Peace of Cake — Desserts for Days

Woo hoo! We’re slowly catching up on this. After this cake blog, I have one more unit, then a slight thing on my midterms (YIKES!!), then we’ll be back on track.

Going into the second cake unit, I knew that we’d be sort of going over similar techniques that we learned in the cakes 1 unit, and that we’d be building on those skills. That very first day we got right into it, starting work on two cakes: the Fraisier cake and the black forest cake.

While I thought that both of these would be pretty simple, I was wrong. One thing that I learned in this unit is that there are so many cakes that look like they’re so simple in construction, but they actually have a million little components. While the black forest and fraisier were not these cakes, they both definitely had a lot going on. Everyone knows and loves black forest cake, and what’s not to? Chocolate cake, whipped cream, and cherries? Yes please! The fraisier was unlike any cake that I’d ever eaten before, but it was genoise sponge (we all remember that from way back when in cakes 1), orange cream mousseline, and strawberries. It was a seemingly simple cake, but there was a lot of flavors happening in there. That was also the first time that we got to use acetate, which is something that I would grow very fond of.

The next class, my partner was out sick, but I worked extra hard so she would have cake to bring home with her! Turns out, she didn’t want it, so I just ended up with two of each, which isn’t bad at all! :)

We made two different charlotte cakes that day, a charlotte russe and a charlotte royale. Personally, I preferred the russe over the royal, but they were both delicious!! The charlotte royale had a base of biscuit jaconde, which is a super thin little cake that is so incredibly versatile. So we baked that into one big sheet pan, and once it was cool, spread jam on it, and rolled it into a log. That’s what sort of gives this cake a brain-type look. We cut little 1/4” wide rolls, and arranged them all inside of a plastic wrapped lined bowl. We had to pack them in as tightly as we could, since the filling (bavarian cream) was super liquidy. Clearly, I didn’t pack them quite tight enough, since I had a little bit of cream leaking out at the seams, but that didn’t make it taste any less delicious!

The other charlotte cake wasn’t quite as technical, and for that one, we baked lady fingers, packed the in nice and right inside a cake ring, and filled the whole thing up with this insanely yummy raspberry fruit mousse. These cakes were both done over the course of two days so the mousse had time to fully set up in the fridge, so on day two they were both topped with a little bit of chantilly creme, and just like that, two more cakes were done!

Just a side note, I’m sure that you’re thinking, “gosh, this sure seems like a lot of cake, I mean, what, 4 in 2 classes?” Yes, you are 100% correct. I think I ended up doing the average for the number of cakes we made versus the number of days in the unit, and it was an average of like, 2.something cakes per day, not including times when my partner didn’t want to take her cakes home. I mean, that’s insane! So, so, SO much cake. My friends, family, and coworkers were very appreciative, as I’m sure you can imagine!

After we finished these two cakes, we started working on our first entremet (“on-TRA-may”). Entremets are a fancy kind of mousse cake, and there are a few requirements for them. I believe that it has to contain at least one mousse, contain at least one prefaced component, has to use one of the internal things as decoration and… there are more, but I’m trying to remember this all from ages ago, so please forgive me. I can envision the page in my textbook with this info, but I’m writing this blog post from the sky, so I do not have it with me. LOL

This particular entremet, which would become the first of two, had a pistachio fueillitine base, pistachio mousse, a raspberry fruit gelee thing suspended in more of the pistachios mousse, with fresh raspberries. There also may have been a pistachio ganache inside on top of the base? This was one of those cakes with a million little components, though this was definitely the simpler of the two. The other entremet that we made was a tropical entremet, and it had a pate a cornet / biscuit jaconde combo around the outside (that’s what the pink thing border thing is), then the inside was a coconut cake base soaked in passion fruit syrup, chocolate caramel mousse, pineapple compote, and a passion fruit bavarian cream, I believe. It sounds sort of weird, but it was actually pretty tasty. I was a little bit thrown off by the chocolate caramel thing, but it was okay once you had a bite of the whole thing.

The next class we made two more mousse cakes, one was fruit mousse and the other was a black and white mousse cake. That black and white one was particularly cool because when you cut into it, the mousse looked like a checkerboard. I wish that I had a picture of it, but you’ll just have to take my word for it!

The fruit mousse used that same biscuit jaconde with the jam that the brain cake (aka, charlotte royale) used, except this time, instead of rolling the cake into a log, we cut it into 2” strips and stacked it with layers of jam in the middle. We cut them into smaller vertical pieces and lined them end-up inside of a cake ring, which is how we achieved that vertical look. This cake had the most delicious cassis mousse, and was topped with cassis glaze. The raspberry mousse cake was definitely my favorite of the unit up until now.

The black and white mousse cake had that same pate a cornet / biscuit jaconde combo I mentioned on the tropical entremet, except the inside was piped with alternating circles of chocolate and vanilla mousse, alternating as the layers went up in order to get that checkerboard look.

As the unit was slowly drawing to a close, and closer to Thanksgiving, we started doing a some more intricate things like working with fondant and marzipan and shaped cakes, but before we got there, we made a carrot cake, a sachertorte, and a buche de noel, perfect in time for the holiday. My partner and I accidentally dropped our baked (but pre frosted) carrot cakes on the floor — whoops! — and even though my teacher didn’t think that we would have enough time to get them remade, we buckled down and sure enough, we did! Carrot cake is my mom’s absolute favorite thing, so there’s no way I *wasn’t* taking one home.

I think the buche de noel was by far the most fun cake to make in the unit. I mean, it’s so cute, how can you not love it? To make things even better, it was also delicious! Chocolate cake with chocolate cremeux. frosted with chocolate buttercream and meringue mushrooms, yummy! This was another one of those nights where we weren’t sure that we’d be able to get it done, but my class is definitely super motivated, so we were able to get it done just in the nick of time!

My class' gift box cakes! Mine is the pink one in the front :)

We sort of had an ease into working with fondant, which is something that we’ll do more of once we get into the third cake unit, which is when we do the wedding cake. Our first time using it, we used a 50/50 mixture of fondant and marzipan. I think that this made it easier to use, though I’m not really sure. I’ve used fondant at home before, but it’s always been for simple things, nothing like the gift box cake that we made. Covering a round cake is one thing, but man, a square?? This is something that I’d never done before, and I didn’t think it would be too bad, but man I was wrong. Since we had to fold the fondant over to make it look like a present, it was hard to get the seams really clean and even. Thankfully, the little bow helped some, but it was definitely still a challenge.

Though, I have to say, the cake inside of that present cake was soo yummy. I know that the focus was more on the outside, but how can you ignore a devil’s food cake with raspberry cream?? You can’t, it’s as simple as that.

The last cake that we made before our practical was the kugelhopf, which, based on the name alone, was a German cake, I believe. It was a yeasted cake, too, which sort of brought us back to the bread unit a little bit. It was a pretty simple cake with no frosting, rum raisins, and just a little bit of powdered sugar, but the real hero of this guy is the mold. I mean, how can you not love that?? This cake really was more like a bread, and I would not put it past myself to cut a slice, toast it, and have it for breakfast with some butter.

Now, the last thing to go before we get into the next unit was the midterm. You may have noticed that I didn’t really talk about the sachertorte that I mentioned earlier, and there’s a reason why. That’s the cake that I had to make for my practical! There were a few different options, as this one was a lottery, but I really feel like I lucked out. Of all the options (which I believe were the sachertorte, buche de noel, the fraisier, and black forest), I think I drew the easiest one. On top of that, it’s a pretty tasty cake, at least I think. I know that Chef Jeanne said that a lot of people aren’t a huge fan, since the only thing on this cake other than the cake itself, it soaking syrup, apricot jam, and a chocolate glaze. In addition to making that cake, I had to pipe a border of buttercream shells on a cake board.

With that, I'm closing in on being caught up with my blogs. Stay tuned for my next blog, and if you want more frequent updates, you can check out my Instagram.

Thanks for reading!