Two weeks ago, about an inch of skin, just below my pinky, was burned by a heat gun. It hurt a lot, but I treated it with eveything I could — ice, burn gel, aloe, and even a sliced tomato. It didn’t blister, and it only left a red mark that had diminished significantly into barely a pink mark.

Then, today, as I was driving, I noticed that the area is covered with three splotches of puffiness, like mosquito bites. They don’t hurt, unless pressed hard. Maybe the chafing from the steering wheel disturbed it? If anybody has an idea of what’s happening, please let me know…

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 week in early August focused on cakes generally composed of layers of sponges, dacquoises, mousses, creams, and glazes. We’d already made some during our Basic and Classical Cakes class, but I guess these cakes had more elements in them. We made two cakes in two day each, and the fifth day was a practical.

I’m going to name “proportionality” as the most important concept of the week. Since these cakes were composed of so many different things, each component had to be made with the correction proportion of ingredients so that they had the correct flavor and texture to begin with, and all of the components have to fit together proportionally for a composed texture and an interplay of flavors — and the amount of each component used in proportion to each other is very important. I almost wish that cake rings had grooved marks on the inside so that you could tell more accurately how thick a layer is b/c once you pour it in, it’s hard to tell.
Since many of these cakes have components that are poured in or placed in, you can make a lot of cakes in just a little longer than it would take to make one of them. But you often have to wait for something to set before adding the next layer. We put these cakes in the freezer a lot between layers.

It doesn’t feel right not to mention that the students had a rough time in this block because the recipes that we were given needed tweaking — quantities were off, instructions were off and incomplete… and I don’t think we had a firm idea of the art of these cakes. Since it was only a 4 day class with the 5th day for the practical, the course didn’t have a chance to smooth out, and many of the problems couldn’t be anticipated — like if there was too much gelatin in a mousse (esp since, in this case, we learned more about bavarian creams than mousses). We handed in notes about what was off so that corrections could be incorporated into the recipes, so I can only hope that future sections have a better time with this… and that our instructions don’t reflect errors that we made. I think it would have been cool if we were given the recipe guide as a reference at the beginning of the week, and then used the week to perfect a unique cake to make for our practical. Since these cakes are often featured in competitions, treating the block in a similar way makes sense, especially since we knew the basics of the components already.

Coffee Hazelnut Cake. From the bottom, this had a crunchy paillette feuilletine (melted choc, praline paste, and wafers mixed together and spread out to set), two layers each of alternating hazelnut coffee mousse and coffee dacquoise, a white coffee bavarian, and then chocolate ganache sprayed with chocolate from a paint gun. This was made as a larger sheet cake, and then cut into smaller cakes, one of which is pictured.

This one was mostly okay (only the quantity for the dacquoise and feuilletine should have been reduced by 1/3), except that the ganache became problematic. It was too soft so it was put into the freezer and became too hard. We tried to hand form it into shell shapes as we were supposed to, but that looked icky because it was all pointy and bumpy, even after spraying it. So, the next day, we took off the bumps, and rolled them into the round you see here. There’s a vaguely tiramisu-like style to it that I’m okay with. And actually, the ganache should have been whipped so that it could be piped on, but the instructions were incomplete.

This was The Shining Cake, er, no, I mean the Kir Royale Cake. For the jaconde that runs around the outside, we used a special rectangular silicone mold with grooves in it so that we could spread in purple colored tulip paste, and then spread almond jaconde batter on top and baked it. That was cut into a strip and used to line a 2″ cake ring. An almond dacquoise was used as the bottom, topped with a cassis mousse made with cassis puree and gelatin sheets. That was left to set overnight, as was a cassis jelly in a 6″ silicone mold. The next day, we placed another layer of dacquoise over the cassis mousse, and then the cassis jelly disk. Then we made the Champagne mousse, which was the real reason that I wanted to make this cake, since I find that working with bubbly alcohol is one of the trickier things that you can do. It was made by mixing sparkling wine with egg yolks and sugar over a double boiler until it foamed up a lot and then reduced down into a thick reduction that could hold a ribbon. That was then used to make a mousse adding a little more sparkling wine, gelatin, and cream. It was all topped with a cassis mirror glaze.

I loved the flavors of the champagne mousse and cassis mousse, and thought that they were a great combination, rivaling the charms of the drink.

But then there was that cassis jelly. It’s quantity was at least double what it should have been in the cake, and it didn’t set up, so it ran everywhere.

And I didn’t like the almond flavor mixing with the kir royale flavors. Granted, I don’t know what flavors would go well with kir royale flavors in a cake… I’d probably just leave them alone together.

We also made really good Apricot and Pistachio Ice Cream Bombes in dome molds as a class project, as well as Baked Alaskas.

We had a four day long class about contemporary wedding cakes, so we played with rolled fondant, gum paste, and the like. A guest Instructor, who owns a pastry shop and wedding cake business in the area, came in to teach us for two of those days.

Here are some things that we learned:

• You need to crumb coat your cake before applying the rolled fondant to it. The crumb coat should be perfectly smooth and even, with no shadows from the cake showing (or else it’ll show through the fondant). Since you need to chill the crumb coat so that it firms up a little, you can also smooth it out more precisely once out of the fridge since you’ll have more control over the firm icing.
• You can make your own rolled fondant (especially if you want it taste good), but many wedding cake makers buy it. We were advised to stay away from fondants with ingredients that end in “-ice” (such as regalice, satinice, pettinice, etc) and patisfrance because they are gritty and taste bad; they generally can be rolled very thin, but their ensuing transparency isn’t desirable either). Instead, she recommended Massa Grischuna and Massa Ticino. Wilton is okay, too.
• Fondant is hydroscopic (it attracts moisture), so air and moisture will affect it.
• Modeling Chocolate can also be used to cover a cake, and it often tastes better than fondant. It’s firmer, though, so you have to sheathe the top and sides of the cakes separately, and then close the seam smoothly with your fingers. You have to keep in mind that white chocolate has a yellow color when you add coloring to it; for instance, adding pink will get you peach.
• French buttercream should only be used to fill a cake — it’s too soft to put on the outside. Italian buttercream can be used for either.
• As a wedding cake maker, you can always re-invent yourself… because there’s rarely repeat business.
• If you can get an exclusive deal to make all wedding cakes for a hotel or retail store, that’s good.
• Gum paste flowers usually take at least a day to dry. Gum paste is desirable for this b/c it can be rolled very thin.

We were to decorate one real cake and one styrofoam cake during this block. I was sick one day, so I only decorated one real cake. I just wanted to get a feel for how the fondant acted, so this was a start…

It’s no secret that I loathe making pure decor stuff, so my cake was the wedding cake for people who don’t like wedding cakes. The only thing that I really wanted to get right was to have a perfectly smooth layer of white fondant… no tears, or scratches, or bumps. And I did it. I attribute some of that to my enthusiasm for rolling tart dough. Anyway, what you do is roll out the fondant on a mix of cornstarch and powdered sugar (you can make a little tied baggy from cheesecloth), and then go over it with a fondant smoother. If there are little air bubbles, gently prick them with a toothpick and smooth over them; the air bubbles usually found by running your hand over the fondant than by sight. Once you put the fondant over the cake, you smooth it again and make sure that it’s snug against the cake. To trim it, you run a pizza cutter around it, at an angle so that it doesn’t scrape against the fondant. You need to put something around the border to cover the seam.
To color fondant (and marzipan), you color a small batch, and then use pieces of that as seeds for coloring other batches of fondant.

For the rope, you just twist together two strands of fondant, and then roll them so that they flatten out. I think it looks much better like that than unrolled.

For the Flowers That Do Not Exist In Nature, you roll a rectangle of fondant, fold it in half, and then roll it up, slightly spiralled, and then pull apart the edges a little. I made a whole bunch more, but I also wanted some degree of proportion on this modest cake, so only three of them were needed. They were secured to the cake with toothpicks. The leaves were made with molds.

For the last day of our Plated Desserts course, we had an Aluminum Chef competition, which was like Iron Chef… except that we had 2.5 hours to make one plated dessert with a partner based on a Secret Ingredient assigned for the whole class as well as three other assigned accompanying flavors for each team. We could use any recipes that we brought with us, but there was really no preparation for the event, except for having been in culinary school for 7 months.

So, the Chef Instructor pulled off the table covering, and Battle Mixed Berry was on. Our team also had to incorporate lemon, hazelnut, and phyllo dough into our dessert. After a discussion and playing around with ingredients, we turned in a Mixed Berry Baklava Tart with Lemon Curd and Hazelnut Creme Anglaise.

I think that this day was a valuable culmination of our experience in plated desserts, and something of a marker for how far we’ve come in the program as a whole. Previously, we’d followed some very creative, intricate recipes and we’d also planned our own desserts to make. Both have been met with success and occasional despair, but to just walk into a set of ingredients and have to turn in a complete dessert demands different and interesting things from us. I think our culinary instincts have been honed to a point of being able to come up with logical ideas on the fly and to work within the confines of a situation. And I’m sure that, as culinary graduates, we’ll be asked to make desserts at friends’ houses and will only have access to what’s in their kitchen at the time (this will easily happen at work, too) … so I don’t think that the time and ingredient constraints are really so unusual. Also, unlike, say, our early practicals, it was a rather low-stress day — we just settled on ideas and went to work on making them happen. In this situation, you’re bound to come up with something that reflects your own personal styles, and I think our dessert did just that.

So, anyway, this is how the dessert came together…

My biggest concern going into the competition was just what main form the dessert would have. Although we could use any recipes in our materials that we wanted, it would have been hard to come up with or adapt, say, a cake recipe suited for the secret ingredient… and I didn’t want to resort to something like crepes with *Secret Ingredient* filling.

In that sense, we were lucky to pull the phyllo dough, which provided a logical structure for the dessert, and we ultimately decided that it would be interesting to use it as a tart shell baked in a flan ring. We weren’t completely lucky, though: neither of us had actually worked with phyllo dough before. So, we did the logical thing: we read the box. For a pie recipe, it said to use 9 sheets of phyllo brushed with melted butter and sprinkled with sugar, so that’s what we went with. In retrospect, since a tart is smaller than a pie, we should have used maybe 4 sheets instead to keep things in proportion.

Since we didn’t quite know how the phyllo would act, it didn’t seem safe to bake a filling in it (which was good because it puffed up like crazy, only to be tamed with forks). I’ve long lost my taste for pastry cream, so we decided to go with one of my favorite fillings: ricotta mixed with honey and a little bit of cream… until we discovered that there was no ricotta in the kitchen. No problem. Instead, I whipped up some mascarpone with cream and honey, and engaged in prolonged taste and texture tests until it was just light and sweet enough. I whipped the cream and mascarpone together, and added more cream as needed, but in retrospect, I probably should have whipped the cream separately and folded it in because the cream that was added first was whipped quite a lot.

I’d had the raspberry and pistachio tart from Boulangerie de Monge in my mind that week, and halfway through our time, I thought that it would be interesting to include a chopped hazelnut and honey layer between the crust and the filling (hazelnut paste, on the other hand, would have been way too overwhelming). I consider this some sign of maturity, too, since I hate hazelnuts and yet was willing to enhance their role in the dish because it made sense… Previously, when we had the idea for the hazelnut creme anglaise, my thoughts were along the lines of “yes, yes… off to the side with them.” I almost heated the honey to make it easier to mix the nuts into it, but then I thought that since the honey would be served at room temp or cold, I may as well as add water instead so that it would stay thin. In retrospect, I liked how this element worked into the dish a lot, but I probably should have put more in the tart than I did. I just wasn’t sure if it would work, so I didn’t want it to overwhelm.

And the mixed berries? Well, we just put them on top and sprinkled them with powdered sugar… We wanted to punctuate their natural deliciousness, of couse.

We didn’t win, which is fine, but I was happy with how our dessert tasted and how well the textures played with each other while keeping our assigned ingredients in the spotlight, and that was all the reward that I needed. Plus, I would have felt weird if we had won without actually doing something to the main ingredient, even if not doing something worked for our dish. On the other hand, after the competition, one of the people who tasted our dessert suggested that we could have boiled up some simple syrup infused with lemon verbena, poured that over the berries, drained them 15 minutes later, and then placed them on the tart. I think that would have been brilliant, because not only would it have rhymed with the “lemon” requirement of our dish, but it would have just tasted great. So, I’m way more bummed that I didn’t get to taste that in our dish than anything else, but I’ll give that method a try soon.