I feel like I'm becoming a real pro at making Black Forest cakes. It seems to be one of the most asked-for cakes we've learned at school so far. Funny thing is that it is one of my least favourite to eat. I really can't stand the cherries or alcohol in it. Yuck! I guess that works out for the best as I'm really not tempted to dip into it at all.
I had some advance warning so was able to start soaking the cherries in rum a full 24-hours before so they would have a true burst of cherry-rum flavour. The biggest issue with this cake was placing the rosettes on the top, believe it or not. They wanted it to be divided into 10 portions for the number of guests that would be at the party and you wouldn't believe how difficult it is to portion that evenly. Quarters, eighths, even sixths aren't that hard, but 10 is just ridiculous. Here's a handy trick if you have to do something like this yourself - before you place the final rosettes, arrange toothpicks on the top. You can move them around a bit if your spacing is off because once those rosettes are on, they aren't going anywhere!
The other cake was the Field-Berry Mousse Cake that we did in class just last week. I find that it's one of the easier mousses to make as the base is just pastry cream, which we've done countless times since Basic Pastry. The most odious task was making the raspberry coulis. Unless I'm working with really large quantities of it, I have to make raspberry puree from scratch and straining out those tiny little raspberry seeds is quite tedious. The result is always delicious, but halfway through I'm dreaming of storebought tubs of seedless raspberry puree. Yum!
I made a slightly smaller version of the cake for the order, but made a full recipe, so Phil and I had plenty of leftovers in the house. There goes my household baking for the week! The finished product wasn't quite as bright as the one in class, as I didn't have access to cocoa colouring. Instead, I used white and dark chocolate to glaze and decorate the cake.
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