Spring Cleaning Part 1: Cassis Chocolate Cake

I opened my freezer a few weeks ago and started listed out what pastry "leftovers" I have in there. You can bet that I have different flavors of joconde, baked cheesecake, mousses, some sponge cake layers among other common things such as frozen berries that I froze last year (red and yellow raspberries, strawberries, blackberries, blueberries), as well as frozen purees (passion fruit, guava, apricot, cassis, mango, etc), cherries. That's a whole lot of stuff! I can make half a year worth of desserts without having to buy most of the ingredients. And now that Summer is here, I have to start "cleaning" them up so that I would have space for a new stash of every fruit I can find in farmers' market.

If you follow this blog, you might know that I hate wasting stuff away. I am a firm believer that you can make something completely extraordinary with leftovers and maybe with a bit of extra work. So the spreadsheet planning began. So many things I could make with them that I am almost overwhelmed with excitement, can't decide which one to make first and when I will actually have time to do them.

Like this cake for example. Most of the components in this cake are leftovers from this cake. I had some leftovers for most of the layers from previous cake, so I partly assembled them and put them in the freezer until I can figure out what I can make with them. So here are the dissected components for this cake:

• chocolate joconde
• raspberry soaking syrup (to moisten the joconde)
• dark chocolate mousse
• chocolate joconde that has been moistened with raspberry syrup
• thin layer of raspberry garniture
• cassis mousse
• decoration: mini chocolate macarons, blueberries, and chocolate decoration

The only thing I needed to make for this cake is the cassis mousse, which was a very quick and easy mousse. Even the macaron shells were available in my freezer, I just needed to make a quick chocolate ganache (not even a real measurement) and I was all set.

Fortunately, chocolate and cassis mousse is one combination I'd like to try in my list, so I can cross that off now, killing two birds with one stone. Smart.

This is just an idea of how you can transform leftovers to something completely different, tasted great and a lot quicker too! I have been feeding this cake to my nephews and niece every night and they always asks for more, a good sign! Although I think they are a bit spoiled with non-kid desserts they have been getting these past few years :). So please don't throw anything away as you'd never know what you can turn it into someday :).