Summer quarter started this week, and so far so good. In European Cakes and Tortes, we started a Sacher Torte. It's a dense chocolate sponge cake with apricot filling. Here we are folding a meringue into the chocolate.
We froze the cakes and will finish up next week with filling and ganache glaze.
After a guilt-inducing Nutrition class, I went to Centerpieces, Confections and Chocolate where we will make truffles, marshmallows, jellies and decorative sugar. Very nutritious indeed.
Here we have two different kinds of dark chocolate. The top is 100%, which has only cocoa solids and no cocoa butter. The lower tin has 65% cocoa solids and 35% cocoa butter. What I used to know as unsweetened, bittersweet and semi-sweet is now just numbers. And what misnomers. They should be called un-fattened, semi-fat, and a lot of fat.
To use chocolate as a decoration and maintain its texture and physical properties, you have to properly pre-crystalize it. We used the seeding method, where the majority of the chocolate is melted to 47-50℃, then more chocolate is added until the temperature drops to 30℃. This melts the fat crystrals and then introduces seed crystals to teach the melted ones how to form. Very scientific indeed.
We made plaquettes, small square decorative pieces for plated desserts.
We also poured the chocolate onto transfer sheets to get pre-printed designs. The transfer is dyed cocoa butter, so it's edible.
Now for the Gianduja. If you like nutella, you'll like Gianduja. It's layers of hazelnut and dark, milk and white chocolate.
We molded the layers, then poured dark chocolate on both top and bottom, then added texture to the top.
Sliced and diced.
The other groups tried pistachio paste instead of hazelnut, which was also very good.
And even the spoils taste like heaven.
