Tri-color cookie (Easter) cake

Tri-color cookies, or Italian rainbow cookies, have to be one of our top five favorite sweets.  My family and I are seriously crazy about them!  No Christmas is complete without at least one, or more likely 2 or 3 batches of it.  We're talking three layers of almond sponge cake joined together by apricot preserve, encased in dark chocolate.  It's a heavenly combination.  We're such fans I've turned them into mini cupcake bites and now, we can have it in cake form, too!

Tri-color cookies, then cupcakes bites, and now cake too!

Given our love of those cookies, you can imagine my interest when I spied this recipe for "Italian Rainbow Cookie Cake" on Joanne's Eats Well With Others blog.  The post I happened to be looking at was for another lovely cake but it was the rainbow cookie cake that popped up at the end of the post, in the 'related recipes' section, that caught my eye.  I knew I had to make it!

I couldn't possibly wait until Christmastime to try it out.  I know I don't really need a reason to make any cake but thinking of the colors (I was actually aiming for pastel hues but the colors baked up deeper than I expected), I thought I'd pretend to be seasonal and call it an Easter cake.  I added some white chocolate shavings and nestled a few Cadbury mini eggs on top.  To me, once something has a few Cadbury mini eggs on it, it just screams: "Easter!"  They're the first thing I buy when Easter treats start appearing at the stores.  So I hope you'll play along and indulge me on this loose Easter theme.

I made this recently as a little surprise for my fellas (my husband and the little one).  I knew they'd love it and after tasting it, we were all thrilled.  It is literally tri-color/rainbow cookie in cake form!  As you'd expect, it's fluffier and thicker than the cookie (which is really not a cookie...but that's another discussion) and more importantly, the flavor is very much the same.  I've been partial to making smaller 6-inch cakes lately and this one is another example (though my family would've welcomed a 9-inch with this one).  This could very well be the first 3-layer cake I've ever made and, miraculously, I actually had three 6-inch round cake pans so I was able to bake the layers all at once!

Texture and flavor wise, this cake is as it should be - a moist sponge cake that has a lot of body and almond flavor thanks to almond paste.  I use apricot preserve (heated then strained so it's smooth), rather than a combination of apricot preserve and raspberry jam because my family and I are partial to it here. I tried to pack as much of the preserve in the cake as possible since we love the flavor it adds. That got me thinking about possibly baking the batter into two layers next time but splitting the 2 layers into 4 so that we'd have another layer of preserve!  I can call it a quad-layer rainbow cake, maybe?  That might be over-complicating things but I want to make it happen...

I like to use strained apricot preserves - and lots of it - between the layers of this almond cake

This cake is encased in one of my favorite things: chocolate ganache. But because of a higher chocolate to cream ratio, the chocolate ganache is somewhat firmer (so you get more of a shell) than typical ganache frosting you'd use for a cake.  That's just spot on here because it replicates that hard shell/snap I know and love from a good tri-color cookie.

You can probably tell I've discovered a new favorite cake!