This cake tastes like birthday cake. It reminds me about all the birthday parties I had as a kid. And how I wished we could eat cake as soon as the party started and not at the end.

A genoise is a very particular cake because you don’t use a chemical agent like baking soda or baking powder to make it grow. You don’t use egg white foam either. What you actually use is a whole egg foam.

So, we heat up the eggs with sugar and salt in a saucepan and whip it. The moderated heat and the whipping makes the egg foam work as a leavening agent. If you don’t trust me, look at the picture. It actually works.

Another thing that helps genoise grow tall is that you cool down this cake upside down, inside of the mold, on a cookie rack. You leave your cake hang to the mold for 15 minutes, upside down, like a bat. As it cools down, gravity helps the cake stretch. So, when you unmold the bat cake is tall, strong and beautiful.

As per the decoration, I know it’s unconventional for a genoise, but I find the traditional decoration a little bit boring and old-fashioned. This is why I prefered to pipe some Italian meringue drops, drizzle a few raspberry jam drops and burn the top of the meringue with a blowtorch to give the cake a brulee look.  I finished by covering the sides with sliced almonds.

The flavor was too sweet for my taste, but it was good enough to get my a very good grade on my midterm exam and to bring me back to the time where I did not feel guilty for eating a huge slice of sweet cake.

The recipe to prepare the Genoise à la Confiture Framboise and all its components (genoise, dessert syrup, Italian meringue) can be found here.