For this practical, we were asked to make two identical entremets cakes based on recipes of our own devising or findings — making it so that it had 30% chocolate by eye, at least 3 flavors and 5 textures, and incorporated the theme “Flower Power!” Like the Restaurant Project Practical, I like that we are given the responsibility to come up with something that we like and try to make it work, even if there was the added risk of making things that sounded good but we hadn’t personally made before. I practiced making the nutter butters and bavarian cream (x1, instead of x3 as I used for the cake) the day before, though.

Mine was a Nutter Butter Banana Cake, made of honey peanut bavarian cream layered with chocolate flourless cake, caramelized bananas, nutter butter crumbles, a honey glaze, and garnished with a nutter butter flower and mini-nutter butters. As I was thinking about what flavors I wanted the cake to have, I became stuck on the idea of an adaptation of the Elvis sandwich, which layers honey, banana, and peanut butter (bacon optional… and was seriously considered for the cake) on white bread and is then fried. I was going to spray the top with chocolate and then put the honey glaze on so that it would look like fried toast, but I practiced it, and it just looked messy.

The night before the practical, I’d worried that my cake would turn out boring because it really didn’t have many things in it, so I tried to re-arrange the elements and add new things, but the new versions weren’t appealing to me.

So, I stuck with it, and sure enough, I was told that it was monotonous in my evaluation. Plus, the bavarian just barely set up. So, my cake was a sideways entry into the world of entremets. I think it would work as an entremet if a layer each of dacquoise, feuilletine, and chocolate mousse. But as I’ll discuss below, I wouldn’t wanna do that.

Here are some technical thoughts on the cake:

• I hoped that the nutter butter crumbles would provide a crunchy element, but the recipe turned out sandy cookies rather than crunchy ones. They were, nonetheless, delicious. I got the recipe from Nancy Silverton’s Sandwich Book. You can shape them by hand using a certain tedious method, but our creative chef pinched a round cookie cutter into a peanut-shaped cookie cutter, and that’s better and faster.
• Here’s why the bavarian cream barely set up and was so soft — I’d simply tripled a recipe for a bavarian cream in our packet, but I should have taken our bavarian cream formula into account — for bavarian creams, there should be a ratio of 100 ml anglaise : 100 ml cream: 1 gelatin sheet, but the original recipe called for 3 gelatin sheets for 375 ml cream, which is a touch loose, so when I tripled it for 1125 ml cream, I got 9 sheets gelatin, which is very loose. I should have just added at least 2 more sheets. It didn’t set up for a long time, and I unmolded it at the last minute in case it collapsed. Ironically, though, I probably only needed 2 x the recipe to make the correct quantity for two cakes, but since the cream was so loose and oozed out of the bottom of the cake rings to form mounds on the sheet pan underneath that were akin to the fjords of Norway until it finally set, I ended up needing exactly 3 x the recipe to fill in for the oozed-out cream.
• It’s quite home spun for an entremet, but heck, it looks cute.
• I’d never made the flourless chocolate cake in our recipe packet before, and assumed it would make a reasonable cake for two thick layers, but no, it turned out so thin, which didn’t bode well for a cake whose only other main element is simply a lot of bavarian cream and bananas. Maybe doubling the recipe would make it thicker.  Maybe I over-folded it, but I don’t think so…
• My bavarian cream had bubbles that came up when I poured on the final layer. I used a blow torch to get rid of them, but then more appeared. No one had ever seen that happen before, and I still have no idea why it happened.
• Caramelized bananas are really good — you just melt sugar in a pan into caramel, add butter, roll bananas in it, sprinkle nutmeg over them, and cool them (I put plastic wrap over them as they cooled so that the caramel would stay soft).
• I don’t usually like mirror glazes because a set jelly on top of cream rarely appeals to me, but I liked the honey glaze because I’m used to honey being thick. We used a standard formula of 1 cup water to 3 sheets gelatin for our mirror glazes, so I used 1/2 c water and 1/2 c honey.

But there was one very important element that did work: taste. I couldn’t stop eating the cake. It was comfort food — the kind that makes you want to find a back porch and a sunset.

So, even though it doesn’t really work as an entremet, I think it works as a dessert, nonetheless. In an oddly Proustian moment, by the second bite of the cake, I was brought back to New York in 1999, when I’d go to the Magnolia bakery and occasionally emerge with some Chocolate Wafer Ice Box Cake or some Banana Pudding — both basically involved a form of cream with layers of cookies/fruit. My cake for this practical seemed to be a kind of combination of these two cakes. First, the creamy part — my bavarian cream was made by folding whipped cream into a gelatin-laced dairy component (peanut honey creme anglaise) while the banana pudding is made by folding whipped cream into a starch-thickened dairy component (condensed milk vanilla pudding) and the ice box cake simply has whipped cream. Next, the cookies — the wafer-thin chocolate cake replicated the chocolate wafers in the ice box cake, and the bits of nutter butters replicated the Nilla wafers in the pudding. Also, the flavor of the bananas layered in my cake permeated throughout the rest of it, like the bananas in the pudding do after a few hours, too. The result was a cake whose taste so strongly suggested a more complex and less sweet honey-peanut-banana pudding and whose soft cookies-bathed-in-cream texture also mimicked the ice box cake.

So, even though the bavarian cream was so soft, I liked it more than if it had been firmer (the creepy, unnatural firmness of bavarian creams is why I usually don’t like them), and when I think about adding, say, some crunch, I can’t come to terms with it. If I were to make it again, I’d layer my components in a glass bowl instead of a cake ring, put in a lot more cake and cookies, and serve it in scoops, as Magnolia does.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 29th, 2006 at 11:08 pm and is filed under Culinary School. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.