A Doctor in the Kitchen: March 2008

In a couple of days it is time for another mid-life crisis as I turn 30. I have however already had some birthday celebrations as I spent Easter and last week back home in Sweden, so I took the opportunity to have an early birthday party for my friends back home (granted, before this I had already had two previous smaller birthday celebrations - one for friends who couldn't make it for this one to which I made the Cloud forest chocolate cake (no pictures) and one for family for which I made my old trusted favourite described in a previous post here).

Given that I had already done a fair amount of baking I wasn't really in the mood for anything overly complicated for this party. The photos below show the two cakes that I had. The one to the left is a traditional Swedish "gräddtårta" and consists of three layers of genoise with a mixture of mashed bananas and strawberrys between the layers, and coated with whipped cream. Very simple and very good. The decoration was made by my sister and is a portrait of me back in the days when I used to have a beard. :)
The other cake is a bittersweet chocolate charlotte. I've been looking at this recipe for a while, wanting to try it, so I figured this was a good occasion to give it a go. Once again, I received some help from my sister in stacking the ladyfingers in the bottom and around the sides of the pan. We didn't have enough ladyfingers to cover the top of the cake as well, so I just put some white chocolate shaving on it. I probably won't make this cake again. Everybody liked it and thought it was very good, but I was not thrilled. I didn't really like the texture of it, and given the amount of effort it after all required, I could probably do something better. The pictures also shows some cookies that my mother had made previously that I retrieved from the freezer.

Oh, I just remembered, that while not on the pictures, I also made a last minute batch of these chocolate and almond meringues from foodbeam that are very good.

Ever since I saw the post about the Coeur Velours (Velvet Heart) over at Foodbeam, I have been looking for an occasion to make it. Given that it's a Pierre Hermé creation it is from the offset guaranteed to be a great recipe. Add into the equation that this is basically an entrement version of a Plaisir Sucré, and you can hope for nothing less than total bliss.

Yesterday was my friend's birthday, and one can hardly find a better excuse than that to try out a recipe like this. It's a win-win situation - I get to try out a recipe that I've wanted to try for a long time (and, not to forget, get to eat some of the cake), and she gets a nice birthday cake like she deserves.

The cake has the following layers:
A disk of hazelnut daquoise
A layer of praline feuilleté spread on this
Three thin sheets of milk chocolate, with a milk chocolate ganache between each of the sheets
A fairly thick layer of milk chocolate chantilly
Another hazelnut daquoise
The entire cake is then covered with a milk chocolate coating and sprinkled with toasted hazelnuts for decoration.

Comments:
While the resulting cake is quite impressive, just like the Plaisir Sucré, the recipe is straight-forward to work with and has the benefit that most of the different components can be made separately ahead of time and kept frozen until it is time to assemble them. This certainly makes it easier to find time to make a fairly ambitious project like this or the PS. Each component is reasonably simple to make (but it certainly doesn't hurt to have some baking experience - this probably shouldn't be the first cake that you attempt to make, with one notable exception (which is the same thing that was a hassle when making the PS) - the chocolate sheets. While the recipe allocated a total of 15 minutes for the tempering of the chocolate and the creation of the chocolate sheets, I fortunately have enought insight into my abilities in this area to expect this part of the process to take slightly longer. After about two hours (and a fair bit of chocolate pieces on the floor), I was done. First of all, tempering chocolate is a bit of a hassle in itself, as it is a very delicate process where the temperature ranges for the chocolate are very precise and it is easy to overshoot the target temperature when reheating it (if you are not aware of what tempering of chocolate is, it is basically a process in which the chocolate is first melted and brought up to a certain temperature, then it is cooled down to a lower temperature, and then reheated again to a temperature in-between to two others... this is done to make the crystals that make up the chocolate re-arrange themselves in the proper way to make the chocolate have the right "snappy" consistency). Once the chocolate is tempered, one has to work quite quickly to spread it on sheets to create the thin layer of chocolate that will make up the three circular sheets that go into the cake. Finally, there is the process of removing the chocolate from the plastic without breaking the chocolate sheets (this is even more difficult here than for the PS, as each sheet is much larger for this cake).
My cercle à pâtisserie was also larger than the 19cm prescribed in the recipe. I scaled up the amount of praline I made, but not the chantilly and ganache, which I probably should have. I think that the amount of chantilly was still enough, but it would have been good to have some more ganache to get a larger distance between the chocolate sheets (especially when you are cutting the cake, the trio of chocolate sheets will be a bit compressed in some places).

Just as expected, the cake was very good. One of the best things with making cakes and dessert is to watch peoples' faces as they take the first bite of what you have made. When you have made something good, that expression says so much more than words (though the words of the birthday girl and the others who tried this cake were also very positive), and that is what I strive to achieve with all the things I bake.

While the cake basically is mostly milk chocolate presented in different ways, it is very interesting with several different textures that combines together wonderfully. It has the smoothness of the chantilly and ganache, the chewiness of the daquoise, the crunch of the praline, and the snap of the chocolate sheets.

Finally, here are the pictures of the cake. (Yes, I know... I need to start putting more effort into the pictures and have nicer backgrounds.)

The cake under construction: