The last cake

Our last cake was a quick one. Decadent Chocolate cake batter includes bittersweet chocolate, butter, flour, sugar and eggs (separated, with the whites and a bit of cream of tartar whipped into firm peaks). Baking time is 15 minutes and the cake needs to be cooled completely in the fridge before being glazed. The glaze (chocolate, butter and corn syrup) is heated over a water bath and then drizzled and smoothed over the cake (mmmm....). We used heated white chocolate to pipe a variety of designs on parchment paper, which were peeled off after the chocolate had cooled and set. Mine resulted in an, um, interesting design which I'm calling 'abstract'.


This is a super-rich recipe so servings sizes should be small. You could also use this recipe to make molten chocolate cake. (Which I will be trying - I've always wanted to make those!) Simply fill some ramekins 3/4 full with the batter and place a Lindt chocolate in each one and top up with more batter and bake. I have a month off before The Art of Pies starts so am planning to try making those, as well as macarons - they seem like the perfect spring-like thing to make.

I heart cheesecake!

Finally! Cheesecake is my favourite dessert ever so I was excited to make this Baked Raspberry Chiffon version. It was all I could do not to grab a knife and fork and eat this for dinner. But I shared - because it's nice and because consuming this much cheese in one sitting would not end well. The graham cracker crust was what you'd expect: graham crumbs, butter, ground almonds and sugar. The filling included a lot more ingredients than I've seen in a cheesecake before, some of which were: Baker's (Quark) cheese, egg yolks, sugar, vegetable oil, bread flour and butter milk. Whipped egg whites were what gave it a light, fluffy texture.

The raspberry topping was made by boiling frozen raspberries, water and corn starch. Cheesecake should be baked at a low temperature for a long time (this one was baked at 325 degrees for 20 minutes and then 20-25 minutes at 300 degrees). I will definitely be making this recipe again.

Chocolatey goodness

This week's Chocolate Mousse cake was my favourite so far. There were three steps: biscuit, mousse and glaze. Melt this over a water bath...boil that...I love complicated recipes. We baked Japonais biscuit, which is similar to meringue and includes egg whites, white sugar, icing sugar, ground almonds and corn starch. The biscuit was cut and layered into the dark chocolate mousse (!) made of butter, dark chocolate, water, gelatin, sugar, eggs and cream. Our cakes were then frozen (had we been at home they could have been refrigerated overnight) and released from their pans.


We then poured a shiny glaze made of couverture chocolate (more expensive because it includes cocoa butter), coating chocolate (cheaper), cream, water, sugar and glucose over our cakes. We had piped some little circles with the leftover biscuit batter earlier, so stuck these to the sides of our cakes. The grand finish was piping melted white chocolate across the top and using a paring knife to create the wavy patterns you see on top.


Needless to say this all smelled SO good!

Espresso + cake = delicious

It was Tiramisu week! We made a creamy (and not low-fat) filling with mascarpone cheese, whipping cream, eggs, sugar and gelatin (passed on the brandy).


Instead of baking the lady fingers as individual cookies, we piped a small sheet tray full of cookie dough (eggs, sugar, corn starch and bread flour = delicious) and cut the baked sheet into strips that wrapped around the outside of our cake. The cookie crust was brushed with a mixture of espresso and simple syrup. The filling was poured in and the cake was popped into the freezer to set.

Peaches & cream

We made the hot milk sponge for this Peach Yogurt Mousse Cake in our last class - it's baked in large sheets similar to how Raspberry Swiss Rolls are. So this week all we had to do was make simple syrup (equal parts sugar and water, with a bit of the syrup from the peach slices) and the yogurt mousse. Hand-whipped cream (tiring!) is blended with yogurt, sugar and gelatin. Alternating layers of sponge, peaches and mousse are layered into a springform pan and refrigerated (preferably overnight) to set.


My peach slices are supposed to look like a peony but the apricot glaze kind of takes away from the look I was going for. This was a quick recipe - our class typically runs about 3 hours and this took half that.

Austrian treat

I had never heard of Linzer Torte before, but apparently it's very popular in eastern Europe as it originated in Austria. It's a dense cake that includes lemon zest, ground nuts and jam and we were told that it should be enjoyed in small pieces with coffee. I do like my coffee so sampled this almost as soon as I got home today.

It was quite rich, but flaky...a perfect after-dinner treat. We piped a lattice-pattern on the top of it, which ended up flattening out in the oven so that you could barely tell we had gone to the effort. I'll be using a much smaller piping tip next time.

I love the word 'chiffon'

So there were actual oranges in this week's cake, which was a nice change from last week's puree. Orange Chiffon Cake is a variation of Angel Food Cake, the difference being that Angel Food is lighter and has no levening agents (baking powder) - it's simply whipped egg whites and sugar mixed with vanilla and a mixture of cake flour and icing sugar. Orange Chiffon incorporates all this plus baking powder, orange zest, the egg yolks, water and vegetable oil.


I want to pretend that my whole week wouldn't have been ruined if my cake fell, but I would be lying. Apparently, if your bowl and whip aren't completely clean and without a speck of oil, whipping the egg whites (mixed with a bit of cream of tarter) could result in a total catastrophe! But all went well. The sugar content in these is high enough that there's no need to refrigerate them - they should last a week on your kitchen counter, which is a little alarming.

Not chocolate

Today's creation was banana layer cake with German icing - which I assumed was German CHOCOLATE icing, but wasn't. There is walnuts and coconut and a bunch of other stuff in there. The cake batter called for sliced bananas but we substituted those with banana puree (?) which explains the bright yellow colour that is not of nature. I love anything banana-flavoured, but would definitely make this with real bananas and - you guessed it - chocolate icing next time.

Carrots & cream cheese

Baking school is back! I forgot to photograph last week's pound cake, but it was pretty simple-looking anyway. In other news, I made marzipan carrots today:


This week: Carrot cake with cream cheese icing. Vegetables and desserts are not two things that go hand-in-hand, if you ask me, but the method used to make this was different from a typical batter-type cake. Eggs and sugar were heated over a double boiler and then whipped. Vanilla, lemon juice and rum was added and then shredded carrots and a mixture of graham crumbs, flour, ground almonds, cinnamon and baking powder were mixed in by hand (meaning I was elbow-deep in goo). I'll probably try a slice tomorrow - it actually smelled amazing coming out of the oven, so maybe I'll be sold on the idea then.