Birthday cake style opera cake 🍫🎂

There was one Saturday that I felt so eager to have some cake, Alex and I ended up spending the whole afternoon making this Opera cake. Opera cake has always been on my to-make list, but had been held back from its tedious steps every time. 

The reason I am calling this as "Birthday cake style" is because Opera cake is supposed to be rectangle-shaped, but I don't have multiple rectangular baking sheet pans. Alternatively, I used my smaller-sized round cake pans which also resulted in thicker layers of cake.

A special spark to this cake is the pistachio flavor cake layers instead of the classical hazelnut flavor! This flavor well-blended into this Opera cake! (Cheers for pistachios💚) We made coffee syrup, buttercream, chocolate ganache and tempered chocolate for coating. Although the cumbersome process, we enjoyed the moments together preparing each elements and then eventually assemble the whole cake.

The nutty flavor from the pistachio sponge cake helps lighten the richness from chocolate ganache and coffee cream. Though it's delicious and all the opera cake elements are there, I hope I had made thinner cake layers and thicker butter cream...maybe next time!