...The Rest is Ganache: X-Treme Chocolate Double-Nut Caramel Ladyfinger Torte

I figured I'd start out our postings on here with a few pictures of a delicious dessert that was featured on The Food Network Challenge: Southern Living Showdown. We made this a few weeks ago to accompany a dinner that Joanna made me of pork roast with a blueberry, red wine, and caper sauce, roasted red skin potatoes with rosemary, and steamed artichokes.

Here is the link to the recipe since I'm all about attribution: X-Treme Chocolate Double-Nut Caramel Ladyfinger Torte

Before we get to the pictures, let me just say that this dessert was amazing. By amazing I mean you want to roll around in it like a hog in slop. It has so much going on but the flavors all balance out perfectly. It is insanely rich though so don't plan on eating big pieces of it.

As an editorial note, it is ridiculously difficult to get soft ladyfingers in this town. Joanna and I went to Giant Eagle (several locations), Trader Joe's, Target, and Sam's Club before finally finding them at Shop N' Save of all places. Then, this past weekend, I decided to make a raspberry tiramisu and this time Shop N' Save didn't have them either. We even went down to Penn Mac in the Strip and, while they had 4 types of crunchy ladyfingers, no soft ones were to be found. The moral of the story is, don't make yourself crazy. Substitute in pound cake if you can't find soft ladyfingers and call it a day. Having done it in the raspberry tiramisu, I can tell you it works splendidly. Anyways, on to the pictures!!!

This is the first step in the cake, a layer of Nutella, the chocolate hazelnut spread of the gods...