Whiskey Truffle Cake with Nut Dacquoise
"This is my go-to Christmas party dessert: a luscious, boozy dark chocolate confection with a nutty, golden base that never fails to please. It is a little involved, but everything but the decoration can be done days ahead of time, and the results are well worth it. Dacquoise, a nut-stabilized meringue, is a useful tool to add to your cake making repertoire – it makes beautiful, tasty, and very stable thin layers to give structure to all sorts of tortes. Though I've called here for whiskey, use whatever booze you choose – brandy, scotch, bourbon, rum, or omit the booze entirely and use a little good vanilla instead. The filling is adapted from Nigella Lawson's Meringue Truffle Cake, a recipe which appears in her book Feast. The dacquoise formula is from On Baking: a Textbook of Baking and Pastry Fundamentals by Sarah Labensky et al...."