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.