European Cakes & Tortes Week 1 ~ 3

Here's what's been going in my other class: European Cakes & Tortes

Just like my Advanced Plated Desserts class, we make the components of the tortes one week, then finish them the following week. Week 1 in this class consisted of making the cake bases for the tortes we'll be making the rest of the quarter. That meant a lot of cakes. I mean, a lot of cakes.

Each of us were assigned a cake. There were chocolate, pistachio, almond, fruit & nuts cakes (among others) to be made. I got assigned Hazelnut & Cherry Meringue cake. This cake is simply a meringue with a mixture of nut flour, chopped nuts and dried cherries folded into it. I needed to make enough to fill a few full sheet pans, which required me to quadruple the textbook recipe. And that meant...

...whipping 6 lbs. of egg whites. Took me 15 minutes just to separate cartons after cartons of egg whites.

Behold. 6lbs of meringue. This was my first time ever using the huge commercial-use mixer.

My classmate folding the meringue and the cake base together. He dealt with 2lbs of meringue.

One of the finished cakes. This one is the Emmanuel Sponge, with chopped pistachios and dried cherries on top. This is a component in the White Chocolate Mousse Cake.

So that was Week 1. I don't have picture from Week 2 because utter chaos ensued and had no time whatsoever. Basically Chef told us that each one of us has to make/assemble two tortes in one class time--that's two tortes in under 5 hours. All of us were stressed and scrambling, especially since we didn't have enough equipments to accomodate everyone.

Week 3, we finished the tortes we made in Week 2. One was Raspberry Mousse torte.

Chef told everyone to freeze the torte after putting the gelee on--but I knew better. I've done that before and the gelee got wrinkly. So I put mine in the fridge while everyone else put theirs in the freezer. Sure enough, everyone's gelee was wrinkled except for mine.

Fruit Charlotte. Ladyfinger base with Diplomat cream and lemon cream insert.

It would be nice if the instructor was a little more organized. Nevertheless, I still love this class.