Chocolate Dessert Party Prep, Day 1

My parents are having a chocolate party for their 50th birthdays, and the menu is: chocolate linzer torte, sacher torte, my great-grandmother's brownies, stout cake with mocha frosting, sugar-free chocolate mousse, angel food cake with ganache, and chocolate cheesecake. We made the two tortes and the angel food cake and the cheesecake today because all of those things will improve over the two days between now and the party. The linzer torte and cheesecake are family classics and the angel food cake was a mix (give us a break here, it's seven desserts!) but the sacher torte is a new recipe, courtesy of Epicurious: http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Sachertorte-231043. Tomorrow we're making the rest; I'll post pictures and recipes from those as well.

I'm not going to type up the recipes right now because they're all long and detailed (but not terribly difficult, actually), but I will try to scan them to post later, or just type them when I'm not so tired. (Remind me.)

To entertain you in the meantime, pictures of the linzer torte's construction:
(about to fold the chocolate into the meringue to make, you guessed it, chocolate meringue)

And, completed:

The sacher torte was kindof a pain in the butt to assemble because it bakes in one layer which then has to be split into two layers. Then it gets apricot glaze, which has to soak in for a while, and then chocolate glaze, which is essentially a thin layer of very dark fudge. (But stickier.) And then you have to move it, before the chocolate sets.



Step 1: Split.













Step 2: Apricot glaze between layers and on top.







Step 3: (An hour later) Chocolate glaze.













Step 4: Move to clean doily (it takes four hands). I have a pretty picture of the completed torte, but Blogger keeps rotating it for no obvious reason. I'll mess with that and post it later.

On to the cheesecake! I only took one picture of the in-process because it's pretty much just "Throw everything in the kitchen-aid":















I'll take a picture of the cooked cake tomorrow; I forgot to do that today. It's cracked like the Grand Canyon, but it smells wonderful. (Besides, that's how you know it's homemade, right?)

In other news, my diploma finally arrived!