After we finished our tarts, we started working on our deep dark chocolate cakes. We had made and frozen the cake and an American buttercream last week, so we cut and did a crumb coat using those first. This was my first time actually icing a cake the right way, so I was really excited at how well it turned out. Then we made a ganache glaze that we poured over the top, and then chilled it until it set up. This was such a simple step but it looked so beautiful! We didn't have quite enough glaze, so we had to use a spatula to finish the sides, but the other cakes that were completely glazed were even prettier. And then of course we had to cut into big fat slices to taste! The cake itself was very rich, dense, and fudgy. The buttercream was a little too sweet for me but with the glaze, all three parts really came together. I still couldn't eat the whole slice...there's still some in the fridge!
As if that wasn't enough chocolate, then we made baked whiskey tortes. These really reminded me of the Pot de Creme we made last semester, except they had whiskey instead of Baileys. Very rich, I could only eat a few bites but it was wonderful straight out of the oven. It really needed some whipped cream or vanilla ice cream or something though. And then the groups with extra ganache made truffles. I have never eaten so much chocolate in my life!
The next day in cookie class, we were focusing on bagged/piped/pressed cookies. The two pictures on the top left are the cookies my group made, Strassburger cookies. They weren't my favorite flavor-wise, but we did get to practice some different piping techniques, which is something I don't have very much experience in. My favorite was the pleated ribbons in the first picture (mine started getting better towards the end!). Out of all the cookies the other groups made, my favorites were the gingersnaps.
After that, I headed to Cakes class. I was still nervous about that Chef, being one of the least experienced in the class, and the fact that it was our first day baking in there, but all in all it went pretty well. We made Angel Food cake from scratch (the one in the picture is someone else's, my group got stuck with the "experiment" of doing it in the wrong pan - tasted the same, but it caved in in the middle). The only thing I didn't like was that when I was eating the cake, I kept smelling the eggs right before I ate it. You couldn't taste them, so I just started holding my breath and eating it! Then the Chef demonstrated a French buttercream - by itself, it was too buttery for me, but when we tried it on the cake, it was perfect. We almost made a Genoise, but they were still cooling in the pans when we left, so no pictures yet. Those are going to be our practice cakes for the rest of the semester to practice icing, etc.
Oh and one last exciting-ish thing for the week! Right in the middle of the ganache extravaganza, another Chef popped into our class with cocoa pods straight off a tree in Puerto Rico. As gross as the cocoa beans looked inside, I figured I would never get another chance to try something like that, so I peeled the slimy shell off and took a teeny-tiny bite of one. How awful! It's amazing that something as wonderful as chocolate can come from something so bitter! We aren't allowed to have drinks in class, so that stuff was stuck in my teeth for hours...gross! But I'm still really glad I tried it, now I can cross that one off my bucket list!
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| [the purple part is the part I ate] |
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