Cake Week: Round Three

The last cake week!  It was pretty fun.  I was partnered with someone as obsessed with decorating perfection as I am, so we worked very well together.

The first cake we made was a raspberry and basil tart.  The tart dough we made is called "Sable breton," and it's a traditional dough from Bretagne.  In Bretagne they really like salted butter, so everything they make in pastry used salted butter instead of the typical unsalted butter.  We filled the tart with a basil pastry cream, then topped it with fresh raspberries.  It was so fresh and summer-y!  I think it was my favorite cake of the week.

The second cake we made was called B52.  It was a coffee, orange, and Bailey's themed cake.  We made a chocolate sponge and made ladyfingers with it, as well as two layers of sponge for the inside of the cake.  The layers were (from bottom up), chocolate sponge, feuilltine, orange bavarian cream, chocolate sponge, coffee jelly, Bailey's bavarian cream, topped with a mountain of chocolate curls and surrounded by chocolate ladyfingers.  It was delicious, but also extremely rich and heavy.  Our apartment only kept one cake and we ate only about half of it.  Too bad.

The third cake we made was called "Mac Cap D'Agde."  Our chef invented the dessert and the name.  The "mac" part is because the base of the cake is a macaroon, and rest of the name is pretty self-explanatory (the area it was invented).  This cake was kind of more of an individual cake, but we made a ton of them.  It reminded me of something we would normally make during plated dessert week.  The base was a long macaroon (kind of in the shape of an eclair), and on top we put a line of mango pastry cream we made then poured into long skinny molds to set.  On top of the mango we piped chocolate banana pastry cream in pretty braids and shells, then sprayed it with a chocolate gun (though I

Mac Cap D'Agde final product.

would have preferred not to).  Then on top of that we put a long line of chocolate then put passion fruit caviar on top decoratively.  Making the passion fruit caviar was an interesting process.  We heated passion fruit pulp and agar-agar together, then poured it into syringe which we then used to push droplets into room-temp oil.  The drops then set up into little caviar-like balls, which we strained from the oil to use to decorate.  It was very cool.           

Making passion fruit caviar.