The Bon Appetit 6 Hour Cake - and yes, it's that good!

In honor of my sweetheart's birthday, I baked a cake.  Not just any cake, but the Bon Appetit Almond Praline cake with Marscapone Frosting and Chocolate Bark.  I will confess up front that it was a special request and at first I thought  - "What, are you nuts!?!"  Now I like to bake, but this a bit beyond the pale.  With about 5 separate recipes to assemble and more than a few ingredients that aren't the kind of thing that usually jump into my shopping cart, it seemed that it was not the kind of thing I usually bake.  Cookies, sure.  Scones, yum!  Doctored cake mixes, of course.  But really!  What the heck - his birthday comes but once a year! 

The first component was the pralines, which were a complete failure.  So I threw them out and tried again.  Complete and total failure again.  Loud, swearing failure.  So what if I skip them? What if I just use chopped almonds and chocolate bark and skip the added sugar?  Will anyone actually notice? hmmm....

I gotta say, no one noticed.   Any 3 layer cake that looks this good and tastes this good - no one is going to notice if I leave out the pralines.  After all, there was the dense almond cake, the rich ganache filling, the mosaic of chocolate bark, and the fluffy marscapone frosting that makes any standard cream cheese frosting pale in comparison.  We had a few friends over for cake, ice cream and bubbly and my friends were properly impressed and will now be inviting me to all their birthday parties, with a cake of course.  Great for my ego, but not so much for my waistline!

btw, the Cobblestone pullover - not finished but so what. Still coming along and I'm on the upper yoke, time for the final decrease and a few short rows.  Some thinking and measuring is in order, so it was not the knitting to do last evening when I was tired and rather baked out.  Besides it's not Olympic knitting! Final pictures coming soon.