A Series of Chocolate Hazelnut Mousse Cake (a.k.a Ferrero Rocher Cake)

First of all, I'd like to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and the coming New Year. May this Christmas and New Year be the time for us to think and reflect all the blessing that we have been given and that we can channel those blessings to other people as well.

Christmas is coming too soon, so fast in fact that I'm not prepared to it, not at all. It's not just me that has crazy holiday schedule (in my case, it's work and lots of birthdays), but I'm sure that everybody experience the same thing, and I hope in a good and jolly way :). I see a lot of Christmas dishes, Christmas desserts, Christmas parties, Christmas decors, Christmas everything and it is very exciting! It is Christmas morning when I typed this and although the weather is somewhat crappy outside, so cloudy and windy, I have my morning cup of Cappuccino and also a very good freshly-baked chocolate croissant on my side :)

With my mom, my twin sister, and three of my eight brothers are here (it's usually two brothers and their family), we plan to go on a road trip this holiday break. It's been a while since I've been on a road trip and this time, we're going to LA, Vegas, and Utah. There's going to be A LOT of driving involved and with that long drive, I think we need lots of snacks, but let's see if we can actually manage to squeeze in some time to do it.

I almost ran out of new things to post on this blog lately, not that I bake less (it's more like the opposite), but I find myself baking mostly the same thing for the past few weeks.Ever since the wedding had passed, I received quite a number of request to bake the chocolate and hazelnut cake I baked for the wedding. At first, I wasn't planning on making this cake so often, more so by request, mostly because how time-consuming it is to make and the ingredients I used are pretty costly. If you recall this cake, it has about 8 different components. I made a simple version of it for the wedding, which only consists of about 6 components, but it is still a complex one to make.

I bake this same cake four times in a row just in two weeks, and I think that breaks the record for me. I did bake some other cake for different occasions, but I thought I'd combine this one in one post so that I won't post the same thing over and over again.

Most of these are for birthdays, different ones of course, and even though I always reluctant to make this cake due to the above reasons, it's always a joy when they come back and tell you how much they enjoyed it, makes me want to bake some more and more :). Since I don't like making the same exact cake multiple times, at least I tried to decorate it differently, I see this as an opportunity to practice my poor decorating and glazing skill. Some of the glazing looks very poor and not shiny, this is because I was re-using the leftover glaze from the previous cake, which is something new to me.

Again, have a joyful Christmas everyone!!