L'Ambassadeur Exotique

This little cake proved to be somewhat of a pain to make. I'm writing this post a few weeks after the fact and my memory really isn't that great, so I'll keep this very brief.

The Ambassadeur Exotique is made with genoise cake, imbibed with syrup and filled with pastry cream and chunks of pineapple and orange supremes. Then it is all covered in italian meringue and speckled with almonds.

Today was the first time that we had to temper chocolate and mine actually turned out rather well. I had some difficulty cutting it into shapes, fumbling with it and melting half of the cooled chocolate with my fingers. We used a cocoa butter transfer sheet, which gave it the nice yellow designs.

Chef H didn't taste any of the cakes, so we could keep them for the long weekend. I'm so glad he didn't, because I used WAY too much syrup on the genoise and it all seemed a soggy mess. But we certainly enjoyed it at home. The orange supremes are particularly nice.

Petits Fours: Pate a Choux

Chocolate Religieuses & Chantilly Swans

Petits Fours can be translated in a couple of different ways. Literally, it means "little ovens", but most often it is translated as "two bites" because that is what they are supposed to be. Miniature little pastries that are gone in two bites.

Coffee Eclairs

Today was a bit of a review on the items we made in Basic and a test of our organizational skills and speed. Chef H showed us seven different types of choux petits fours, six of which we had to reproduce for him in practical.

Salambos

It wasn't a very eventful class. You just had to move really quickly to get everything done on time. It's really the fondant that's the tricky part, though. We had to glaze in three different colours, so essentially three separate times we had to temper and adjust the consistency. I can't even look at an eclair anymore without thinking of all the time and difficulty that goes into glazing the darn things. Mine were all really messy and I think the biggest problem I had was getting the fondant thin enough. It looked pretty good going into the fridge, but when I pulled it out the shine had disappeared on most of them and they had developed little hairline cracks all over. The result of heating the fondant a bit too much. But I am very proud to say that I have no Marie-Antoinettes among my chocolate religieuses - all of the heads have stayed firmly attached!

Paris-Brest

For taste, the Paris-Brest are definitely the best. They're little rounds of choux pastry filled with a mixture of buttercream, pastry cream and hazelnut praline and topped with almond slices and icing sugar. Delicious! I love the story behind this pastry - it was created in 1891 and the circle represents the return route of the Paris-Brest bicycle race or a bicycle wheel.

Strawberry-Cassis Tart & Passion-Raspberry Tart

We've just barely started back into school again and they give us not one, but two tarts to make in one practical. They really have a lot of faith in our skills. And to think of how we struggled to finish just the lemon tart in basic!

The Strawberry-Cassis tart was really quite a breeze to make. We used pate sablee for the crust and baked it with a thick layer of almond cream, speckled with blackcurrants. After it cooled, we topped it with pastry cream and arranged rows of fresh strawberries and a mound of blackcurrants on the top. Personally, I find the blackcurrants are much too tart, my mouth puckering with every bite. When I made it at home, I used white currants instead, which are a little less tart and I added a few bits of strawberries in the almond cream with them.

The Passion-Raspberry Tart is to die for delicious! But also bloody difficult to make. The passionfruit cream is temperamental - literally. You have to add the butter to it when the cream is just the right temperature, then you use an immersion blender on it, but only until it's just mixed. Overmix and you might end up with a chunky butter mess. Add the butter too early and you'll get a soupy mess.

Above is the tart I made in class, which turned out pretty awesome. The pate sablee is topped with passionfruit cream, a disc of raspberry coulis, then more passionfruit cream. Then you cover it with a glaze flecked with passionfruit seeds.

This is my second attempt, pitiful little thing that it is. The passionfruit cream really threw me this time. I'm going to blame it on my not having the right equipment, using a food processor instead of an immersion blender. What started off as a beautifully smooth cream turned into a pebbled mess. I wanted to put it over a bain marie but was afraid that it would affect the gelatine in the cream. So I stuck with it, and then added a bit of chunky glaze on top to reinforce the aesthetic. There would have been some passionfruit seeds as well, but the freshly-bought $5 passionfruit was foul.