I've spent my long weekend coup up at my apartment, ordering take away and cooking healthy meals for myself, while going hard at workouts. The issue of losing weight and eating healthy has been on my mind since forever.
I wasn't at my best during my wedding, but I wasn't at my worst either. Since the start of my course half a year ago, I've been looking larger than usual because I've let my muscles slack, and muscles turn back into fat. I'm actually weighing the same as when I was at my wedding, but due to the muscles slack, I'm not looking any petit either.
So I'm back, working hard in the gym, pushing myself as hard as I can, so that I can gain back some much required confidence and all. =)
I hope your weekend was way better than mine!
Anyway, to update you guys on how I've been doing - besides the above issue that I've been strangling with, feeling a little lovesick and homesick, and craving for a good old chocolate cake/cupcake...I'm actually finding it hard to love what I'm doing currently in Superior term.
It's basically a recap of some of the basic recipes we've learnt in Basic, and combining it with jelly, with cream, etc and then re-dressing it/decorate the different classics differently, modernly, a new messy way of presenting.
Sometimes it's beautiful, sometimes it's not.
Most times so far, it's kinda boring. Oh yes, when I get back home, I hope to explore different ways to dress my cake up, but for now, what's most important for us to do, is to know how to duplicate the same product/look and not do anything drastic that changes the whole look of the entremet altogether.
I'm not sure if you guys will get me, but that's how I feel...
Anyway! For the past week, we've had a few hits and misses (at least for me), on Monday, Chef Willy went through the demonstration for a Lime & Milk Chocolate entremet and Banana Chocolate entremet.
The Lime & Milk Chocolate is an entremet with a baked crispy almond base with a lime dacquoise and lime cream insert, and topped with milk chocolate mousse. The cake is then decorated with a tempered chocolate strip around the cake, and with chocolate flowers. More on that later.
The Banana Chocolate is a entremet with a chocolate feuilletine base with a chocolate flourless biscuit and banana insert, covered with dark chocolate mousse and glazed with a mirror glaze. It is also decorated with macaroon shells.
Chef Willy blended the banana after caramelising it and freezing it as an insert. I wished he didn't do that so that we get to taste bits of the banana, which would go really well with the dark chocolate mousse. Well, as usual, we always get to do the one which doesn't as good as the latter. HAHA! (Not that the lime cake is not delicious, it is! But I would love to do some banana & chocolate combo for once!)
Presenting to you, my Lime & Milk Chocolate Cake!
The only difficulty present for me, was to do the chocolate flowers. As this is milk chocolate, it melts faster than usual as compared to the dark chocolate. I was nearly half way through my chocolate tray, before I could finally start creating some decent petals for the first of my 3 required flowers.
Oh milky, why do you need to melt that fast!
I'm happy, though that my flowers has that pointy outlook to it, now that I finally used the fish knife correctly. I did, however, also managed to slice the skin off my thumb repeatedly, but not deep enough till it bleeds (thank goodness).
I love the look of the chocolate strip too! Having learned from my past mistakes of not having the correct length of the chocolate strip, I cut my strip longer this time, and my chocolate wrapped around the cake beautifully, meeting from end to end.
After practical class, I went for dinner with my friends, and ended up giving away my cake at the same pharmacy again. HAHA!
Then for Tuesday, we had the demonstration for Horizon entremet and White chocolate with red-fruits cake.
The Horizon entremet is a new style cake thought of and created by Chef Willy. It is a cake with a sable breton base, layers of sponge cakes and a pabana coulis insert, and topped with Vanilla Bavarian cream, filled in a special type of plastic mold. More on that later.
The White Chocolate with red-fruits cake is an entremet witha sacher biscuit bottom, with a red fruit compote insert, topped with a white chocolate mousse and decorated with lady finger rectangles.
As you can see, the creation of a French entremet (as far as I've learned) is to have something soft, something crunchy, something sweet/sour and something light. If you've created something, it is best to review the basics to confirm that your entremet has covered all of that, so that you gives your consumer a delightful consuming experience.
It's just about playing with flavours, with textures and then decorating it in the simplest ways possible, not too much decorative items because that can overwhelm the outlook of the cake and also, you wouldn't be able to connect to the flavours within at one glance.
I foresee myself throwing tons of cakes out this coming December - January when I'm back home baking cakes for sale! =D To come up with one successful cake, I'll probably have to face a lot of failures.
Ah well, the above cake was delicious, but as usual, we got to make the former cake. Hence, presenting to you, my Horizon entremet!
Which is a far cry from Chef's during the demo class.
I didn't managed to unmold my cake successfully from the plastic mold, which we were using for the first time. We had to soak the whole plastic mold into warm water, before applying slight pressure on the sides and letting the cake unmold on its own.
Either I didn't blast chill it long enough, or that I applied too much pressure, and that resulted in damaged "steps".
I told Chef that my entremet isn't a forest. It's actually Ang Kor Wat (A restored temple) . He agreed and suggested that I should have place some pebbles instead. HAHA!
I had fun doing the chocolate trees though! =)
Then, for classes on Thursday, we had the demonstration on Seventies Dome and Sensation Dome.
The Sensation dome is a entremet with a sable breton base and layers of pistachio dacquoise, creamy raspberry insert and topped with white peach mousse. Woohoo! Finally we're doing something different, like using peach!
The outlook of this entremet had me squirming in my seat, because it did not looked anything as cute as Teletubby (Chef Willy and his nonsense again.) It looked like a brain with serious tumours growing on it, and at one point of the time, it looked more like boobies.
Then, something magical happened. The moment he put those rose petals and the sugared daisy...the whole damn thing looked cute again. *FTS*. I wished I had the daisies too, so that my cake can look equally cute! Blah.
The Seventies Dome, is an entremet with layers of almond sponge cake, a mango creme brulee insert and topped with caramel mousse, before being glazed with a caramel glaze and decorated with chocolate discs.
Quite an interesting entremet, I must say! The difficult part about making a caramel mousse, is that it is rather hard to maintain the same caramel colour and consistency day in day out, especially if you are going to make this cake for sale!
Again, this is one of Chef's creation, he thinks it looked like a disco ball (Sometimes, I wonder where on earth his ideas came from...) *face palm*
Presenting to you, my Sensation Dome!
Well, I must say, I'm quite proud of my piping skills nowadays, I managed to pipe equal macaroons sizes, and made enough pairs for the next practical class, for another entremet.
The cake is perfect (In Chef's words) and I felt it was quite messy, but in a good way. Chef Willy was going "More macaroons, more macaroons!!", so the whole class was busy sticking macaroons and domes and then went off to spray the cake pink.
Then after class, I gave my cake to the preps kitchen, because there's no point in bringing the cake back home! No one's gonna eat it (not me) and so the next alternative, is to give it away =)
Alright, that's all I've got covered up for the past week! I'm looking forward to this coming Saturday because Ben is coming down for a visit, and I can't wait!!!
In the meantime, hang in there people (Or me!), the next few weeks is gonna get better! Or for me, the next few weeks will be dealing with slightly more interesting cakes! Woohoo!
Till then!
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