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
