Friday was exhausting, but also really fun because we made the most "complex" dessert we have made to date: Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte or Black Forest Cake!
Black Forest Cake is basically a chocolate cake with layers of Chantilly cream (which is whipping cream mixed with simple syrup (a mixture of equal parts water and sugar boiled on the stove) and vanilla - it's pretty much the same thing as what we all call "whipped cream") and cherries and decorated with more Chantilly cream, chocolate shavings, and more cherries on the top. Oh, and each layer of cake is soaked in Kirsch syrup (cherry flavored brandy mixed with more sugar). It's pretty delicious I must say :) I *may* have eaten a couple of slices after class...
Anyway, making the cake was a fairly involved process, but it was cool because it combined a bunch of techniques that we've been learning - like making the cake batter and hand-whipping the Chantilly cream.
Here are some pictures from Demonstration:
We had to slice the cake into 3 layers, as you see here. That process was actually harder than it looks!
Frosting the first layer!
Cherries on top of the first layer. (That's the Kirsch syrup on the right hand side by the way)
Frosting (or what Chef called "molding") the cake - this was actually really hard to do to! We weren't allowed to use those "cake-spinner" things and had to hold the cake with one of our hands and rotate it while spreading the Chantilly cream with our other hand. I was so afraid I was going to drop the cake because it was kinda heavy after being soaked in all that syrup!
This is how we made the chocolate shavings for the cake. First, we spread melted chocolate with a metal spatula directly on the table-top.
Then, once the chocolate had dried, we used our knives to scrape it up!
Chef's final presentation: the Black Forest cake is on the far left, and the one in the middle is a chocolate ganache cake and the one on the right is a Moka cake. We just had to make the Black Forest one in practical, but Chef made all 3 just to show us how.Practical class went really well - I really liked the look (and taste!) of my cake! Chef said I also did a good job of soaking the cake in the Kirsch lol He said I was the first person all day who had used enough Kirsch hahaha
My Black Forest Cake!
Yay Kirsch! lol jk!
Of course you were the only one to use enough Kirsch. :P The Chantilly cream sounds amazing! And your cake looks delicious. Why no cake spinner?!
ReplyDeleteIt looks really good! Nyam! (I don't know how to write this onomatopeia in English, but it's the sound you do when you like food). You seem to enjoy it a lot. It may be so different from you've done before, in fact, it seems a very different experience than my, although I'm enjoying it too and I making the most of my time in London! But I envy the feeling of being part of a team that you seem to have. I'm almost all the day at the library! I thought I would never met anybody, but the second week I started to be in touch with a lot of people and they are very nice with me and I have friends to hang out, now! Sometimes I think this takes time from my PhD thesis, but it's one of the best parts of doing research abroad. :)
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