The Daring Bakers Sing in Tune with Opéra Cake

It’s that time of month again to reveal the Daring Bakers Challenge and what an amazing baking challenge this has been! The Opéra Cake for this challenge is being made in light colours and flavours and not the normal dark colours and flavours of chocolate, coffee.

Firstly I would like to dedicate my month’s challenge to Barbara of winosandfoodies.com Barbara is the force behind the food blog event called A Taste of Yellow that supports the LiveStrong foundation started by Lance Armstrong

This month’s Daring Bakers challenge is being hosted by the Daring Bakers co-founders, Lis La Mia Cucina and Ivonne Creampuffs in Venice and co-hosted by Fran of Apples Peaches Pumpkin Pie and Shea of Whiskful. – many thanks for hosting this month’s event! I absolutely adore citrus flavours and I just happened to have a bottle of Limoncello liqueur and juicy lemons in eagerness for baking this cake. An opera cake is made up of four elements, although we Daring Bakers were given the optional choice of making the ganache mousse and just layering with buttercream, I went the whole hog and made the four elements.

The Four Elements to an Opéra Cake:

Joconde: The base of an Opéra Cake is a thin sponge cake that is made using nut meal, traditionally almond meal (finely ground blanched almonds)

Syrup: The joconde is flavoured with a sugar syrup that can be flavoured to suit your tastes.

Buttercream: The first two layers of the joconde are covered in a rich buttercream. This particular buttercream is made with a syrup, eggs and butter.

Ganache/Mousse : In some recipes, the final layer of the joconde is covered in a ganache or mousse.

I thoroughly enjoyed making this cake and if I am being honest when I started to make each element this cake wasn’t as difficult to achieve as I first thought! It could even be made in stages and left in the fridge to assemble at a later date.




To finalise my decorations I sliced my cake into sections, I whipped some fresh cream and piped it on in swirls and made two theatre masks in sugarpaste on half of the cake and the remaining slices I placed swirls of whipped fresh cream and sugar flowers, sugar stars and jelly lemons.

With all the lemon flavours running through this is one truly amazing tasting cake and one that I will be making in the future for special occasions.