This morning we had our demo for lesson 17. Chef Nicolas showed us how to make:
*Pavé du Roy (he spelled it pavet du roi but it’s spelled pavé du roy in our books. I don’t know which is right or if it really matters.)
Entremets Casino

As usual it was a good demo. It started off with..wait for it….a joke about cherries. It will never end. Chef also told us how we did overall on our written exam. Apparently our class average was around 63% and he told us that the last class’s (last session) average for the written exam was around 80%. And that actually isn’t a surprise to me at all. I don’t mean to be a jerk or anything but it seems that a few people in my class don’t take this seriously at all, and that sort of bothers me…It’s like they’re just taking one really long really expensive just-for-fun cooking class. But pastry. It aggravates me. And it’s even worse when people complain about things like the written exam. Sure, you got a bad mark, so maybe you should have studied a bit more. I know I should have. Maybe I’m just being an unfair jerk right now because I’m in a bad mood. I don’t even know half of my classmates. Sorry classmates, I shouldn’t judge you before I really know you. And sorry readers for the rant.

Anyways, the entremets casino cake is made out of a rolled biscuit with blackberry jam in the middle that line a ring and then is filled with a pear bavaroise (creme anglais+gelatin+whipped cream and pear puree). It is then covered with a round peice of biscuit to cover, allowed to set in the freezer, then flipped over and covered with a clear glaze. It’s pretty but I didn’t really like the taste of it that much. Chef said there was too much gelatin in it and obviously he was right. It was an odd texture to me.

The pavé du roy is what we had to make in our practicals later on. The cake is easy to make yet also difficult at the same time. It’s just simply three layers of a chocolate jaconde biscuit brushed with rum syrup (ew!) and a dark chocolate ganache in between and on top. Then you make a design on the top and coat the sides with chocolate vermicelli. The difficult parts being that you must bake your jaconde properly and not dry it out, and to make sure that your ganache is done well, ie. not over-worked so it gets grainy or too hard to spread, or that you don’t over-heat your ganache if you are trying to soften it after it got too stiff. It used to be so that you made a chocolate decoration for the top as well, but we were not shown that for some reason. It seems that we do a lot of things differently than they did in basic pastry last term. A few of my housemates told me that there is a reason for this but they won’t tell me what (they aren’t even supposed to know). I want to know! I have a slight idea of what it could be, but I won’t say here.  Here are pictures of what Chef Nicolas made for us.

Pave du roy. It looks sort of plain without the chocolate decorations that I’ve seen on them.

Entremets casino. You can see how it’s made up of slices of rolled biscuit.

So the practical was alright. I felt soooooooo disorganized the entire time. And I feel like my techniques were incredibly “basic” level. Which might sound weird, because I am in basic. But it’s just because I feel like/know I can do so much better than I am now. I get so ridiculously nervous for class and I always feel like I am doing everything wrong, that I’m mixing up steps, or that I completely forgot something. I end up having little confidence in myself and that screws me over every time and makes me so mad. That is my biggest problem I think. Not the actual things we are making, but myself.  Plus Chef Nicolas does still scare me. I thought I wasn’t scared of him anymore, but I still am a little bit. I managed to end up with something that actually looked pretty nice, despite the messy process towards it. I was so scared that I was going to screw up my ganache so I worked really quickly and that was a good thing. I only had to re-heat a small amount of it to mask the cut edges for the vermicelli to stick.  When I brought my cake up to present he said that it was a good one. My design on top was pretty, it was a nice size length wise, but it was too high. My jaconde biscuit was too fluffy because I didn’t deflate the egg whites enough. Ordinarily that would be a good thing, having a fluffy biscuit. But with this cake you want it to be more dense so that it holds moisture. Chef showed me one of my classmates’ cakes that was the proper height, so now I know.  Here is my pavé du roy:

I don’t really like this cake, even though I didn’t put as much rum in as I was supposed to. If you really really love dark chocolate then you would love it. But I am not a huge fan of just chocolate on its own, so I don’t like it. Way too chocolatey for me. Even though I felt I was doing really badly throughout the practical I’m happy with how things turned out overall. I know that I definitely could do better. If I were to get this cake for my exam I think I would do well and wouldn’t feel too nervous about doing it. There are only two classes left until the end of term and it feels weird. I feel like I am not ready to move on to intermediate. Basic has gone by way too fast. Oh well.

No butter used