Culinary School - Week 3

Week 3 is over and I needed a nap today to recover from the busy week! Here are the cakes that I personally made in cake class this week. Like I said earlier, everything is individual work in this class.



This is a german chocolate cake. Two layers of chocolate chiffon cake with a layer of german chocolate filling in the middle and on top, iced with chocolate buttercream, and garnished with chopped pecans on the sides.


This is a chocolate flourless cake (found on many restaurant menus) covered in chocolate ganache and topped with a cranberry chutnee.


This is a Sacher Torte. Two layers that are lightly iced in raspberry jam, covered in chocolate ganache and then garnished with chocolate and fresh raspberries. (Sorry for the poor pictures. My little point and shoot camera that I keep in my pants pocket during class doesn't do justice for these cakes.)


This one is a white chocolate mousse torte. An 8-inch yellow chiffon cut into 2 layers. One layer is one the bottom, layer of white chocolate mousse and chopped strawberries, another layer of cake, another layer of mousse, more chopped strawberries on top with lady fingers on the outside and garnished with chantilly cream, white chocolate shavings, and a fresh strawberry. The mousse has gelatin in it which firms up and gives the cake its structure.


We also made a Buche de Noel but will be assembling it next week. The best part of the whole day??? Sampling all the cakes we made and getting a big sugar high! :) My favorite one was the white chocolate mousse torte!



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Yesterday in chocolate class we learned all about molded chocolates. Each person got assigned their own flavor to make. I made lime licorice. It sounded really gross to me because I hate the taste of licorice but they turned out amazingly tasty! Luckily I couldn't taste the licorice and the lime gave the chocolate a very fresh sensation in your mouth. Below is a picture of my lime licorice molded chocolates. You can see some air pockets in the top of the chocolates because apparently I didn't tap the mold quite hard enough to get all the air bubbles out. Other than that, they turned out great!



Here are some of the other molded chocolates that my class made. Flavors included Fennel, Mango Mint, Red Rose, and Vanilla.


We also made molded chocolate but we ran out of time to mess with it in class so we brought it home to practice with. The Chef showed us how to make some chocolate roses with it.

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Next up was sugar class. We made hard candy (my table made grape), chewy caramels (my table made vanilla caramels), nougat montelimar, taffy (orange), and caramel apples. We were also going to attempt to make candy corn however we ran out of time.

This is a picture of us cutting up the caramels.


Here is a pic of my table's accomplishment. You'll notice that we didn't have the proper sticks for the caramel apples so we had to use 3 skewers taped together...hahaha. Hey, it worked! Check out those super blueish purple lollipops we made! My son was so excited when I told him I brought some home for him to eat.


That's all for this week. I hope you enjoy reading about my adventure in culinary school! :)