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Category: Cake

Lesson 12: Entremets Passionata | Raspberry & Passionfruit

Salut!

So we finally took a break from chocolate with this week’s cake – a lovely raspberry & passionfruit entremet. Even though I was really glad to get a break from chocolate for a while, I was wondering why this recipe had the exact same flavours as that of the tart we did in lesson 3. I guess passionfruit & raspberry pair well together?

Anyhoo, this cake is made up of a passionfruit cream, a raspberry mousse, coconut dacquoise biscuit, wrapped with a tie-dyed joconde biscuit & topped with raspberry gelee. The coconut dacquoise is probably my favourite dacquoise thus far. Yum yum in my tum tum!

We had Chef Verger for this practical again. It was nice to have to practice speaking French even though my French is really really bad haha. Shoutout to Charlie from Street French who I’ve been having classes with – really helped me with understanding what Chef was saying in prac + in communicating with him.

We had to work in pairs AND fours for this practical. Because we only need a 2-inch strip of tie-dyed joconde around the cake, one sheet was shared between four people. Mardi, Youjeong, Jianhua & I did this together, with Jianhua & I taking charge of the coloured part of it. Thank goodness we spread it quickly enough and we managed to retain colour differences (rather than everything combining together to be an orangey hue). This cake was definitely wayyy more manageable than last week’s *phew*.

Really love this cake – think I’ll attempt it again sometime when I’m home 🙂 Perhaps it’s because I love raspberry & passionfruit (I guess answering my question on why the school is repeating this pairing of flavours haha). To those who are back home, I’ll post it on Instag if I do!

Also, the sun is out more and we’re having much better weather. Super super happy bout that.

Got a huge backlog of posts to go though (this is supposed to be an end-Feb post haha) so stay tuned!!!

xx,
Eug

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Lesson 11: Belle Hélène

Bonjour everyone!

I think I mentioned before that at the start of the whole programme, I was super excited as I knew that we were going to be making entremets. I’d basically ‘memorised’ the entire table of contents for the course and was really looking forward to this lesson’s entremet – the belle hélène.

The belle hélène has a total of 7 components, a clear signal (to me, at least) that the difficulty of the course would probably increase steeply from this point. Chef began the demo by explaining to us how we’d assemble this cake. Entremets typically have an ‘insert’ component and the one for the belle hélène has a chocolate streusel, pear coulis & of course, the classic chocolate biscuit. 

Given that there are so many components to the cake, it was imperative that we worked quickly in the practical. Chef himself didn’t manage to finish the cake within the 3 hours of demo (granted, he spent time explaining techniques and all along the way) and that kinda set the stage for how tough we’d be.

We got Chef Verger for this practical and from the start, everyone moved super quickly to ensure that we would not be late. The whole way, Jianhua and I split the work & tried our best to keep ourselves clean (chocolate stains are a pain to remove…). So continuing from what the entremet is made of, the insert is surrounded by some luscious chocolate mousse and then glazed with a dark chocolate glaze. Additionally, we had to make a creamy chocolate spiral to place on top of the cake as well as temper chocolate to put around the cake and as decorative pieces on top. Just repeating what the cake is made of makes me feel exhausted haha.

I think the cake turned out pretty fine 🙂 Gave Jo the cake to bring back to Lyon when she was here over the weekend & her colleague said that it was a “real luxurious cake” – hehe huge compliment and boost to my cake-making abilities 🙂

Looking forward to trying to recreate this cake when I’m back in Singapore, possibly with other fruit purees apart from pear *slurps*

Wished that I could share the goodness of this cake with all of you 🙁 – hopefully these pictures will help satisfy any cravings though!

Till the next post!

xx,
Eug

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Lesson 7: Choquette Tart with Maple Syrup

Hi everyone!

Writing this as a super belated post so hopefully I remember all the details :p

When I first saw this recipe (or more like the name of the recipe), I thought it was really strange that we were doing something with maple syrup. The first thing that ran through my head was – how’s maple syrup even vaguely close to anything French?

Also, when demo started and I saw that there was a generous serving of chantilly maple cream, I figured that I wouldn’t be a fan of this dessert (cos too much cream always makes me feel sick). However, I realised during tasting that I was very wrong. The base of this tart was amazing – a deconstructed sable crumble with hazelnut and milk chocolate. It was pure decadence. Even the chantilly cream, lightly flavoured with maple syrup, had an amazing texture and flavour that was well complemented by the choquettes on the side, filled with coffee pastry cream.

Needless to say, this tart had quite a few components, hinting at the fact that we’d need to be quick during practical (+ the fact that we needed to temper chocolate for the squares on top).

We got Chef Park for practical, something that I was very happy about. She’s always very calm and the aura that she exudes during class really gets us (me at least) into this rhythm of doing work. The whole practical went very smoothly except for a point where I put my wire rack with the parchment paper and sable on it on top of the stove (we have the induction kinds and I didn’t realise it was on), burning the paper a bit. Oops!

Because I’d done piping with the St Honore tip before, the piping part of the tart went pretty smoothly 🙂 Really loving all the piping work we’ve had to do.

As it was CNY weekend, I rushed home, grabbed my bags & took a train to London to spend the new year’s with Mena Jie and family 🙂 (+Amanda Jie & a couple of Mena Jie’s friends were there so that was awesome). It was a caloric-filled weekend with lots of Asian cuisine that was amazing and making my stomach extremely happy, made even better because I got to see Syaz & Pin that weekend too.

Anyhoo, going to try update more frequently over the next few weeks. I’m a good 6 classes behind right now :S

xx,
Eug

 

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