Cake Madness!

Ok, this cake unit is really intense. We are making so much, it's almost hard to keep up and even harder to carry everything home!

Tuesday night we made a fruit miroir and a white and dark chocolate mousse cake. The miroir is a really cool looking cake that is also the cover of our textbook. It's made with jaconde cake, layered with raspberry jam, which then is sliced and placed on the side of a cake ring. It has a genoise base that is then filled in completely with a cassis (black currant) mousse. I was so excited to make it. Mine came out pretty well, I think.

And here's the cover of the book, for comparison:

Ok, so mine's not perfect, but considering it was my first try, I think I did a great job!

The next cake we made was the mousse cake. Now, it's supposed to have layers of white and dark chocolate, so that when you cut into it, it looks like a chessboard. That being said, it was snowing like crazy, and we wanted to get out of there, so our mousse didn't really set up enough in the fridge. It was a bit of a mess, although I'm sure the cake will taste good! The outside of the cake is made with a biscuit aux amandes with chocolate pate a cornet polka dots used to make a pattern. Pretty cool, huh?

The last thing we made on Tuesday was the Charlotte Royale. To be honest, I wasn't expecting much in the way of taste with this one, since it's a very simple cake. It definitely looks cool (we call it the "brain cake."), but the ingredients are all very mild-tasting. However, I was pleasantly surprised...it was really good! Very light, and it would be good for a summer dessert. It has jaconde cake that has been rolled up with a bit of apricot jam and molded into a bowl and then filled with Bavarian cream.

The other stuff we made last night were a lot more simple and a lot more American. We made chocolate cupcakes that we decorated with marzipan roses (I was especially happy with the way my roses came out).

We also made a carrot cake. We ran out of time last night, and our instructor told us to make the marzipan carrots at home, so I did that this morning!

The final item we made was a coffee cake with pecan crumb topping. I have to say I was dissapointed with the way this turned out. I thought the cake could have been sweeter, and I think I would have preferred a more cinnamony cake, as opposed to the nuts. Oh well, now that I have the recipe, I can tweak it as I see fit.

Jeez, that's a lot of cake! It was so hard to get all this stuff home last night that my friend Michelle and I ended up having to take a cab back to Queens. And then I had to try to fit all this cake into my tiny NYC fridge...ugh.