Sweets – Mon Voyage Culinaire

First of all, MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY NEW YEAR 2015! Sorry for being away for quite some time, I’ve had a few problems but now I’m back with more stories. This wedding cake was made by my mom. Isn’t she talented ? The tall cake wasn’t real inside, there were styrofoam underneath the gum paste. The wedding decoration was 100% made of gum paste. Everything was made from scratch. The small cake on the right, however, was real. It was a very delicious Surabaya Lapis Cake or in Indonesia we call them Lapis Surabaya or Spiku.

(Source: natacake.com)

The cake has two layers of sponge cake and one layer of chocolate sponge cake in the middle. Traditionally, there was a layer of strawberry jam between each layers. A lot of eggs (especially egg yolks) and butter are needed to make this cake, so imagine how soft the texture and how rich the flavor is going to be. This is one of my favorite cakes ! Find the recipe here:

Lapis Surabaya Indonesian Sponge Cake Recipe

http://eatapieceofcake.blogspot.com/2014/01/kue-lapis-surabaya.html?m=1

Gum Paste

Now that I’ve finished my formal culinary education. I tried some short courses and one of them was gum paste. Gum paste, unlike fondant icing, it will harden out completely. I learned so many different techniques on how to shape so many different things. It was really interesting but patience is needed to make these. I was asked to choose one animation character that I wanted to make and I chose Tangled (or Rapunzel). The rest of people in the class chose different animation characters but so many people wanted to make Frozen. So these are some photos of my Tangled cake.

I finished this in 6 days with the help of my teacher, Yongki Gunawan. He is amazingly talented. He also has a lot of experiences and I couldn’t tell you how inspired I was to hear his story. Google his name and you could find him everywhere. I’ll show you some other cakes that the other students made.

Macarons

I’m back in Indonesia now. In my spare time back in July I baked these macarons for my boyfriend, we finally reunited! I surprised him these pink mini macarons. They were not perfect but they were good enough. The flavour was plain with vanilla for the fillings. The fillings were more like whipped cream texture instead of ganaches. I also packaged the macarons myself, using any stuff that I could used, it was not so bad really.

It was surprisingly different when I baked in indonesia and when I baked in New Zealand last time. The different environment, different kitchen, different oven and also different equipment and ingredients. I wish I could perfected these macarons next time, and of course other pastry products too. Sorry for the late update. Going to post more amazing stuff from indonesia !

Original Gateau and Patisserie Exam

By the beginning of June, I had to prepare my original gateau for the exam. Original Gateau is an entremet (cake) which is being created by the students themselves, the flavour, colour, texture, glaze ,decoration etc. This is my original gateau.

This is a Matcha Green Tea entremet. It is pistachio dacquoise layered with lemon curd, white chocolate ganache, matcha mousse and glazed with white glaze. The photo was taken during the trial ,one last lesson before the actual exam. The good news was that this cake was really good, the flavour went really well together, the decoration was neat, clean and really simple. However, the bad news was that it didn’t look like that during the exam.

I didn’t have the photo of the full cake as I was really upset with it. This photo was taken after the chefs tasted the cake. As you can see, the layer is different, instead of having 2 biscuits in one cake, I only have one and that caused all the trouble during the exam. Since I removed one of the biscuits from the cake, I should’ve increase the quantity of the mousse but I didn’t and I didn’t have enough mousse to build up the cake. I made a second batch of mousse and put it on top of the first layer that’s why you could see the difference on the top layer. However, I managed to finish the entremet, and be able to fix the problem under the pressure. I finally finished the patisserie exam.

Sugar Works

First of all, sorry for not posting for about a month. I’ve been really busy, so I’m going to post my last lesson in my patisserie course today.

It was an interesting sugar week, last week of may. This piece was made of pastillage, 100% sugar which has been coloured. Pastillage is made of powdered gelatine, water, glucose, icing sugar and corn flour. The flexibility is similar with marzipan or fondant icing, but if it’s left uncovered for too long, it’s going to become hard and keep its shape.

The 2nd sugar product is a fruit basket. This is the most frustrating sugar work that I’ve done. I used the classic sugar recipe and casting sugar recipe. Blowing the sugar to shape it into the desired shapes might be the most difficult part but it got easier as you did it and I honestly felt like it was the easiest job to do by the end of the lesson. HOWEVER, when I did the assembling, it was easy at first but when I started to assemble all the pieces together, the side of the sugar basket started to crack and fell into big pieces. Everything went really well until the assembling part. I was really really upset, but still it was a wonderful experience.

The 3rd product of sugar work is my first ever sugar sculpture which is the most amazing lesson ever. The sugar used for casting was isomalt. The flower and ribbon were made using the similar method – pulling. The most difficult part for me is to keep the petals of the flower thin. The sugar was so hot that it was a really painful job to work with them, but I did it anyway and finished it. Really amazing experience indeed. Thank you Chef Sebastien.

Plated Desserts

This week I prepared some plated desserts using the same components in every plate but different designs. The dessert is a lychee mousse on top of the hazelnut dacquoise garnished with tuile, meringue, tempered chocolate work, raspberry coulis and mango & passionfruit coulis. They tasted amazing but on this lesson I focused on the plating. This lesson was really amazing because you can see everyone’s creativity in their plates and they all looked different. I plated these 4 desserts, I wasn’t too happy with all of them as I was running out of time but they were not bad, yes ? So which one is your favourite ? 🙂

Traditional Celebration Cake

I love this lesson so much. This celebration cake / wedding cake looks really beautiful. It’s a dark fruit cake inside which has been coated with marzipan and white fondant icing. I piped the flame around the cake using royal icing. Garnished with flowers and leaves that were made of fondant icing as well. I used marzipan to cover the whole cake before I covered the cake with the fondant icing. The reason was to get the cake to be as smooth as possible. As you probably have known that dark fruit cakes look like this:

(Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk)

As you can see the surface of the cake is not as smooth as a sponge cake. That’s why I covered the whole cake with a thin layer of marzipan (2mm) before I put another layer of fondant icing (3-5mm) on top of it. This cake could last up to 5 years as it was made of fruit cake which has a really long shelf-life.

Coconut – Passionfruit Entremet

One of my favourite entremets so far , coconut and passionfruit entremet. “Russe”, coconut biscuit meringue ,layered with coconut mousse and passionfruit curd, glazed with white mirror glaze and garnished with tempered white chocolate and macaron shells. I really love this entremet because the flavour is really refreshing, the acidity from the passionfruit curd balanced the sweetness from the mousse, biscuit and the glaze as well. I love the smell of the coconut, and the texture it gives to the biscuit. We fully glazed the cake with the white mirror glaze and garnished with plain macaron shells as well as different shapes of tempered chocolate. It was a really delicious entremet, absolutely fantastic.

Chocolate – Vanilla Entremet

Last week’s entremet week ! One of the entremets that I made is chocolate-vanilla entremet. This entremet was made of chocolate mousse, flourless chocolate biscuit and vanilla crème brulée insert. Yup, crème brulée as an insert. The amazing thing about the entremet is I used Varlhona chocolate for the chocolate mousse. For those who have tried Varlhona dark chocolate, you know that Varlhona chocolate has a unique flavour, I think it is more fruity than normal dark chocolate that we eat. The other interesting thing is that I used tonka bean instead of vanilla beans for the creme brulee, which looks like this:

It doesn’t have that strong vanilla fragrance, it has a unique flavour and you can smell the different spices all combined in one bean. It’s really interesting for me because back home I didn’t really use tonka beans.

If you’re wondering about the glaze, we used a spray gun (chocolate milk flavoured) to glaze the cake so it has that unique texture. This is a picture of my chef, Chef Sebastien demonstrated how to use the spray gun. It was pretty cool. Follow my Instagram: nananadyas, to see the video of the demonstration.