Two-Tier Chocolate Cake

This is the first multi-tier cake we make. It's chocolate genoise imbibed with a raspberry liqueur spiked simple syrup, filled with chocolate-raspberry mousse, covered with chocolate buttercream, and decorated with bands of chocolate and a modeling chocolate rose.

Before we decorated our cakes, we had to assemble them. To do this we used wide straws (like the kind for bubble tea) as supports. We cut them exactly to the hight of the bottom tier of the cake and then stuck them in, so they would support the top tier (which was on a cardboard circle) and keep it from caving into the bottom one. You can do this same process on each layer to support a very tall, multi-tiered, wedding cake.

Apologies, I know it's a bit difficult to see the lovely
flowers and leaves on the branch. The problem is two
fold: the colors were a bit darker than I'd anticipated,
so they didn't contrast as well with the dark chocolate
as I would have liked; and I had left my proper camera
at home so I took this with my phone.

The chocolate band around the bottom tier was remarkably simple to make. I used a small paint brush to paint cocoa butter based food coloring on a band of acetate. Then I spread tempered dark chocolate over the design and, when the chocolate was at it's cutting point, wrapped it firmly around the cake.

The top tier was even easier. I just drizzled tempered chocolate on another band of acetate and wrapped that around the top layer.