Christmas Day

I love Christmas in London! The city is beautiful, everyone seems to celebrate (even Jews like me!), and I have a delicious lunch with my family in Clapham. Jeff is an excellent cook and he made turkey, veg, roasted potatoes, bread sauce, and chestnut stuffing. Yum!

TARDIS Cake and Jammie Dodgers

Hi everyone. I'm Mercedes and I'm a nerd. I love Doctor Who (as you may have noticed when I dressed my yorkie up as the Doctor for Halloween). As you can imagine, I was very excited about the 50th anniversary episode of Doctor Who that aired last weekend. In celebration of the landmark episode I made my dog dress up again--she was not happy--and I baked quite a bit.

White Chocolate, Blackberry and Lime Eton Mess

As I understand it, Eton mess was first served at Eton and was a messy dessert of strawberries (or bananas) and cream (or possibly ice cream). Later they started adding meringue to the dessert and thus the dessert we know today--meringue, strawberries, and lightly whipped cream--was born.

I love traditional Eton mess with strawberries, but I decided that after our dinner of onion tart and filet mignon I couldn't just serve plain old strawberries and cream. I decided to substitute blackberries for the strawberries. That's not really much of a change so I figured I'd add some white chocolate (it's so good with blackberries) to the whipped cream. But white chocolate crème d'or, no matter how delicious, mixed with blackberries is no longer Eton mess. So I whipped up some cream with a bit of lime juice and zest (both pretty and delicious) and folded the meringue pieces into that.

Final Exam, the Showpiece and the Food

My Final Exam Showpiece

These last five classes have been the most intense classes of the course, but they were worth it! I am really happy with my showpiece and the food I presented. By the way, I know I mentioned earlier that class theme was "my imagination" and my showpiece theme was "Pure Imagination"--I was planning on a sort-of homage to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.  As I started making the piece, I quickly realized that this is less Willy Wonka and more woodland--so I'm going with that!

My showpiece before I put the food on.

One of the most nerve wracking parts of the final exam is transporting the showpiece; we have to carry it down a relatively long hallway. Luckily we don't have to put the food on until we've put the showpieces where they will be judged, so we don't have to worry about it moving or falling--we just have to worry about the showpiece itself. I made my piece relatively small and decently light, so it wasn't hard for me to carry. I glued everything down with either isomalt or chocolate, so I didn't have to worry about things sliding/falling/rolling off.

My lemon curd barquettes floating down a chocolate river.

I am very happy with my lemon curd barquettes/tartlets. They came out perfectly, if I do say so myself! Everything from the tart shells to the smooth finish of the lemon curd to the fresh blueberries on top. The chocolate river (which is hard to see in this photo) came out pretty darn well as well.

My peanut butter nougat on my stand.

I love how the nougat looks and how it tastes, unfortunately the texture is slightly grainy. Also as much as I like how they look, the chocolate covering, while perfectly tempered, was not quite as perfect on the bottom edges as I would have liked. At least they were very evenly sized and coated.

My cakes, waiting to be put on the showpiece.

My cakes survived being stored--the icing didn't get smushed at all! I just piled some fresh berries on, attached my sugarpaste flowers and stuck in some sprigs of rosemary (I wanted thyme, but rosemary came instead.) As you can see I tried two different types of basket weave. The method I used on the bigger cake is slightly less refined, but much easier than the intricate two tip basket weave method I used on the small cake.

A close up of a sugarpaste flower on top of my cake.

My sugarpaste flowers weren't my finest sugarpaste work, but I do really like them. Plus I think they help tie the cake into the whole showpiece.

My nougat on their stand and more sugarpaste flowers.

As you can see, the flowers act as a sort of tie-in as they are all over the piece. I really like my candy and cake stands (even if this one is ever so slightly slanted...oops!) They give height to the piece and integrate the food well.

As you can see, I made meringue mushrooms. I used the technique we learned in class of piping vacherin meringue stems and caps, sticking the pointy end of the stem into a hole carved into the underside of the cap, and dusting with cocoa powder. However I added another element to take it to the next level. I dipped the under side of the caps in tempered dark chocolate, let it harden, and then dipped them into tempered white chocolate. At that point I let the white chocolate set until just about the cutting point (ever so slightly before it, actually) and scored it with a tooth pick so that lines of dark chocolate emanating from a central point showed through--like the gills on the underside of a mushroom cap. You could barely see this detail once I attached the mushrooms to the showpiece, but it was there and demonstrated an attention to detail that I think was pretty impressive.

My pastillage candy canes.

I am really happy with my pastillage candy canes. They came out just how I wanted them to! I also really liked my chocolate spheres. I've never attempted to make chocolate spheres before. They aren't easy. You have to make half spheres, which is rather like making a bonbon shell except instead of filling them, you unmold them hollow and stick them together with tempered chocolate. I painted them with more tempered chocolate so that you couldn't see the line where they were glued together or any smudges from where I was holding the two halves when I stuck them together. After all that work they looked pretty much perfect. Unfortunately, they ended up slightly hidden on my showpiece, but you can see one sticking out from behind the candy canes in the photo above.

Nine months of classes, five days of intense work, and it all
comes down to what the judge thinks of showpiece number 21.

Stay tuned to hear about the judging!

Olive Oil Cakes

Ligurian Lemon Cake

Olive oil cakes are cakes made with olive oil in the batter...shocking, I know. They are incredible! The oil makes them moist but doesn't weigh them down too much. Plus the lovely flavor of the olive oil comes comes through in the cake, in contrast to most cakes where you add vegetable oil so that you won't be able to taste the oil. Now that I've said oil so much it has stopped seeming like a word (at least to me as I'm the one typing it) I'll get on to describing the whole dessert.

My favorite of the two desserts was the ligurian lemon cake with raspberries baked right into the cake and topped with bruleed Swiss meringue (although I could have done without the meringue). We served this with a very clear raspberry sauce, an almond tuile, and incredible honey almond gelato. I think the tuiles were a little out of proportion for the plate, but they did taste good so I don't mind too much.

Beaumes-de-Venise Cake

The other cake we made was not my favorite of the night but one of my favorites of the unit. It was a beaumes-de-venise cake with has grapes baked into it; served on a rectangular cookie made out of linzer tart dough; with an uncooked grape compote (to me that's more of a grape salad, but semantics aside, it was delicious), fromage blanc sherbet, more of the raspberry sauce (I may have left this off), and a cocoa nib caramel tuile. I liked the first dessert more because I loved the combination of tart lemon and sweet raspberry in the delicious, moist, rich but still light cake and the honey almond gelato was to die for. Still though, the grape cake (with a hint of beaumes-de-venise, also know as muscat, wine) and all its accompaniments were excellent. I'd be extremely happy if I got either of these desserts in a restaurant.

Buche de Noel

We made a traditional buche de noel with meringue mushrooms (aren't they adorable?!) today. Too bad Christmas is over. We used a very nice white cake that we soaked with orange liqueur. We covered it with chocolate buttercream, rolled it up, cut the ends off (and stuck one on top with a thin straw for support) and piped more buttercream on the outside of the log (with a star tip to get a wood effect.) The chef made the mushroom stems and tops, but we got to assemble them.

Honestly I think that this was slightly too sweet; as I've mentioned I'm not a huge fan of the buttercream we make at school. But overall, it was very good, if only because I've always wanted to make a roulade but have been too nervous to try it. Now I realize how stupid it was of me to be scared to make one (and mess it up, wasting cake and time), they aren't hard at all.

Lemon Curd in Meringue Shells

Remember those meringue shells I made in class? Well, I made some thick lemon curd (with Meyer lemons, yum) and piped it into the shells. How cute are they?! And so delicious too!

Meringue Nests

An adorable leafy nest that, once filled with lemon curd,
will look somewhat like a sunflower.

These little Vacherin meringue nests were delicious on their own and so simple (though not necessarily easy) to make. The meringue isn't hard to make but (at least for me) is difficult to pipe. I don't have the steadiest hand and I have terrible hand eye coordination (to the point of I see where my hand needs to go to make the shape I want, but I don't quite do it right) so it's really hard for me to pipe these small nests so that they look elegant. But I managed and I think that mine actually came out pretty well! We baked them at a very low heat for quite a while to dry them out. They are really quite nice plain (they taste like nicely dried meringue), which is good considering we didn't fill the in class. I have people coming over in the next few days because of the holidays, so I'll make something (probably lemon curd) to fill them with and then serve these. Stay tuned!

Seasonal shapes:
snowpeople, trees, and a lollypop

Flourless Chocolate Cake

This gluten free cake is somewhat absurd, but all the better for it. We made a flourless chocolate cake and I thought to myself, this is a really nice, simple, chocolate cake. Then the chef said we're going to cover it in creme d'or (made with very dark chocolate). Ok, still nice but no longer simple. Then we baked chocolate meringue logs (which tasted somewhat like cocoa puffs, but better) and used them to cover the sides and top of the cake (what a great idea for decorating a cake). Now it wasn't at all simple, but it was certainly nice and very, very chocolaty!

Marjolaine

A marjolaine is the most decadent, insane cake I've ever made (or eaten), and gosh darn it was incredible! From bottom to top the layers are: chocolate genoise, dark chocolate ganache, daquoise (remember those?), crème d'or (remember that?), daquoise, praline buttercream, daquoise, stablized whipped cream, and another daquoise. Then it's iced with more praline buttercream and covered with chocolate glaze. The top is decorated by making a crosshatch pattern in the partially set glaze with the back of a knife. Chopped hazelnuts line the bottom of the long edges and a line of candied hazelnuts (always a nice decoration) finish it off. See what I mean about decadent?

A close up of the layers.

Dacquoise au Café

This was pretty darn good! It was five layers of nut meringue disks sandwiched together with coffee buttercream. Yum! Personally it wasn't my favorite thing, but I still liked it and pops, who always says he doesn't like sweets, loved this. The nut meringue disks were nice, but not quite as crisp as I would have liked. The buttercream was an excellent texture (stiff but still smooth and creamy) and the coffee flavor was delicious, but the buttercream base itself was a little too sweet. It wasn't frosted on the sides, which made it very pretty and different looking than most cakes. I suppose that this is fitting, since it's different sort of cake.

Lemon Tartlets

These were really good! I love lemon tarts and these were not a let down. The filling was slightly looser than I usually like. It was properly a lemon curd, you see. I'm pretty sure that normal lemon tarts are made with lemon curd that has some gelatin in it because they're much firmer. But that's alright, I actually really liked it this way. The meringue on top was easy to make and really good, plus bruléeing it was not as hard or scary as I thought it would be! And when you brown it with the blow torch, it starts to smell like toasted marshmallow, yum.

The candied lemon peel wasn't as hard to make as I expected. Unfortunately, I had problems with the burner I was using and I ended up boiling the syrup instead of just simmering it. So the peel ended up tougher than it should have. It still tasted really good, but the texture was off.

I'm a little unhappy with my piping on them. I think I did a good job to a point, my stars and shells were good, they just weren't touching well enough, I must work on that. It still looked nice and it didn't effect the taste at all, so it wasn't the end of the world.