All posts tagged: Cake

Coconut Mango Entremets

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Baking for my younger brother allows me the chance to reach into the crazy section of my creative side and try things and combinations that I usually wouldn’t try out on other people. I’m just going to come out and say it; he’s a complete weirdo. Since he is returning home from college this week, I decided to be a nice sister and bake something for him. This time my train of thought started out with a layer cake. Maybe I’ll make an exotic layer cake covered in coconut, I thought. Then I flipped to Miette’s Coconut Mousse Cake and thought maybe I would add in some coconut mousse layers… and then that led me to thinking about adding in some mango…and before I knew it, the idea had changed into an entremet with a never-before-seen liquid mango juice center. So I started in with my experimental creation–making a mango puree and simmering it with some simple syrup before straining it and putting the juice into some silicon molds. At the same time, I made …

Honey Matcha Castella Cake

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I told myself I wasn’t going to do any baking this week. I was going to avoid the kitchen in lieu of being productive and getting important things done in all the other areas of my life. And then the spark of an idea led to me tumbling down the rabbit hole–flipping through a handful of cookbooks and spending a solid hour furiously Googling subsequent ideas… Until not only was I in the kitchen, but I had about four projects in various stages spread across every available counter space as I vaguely listened to 30 Rock playing from my computer while sitting cross-legged in front of my oven, carefully regarding the cakes inside. Despite not understanding how the oven in my parents new house can simultaneously over and under cook the things I try to bake, my evening baking adventure turned out to be quite a success. Half following some recipes and half throwing in ingredients haphazardly like the rebel I am, I ended up with a Honey Castella Cake, Almond Matcha Mousse, Matcha Spread, …

In the Kitchen at Château de Bégude

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Sometimes life throws you opportunities in ways you are not expecting. Last week I was invited by a friend to come watch the preparation of a wedding cake in her kitchen. Her chef was willing to have me, I had the day off—it seemed like all the stars were in alignment. A few days later, after a long week of working and returning home around midnight the night before, I woke up at 7:00am (after a maximum of 5 hours of sleep) in order to get myself together and be ready to spend another day in the kitchen. I woke up early enough to shower, and more importantly go find coffee, before Babette kindly picked me up—and soon we were pulling up at her hotel–Château de la Bégude. 9:30am and we are in the kitchen. I’m ready to get going, thinking that there will be a lot of mise en place and calculated running around as soon as we walk in the door. Wrong. To my surprise, after getting a tour of the kitchen and …

Gastronomicom Week Six: Entremets Week

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Guess who has another test in pastry this week? *inserts hysterical laughter* Yeah, its me. And before that, each day will hopefully see the completion of one entire entremets. The one recipe that isn’t able to be made within one class time is the inverted puff pastry–which needs two days to rest in the fridge–so we started off our week by gathering the ingredients for that recipe as well as for the rest of the recipes for todays Strawberry Entremets. Much like with plated dessert week, each team of two people was in charge of one recipe which would later be added to the larger, complete cake. My lovely partner and I were in charge of the Vanilla Biscuit–which smelled like absolute heaven! The recipe originally called for vanilla beans, but instead we used a really good quality vanilla extract. And let me tell you, it was liberally added to the biscuit. I kind of wanted to stick my face into the bowl directly, but I refrained. After the biscuit was completed, we went table to table …

Dark Chocolate Jasmine Cakelettes

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I wish I were cool enough to pick a random word and use that as the title of my new flavor combination. It can’t be something too mundane, it probably shouldn’t be in English, and it has to be vague enough that allows for it to represent several flavors and an entirely new idea of dessert. But alas, I am a relatively boring person who lacks creativity in the naming department. So this little “cakelette” or small cake is just named for the main flavors it carries–dark chocolate and jasmine. It also features raspberry and tonka seed, though those are a bit more subtle, and are present to enhance and deepen the flavors of chocolate and jasmine in the rest of the dessert. The idea for this dessert came to me while I was on the train from Agde to Paris last weekend as I was traveling to London. Though I should have been studying French, I was instead doodling in my sketchbook, thinking up new ideas and jotting down thoughts I’ve had on previous …

Chocolate Dipped Strawberry Matcha Cake

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I think this cake is my spirit animal. I can’t stop thinking about it! Seriously, it is so lovely with so many of my favorite flavors and yet it resists the urge to be ombre or monochromatic as so many other of my favorites have been. In the past few months, I had seen several cakes online–usually smaller cakes–that had one single chocolate covered strawberry that seemed to be dripping chocolate down the sides of the cake. Usually the strawberry was covered with dark chocolate, but when I saw that I thought 1) if one strawberry is good, a bunch must be better, and 2) why not use white chocolate and then add matcha to bring out the color and flavor of the red strawberries? So I did. For the base of the cake, I used my favorite Miette Hot Milk Cake Recipe, but I added Matcha Powder to half of the batter and spooned the batter into my prepared cake pans in spoonfuls to get a nice mix of green and white/vanilla and matcha …