I made this along with my wife Becky Gates and our housemate Eva Chen over christmas. We did it over two days; geez it took a lot of time! But it turned out looking fantastic and tasted amazing. It went pretty smoothly, except the buttercream curdled wickedly while we were making it. That happens to me every time and always makes me feel stressed out (I even dumped a whole batch last summer, thinking it was beyond rescue). But we did some chilling and high speed beating and it came together beautifully.
All the recipes are from the Cake Bible, though I think we did something slightly different cooling or rolling the cake which came out of Joy. The cake is the chocolate Genoise (the one from cocoa, not from chocolate), the buttercream is coffee Mousseline, the ganache is the Dark Chocolate Ganache, and the meringue for the mushrooms and doves is the piping meringue.
-Holly Gates
