Today we were shown how to make fully assembled cakes. Fairly simple ones, but we have to start easy! Then right after demo I had my practical and I made one!

Chef Christian showed us the following cakes:
*Gâteau Forêt Noire
Moka
Mexicain
and simple chocolate decoration

And in practical I made the black forest cake! I was so excited, as you could probably tell if you read previous posts. I love black forest cake a lot, so I was really happy that we had to make one in class.

In the demo, Chef Christian actually didn’t finish one of the cakes, the Mexicain, because he was talking too much, ha. But that was okay because we don’t have to make it. The practical was pretty okay. It was an easy cake to do.

During practical I think I was ahead of everyone the entire time. And it felt weird! Because Chef Christian is sort of “not there” when he supervises practicals, I felt like I was doing a lot of things wrong. I would much rather have the Chefs being scary and walking around checking out what everyone is doing. I like that better, because then you don’t have to leave what you’re doing to ask a question. I think I did fairly well in technique and things like that, because my genoise turned out really really fluffy, not as dark (chocolate wise) as other peoples, and I had a lot of batter left over that I had to throw out because it wouldn’t fit in the mold. And the Chef told me that it was really good and light and fluffy and things. So I was happy about that. The syrup was easy to make, the chantilly cream was easy to make, and surprisingly enough, cutting the small cake into 3 layers was fairly easy too. Then I just assembled it.

The funnest part I think was making the chocolate curls. We just poured some tempered chocolate onto the marble and spread it around with our spatula. Then we let it harden slightly and shaved it with our chef knives. It was fun. In intermediate we learn how to actually temper the chocolate! It’s messy, but it’s fun.

I was the first to present my cake. Chef said that it was good. I actually didn’t hear any negative comments from him…so I’m not sure where I could improve. He told me that my genoise was really good, my chocolate decoration looked good, and my rosettes were good. My chantilly cream was a bit soft when I piped the rosettes, but he said he would actually prefer that than over-whipped cream. Oh well! I saw him write down a few 4’s and 5’s out of 5. And a 3.5 for organization, haha. But I already know that I need to work on my organization.

In the end, here is what my cake looked like

So in the end everything went fine. It was really easy. Chef liked my cake. I liked my cake. All is well!

Butter used: 25gms
Total: 1735gms