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Tagged: intermediate patisserie

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 8: Dome aux Marrons

Salut!

So after an amazing weekend in London chomping down all that Asian goodness for Lunar New Year, I was back in school, ever ready for an awesome week ahead.

I’d seen the cake that we’d be making this week (Dome aux Marrons –> Chesnut Dome) on Instagram (via the LCB location tag) before and was super excited to work on it. The aesthetic of the cake, in my opinion, is simply amazing. It also reminds me of the Esplanade back home in Singapore – kinda like a durian haha.

I really enjoyed the demo, with Chef Verger showing us how to use the spray gun for the first time ever! I’ve always been very intrigued by this effect that’s commonly used by pastry shops so knowing that I was going to be repeating it in practical was very exciting for me.

Unfortunately, I didn’t take too well to the taste of the chesnut (the cake is three layers of halzenut dacquoise, chesnut mousse and piped all round with chesnut cream). Although I’m a fan of freshly roasted chesnuts, these canned/candied ones were too sweet for my liking (probably the same reason why I’m not a fan of mont blanc).

Practical was awesome – we got Chef Park again 😀 Class is always very organised and calm under her watch. As usual, Jianhua and I split up the recipe and got cracking. Really enjoy working with her! The best partner I could ever ask for :*

Ended up with what I think I can call a pretty decent chesnut dome 🙂 Excited to try this again when I’m back home, albeit in another flavour (will also have to buy myself a spray gun hehe).

The next few posts are just going to be about chocolate and more chocolate so I’m thinking of lumping them all together. But we’ll see, I’m getting slower and lazier in my post updates haha :p

xx,
Eugenia

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