More Dessert Experiments/Practice/Disasters

It's been a really, really cold year. Mom's vegetable garden is very late in production, the fruit trees had a late bloom, and the hummingbirds were about three weeks late.
Despite this, she managed to harvest three stalks of baby-sized rhubarb. That yielded about two tablespoons of rhubarb compote, but that was plenty to make this rhubarb tartlet with fresh strawberry topping :)

Served with Cheesecake Ice Cream (which actually tastes like a very rich vanilla ice cream). Mom was a bit reluctant to try this, since she doesn't like overly sour foods; she remembered rhubarb as being almost intolerably sour the last time she had it. But upon tasting the tart, she discovered it to be quite delectable. My parents declared it delicious, especially with the ice cream (and Dad licked the plate clean--literally).
My next Experiment/Practice/Disaster came about with a 1 lb. pack of strawberries we bought when it was on sale the other day. Finally, they are reaching the prime of their season and were decently sweet. Wanting to make a strawberry mousse-based dessert, I decided to make a strawberry mousse cake. For the base, I decided on a genoise--it's been a while since I've made it (not since Intro to Pastry class), so I figured I'm due for practice. And boy did I need it.

My first few attempts resulted in disasters after another. During the first half of the baking, everything seems normal, the cake rises nicely. Then during the last half, it would start collapsing, creating a gi-normous crater that made the cake look like it's been hit with a pea-sized meteor.

Was it the ingredients? The oven temperature?? The pan size??? The rack position????

I've successfully made this cake before! I was so confused trying to figure out what went wrong. Then finally, I asked myself the right question: "Eggs overwhipped?"
For a while now, I've been making cakes via separated eggs method (versus both the yolks and the whites whipped together in the genoise), so now I'm used to whipping the egg whites until the soft-peak stage.... and I've been whipping the egg mixture almost until the soft peaks formed. So with fresh eggs and sugar over the water bath, I whipped the mixture until the thick ribbon stage, went on with the procedure, put the cake in the oven, and prayed. Lo and behold...

It worked. Just a simple thing like overwhipping the eggs... At least we now have lots of cake scraps that I can hopefully use in tiramisu or trifle.

With the genoise made successfully, I now moved on to the strawberry mousse. I laid a circle of the genoise in each of the ring molds (I made about three small cakes), placed strawberry slices, piped the mousse in, and put it in the freezer for easy unmolding. Once frozen, I glazed the top with plum glaze, unmolded it, then placed it in the fridge to thaw.

Hmmm....the plum glaze looks colorful....but too 'artificial'. The texture of the mousse was perfect, except it could've been sweeter. And it turns out the strawberries haven't completely thawed out even though I left it overnight in the fridge, and the strawberries were still a bit too sour for this application.

If it needs to be sweeter, then it should be with sweeter sauce/accompaniment. I folded in extra sugar into the leftover whipped cream and piped it onto the remaining mousse cake. With the extra-sweet whipped cream, topped with strawberry slices macerated in sugar and shaved white chocolate, it tasted much, much better!
Just gotta keep practicing....