The picture you see above is a dacquoise from America's Test Kitchen, a cake very famous for being both delicious and tedious. Typically, it takes a long time to make (anywhere between two to four days), and you need to follow the steps very carefully. You have the meringue, chocolate ganache, and time to let all the custard absorb and become somewhat spongey. Of course, there's adding the sugar to make the cake nice and sweet as well as allow the meringue to become half-hard and half-soft. Because it's so labor-intensive, it's not sold that much; when it does, one slice costs a lot of money.

Recently, I watched an episode on America's Test Kitchen (a half-hour-long program found on several PBS stations, and I highly recommend the cooking show for you all to watch so you can get a grasp on how to make these foods) instructing how to make chocolate-espresso dacquoise. (Personally, I'd make it without the coffee because coffee tastes like expired lead to me.) You can watch the how-to video right here.

One thing I love to do in my time is prepare home-cooked meals with my mom. When we go to a restaurant and taste something unsatisfactory, we get a little peeved and decide to make it even better by ourselves. (There's a reason why one of our knives has "I can make it better" engraved on one side of a blade! ) Dacquoise isn't sold in many NYC restaurants today (The Modern in Midtown being one of the few, which I won't go to because it's way out of my price range), and I want to make it personally.

I think we're up to the challenge. >)