Patisserie 12: Biscuit Moka/Mocha Cake

 The moka cake is the first "advanced" recipe I've tried from the cakes section of The Book. At first, it was not immediately apparent why this recipe was marked as being harder than the other cakes, because in comparison, the assembly is a lot easier and there are fewer components overall: a sponge cake (similar to the Fraisier from last time), coffee buttercream, and toasted almonds. I suspect the difficulty rating is due to the risks of baking a tall, circular sponge cake, and also in part due to the assembly process of the final cake. But I think, for my first cake of this form factor, that it all went well. It is an atypical shape of cake because it is apparently an Alsacian festive cake, and various flavor profiles can be used. This recipe used rum and coffee as the chief flavorings.

Like in the Fraisier sponge, this sponge cake began with egg whites separated from the yolks, to be whipped into stiff peaks with sugar. However, instead of beating the egg yolks into the meringued whites, the egg yolks were also beaten separately with sugar until they were pale and thick. Additionally, the cake contained flour but also the addition of corn starch. I sifted these two powders, though I perhaps should have sifted them together as well. Back in the day, sifting was important to prevent unsavory milled things from getting mixed in with your flour, but now, it's primarily done to eliminate lumps that will either remain undissolved in the batter and bake up as little raw flour pellets, or necessitate additional folding to incorporate that risks overworking the batter and either deflating it or creating excess gluten formation that will make the cake tough.

The ingredients for the sponge: Egg whites ready for whipping, egg yolks and sugar to be whipped simultaneously, more sugar to whip into the meringue, and flour and cornstarch sifted together.

Patisserie 11: Fraisier/Sponge Cake with Strawberries and Mousseline

I wasn't intending to make this cake until strawberries came into season, usually in May. So I planned to make the biscuit moka and the Opera and then move onto the macarons section. However, for the biscuit moka, a quantity of dark rum was needed, and I had a feeling that brushing these delicate cakes with whiskey like I had been using as a rum substitute up until now would not be the best plan. But I also don't really drink dark rum and didn't want to buy a bottle just for the few tablespoons I'd need, here and there. So I called up my friend Kevin, a rum enthusiast that I had not seen for a while, and we met up for dinner (at a delightful Italian restaurant called Bottega that had just opened a week ago on Valencia St). On our way back to his place for me to pick up some rum, we saw the woman who is often at 21st and Capp Streets, on the corner under the light of a streetlamp, selling boxes of fruit. 

Among these were boxes of strawberries. Kevin immediately suggested we buy some. "Are her strawberries good?" I asked, skeptical. 

He replied, "Her strawberries are the best." 

And that's how I ended up with a half cup of rum and a pound of strawberries that evening, and plans to make the fraisier cake the next day. 

Patisserie 10: Paris-Brest/ Praline buttercream choux pastry

 Since the previous recipe contained a fair amount of hazelnuts and originated the hazelnut praline in this recipe, I decided it would be reasonable to do this one immediately after to decrease making small batches of niche ingredients. 

The Paris-Brest is a circular choux ring that is covered in almonds and filled with praline cream of some sort. The pastry was commissioned to commemorate the Paris-Brest-Paris bicycle race, which is a long-distance race between the two cities and back, and the circular shape of the pastry is meant to evoke a bicycle wheel. Variations in the filling are common, ranging from diplomat cream (stabilized whipped cream) to pure buttercream and everything in between, though the praline (caramelized hazelnut) is a typical base flavor. The version in The Book uses a mousseline cream, which is what you call buttercream + pastry cream + a flavoring (in this case, praline). 

Patisserie 9.5: Succès praliné, but more correctly this time

 I was so angry at how much I'd messed up every step of the cake on Friday that I marched back to the grocery store on Monday morning to buy more hazelnuts and try again. 

And I still didn't buy enough hazelnuts! Turns out hazelnuts are not as heavy as I think they are, and they're also a little expensive. But I hedged my bets this time by also acquiring some hazelnut butter, in case my food processors were unable to handle trying to grind hazelnuts into a paste, especially at the small quantities used in the recipes. So I ground the 160g of roasted hazelnuts for the dacquoise first, and hoped I would be able to caramelize an adequate amount for the praline to be sweet enough.

But considering how delicious the cake was on Friday despite my mistakes, I was looking forward to doing it much better this time. I duly grabbed my candy thermometer and food processor from storage to try and do things right this time around.

Patisserie 9: Succès praliné/Hazelnut Almond Dacquoise (with Italian Meringue buttercream)

 After tackling the most pastry-like intermediate cake recipes in the cake section of The Book, and seeing as it was mid-March and not a great berry season, I and my abundance of egg whites from various pastry creams decided to try making the hazelnut-almond dacquoise cake with Italian meringue buttercream. 

A dacquoise can both refer to this style of cake (hazelnut-almond meringue layers with buttercream) or the cake layer itself (nut meringue). Praline is a paste made of caramel and hazelnuts. Buttercream, contrary to the American style of the frosting that contains only butter and confectioner's sugar, typically in the French tradition includes whipped egg yolks, a meringue of some sort, or, in the case of this recipe from The Book, both. Italian meringue specifically refers to egg whites beaten with a hot sugar syrup (as opposed to the French meringue which is egg whites simply beaten with sugar) and has increased stability because the egg whites get cooked. 

I started this cake at 10am on a Friday morning and by the time it was 1pm, I was covered in sugar and meringue and very mad. Mostly at myself, for making a series of mistakes that cascaded into a cake that was not...bad, exactly, but nothing like the recipe intended.

Patisserie 8: St Honore Cake/Gâteau St. Honoré

 So, I'm a little early on this because St. Honoré’s feast day is on May 16, but this seemed like a good recipe to try due to my previous logic that a lot of good fruit ingredients are not in season yet, I had a small amount of puff pastry still left from my first batch, and this "cake" is more like a composition of puff pastry, choux pastry, and caramelized sugar, filled with pastry cream, and thus a good bridge as I transition from making small pastries into the cakes. 

St Honore is the patron saint of bakers and pastry chefs, who did some miracles in French lore, and this cake is apt because of its composition, which showcases several french pastry basics: puff pastry/lamination, choux pastry, pastry cream, caramel, and meringue. The presentation varies, but these components are always somewhere included, and there is an additional traditional component: The St Honore piping tip. This tip is used to create the elegant waves in the Chiboust (combination pastry and meringue) cream filling, and the shape is something like a quenelle with a mohawk. After reading reviews that most people liked the medium sized 882 tip from Ateco, but not wanting to make a web order for a single piping tip, I decided to use my 3D printer to print a piping tip. 

Patisserie 7: Mille-feuille/Napoleon with matcha cream

Almost exactly a month ago, I made my first batch of puff pastry without realizing that the recipe made approximately five times the amount I'd need for that recipe. I still had about two-thirds of that recipe left, so I decided I would use most of that quantity for a Napoleon-style cake, based on the Mille-feuille au Rhum from The Book, since this was mostly a sandwich of puff pastry and pastry cream rather than being an actual cake and would let me use up my first attempt at the pastry so I could start anew in future attempts with my newfound lamination experience. And, as I am not a human who enjoys using spiced rum and the closest thing I had on hand was whiskey, I decided to use matcha to flavor the pastry cream and fondant instead for a burst of color. 

In a distressing deja-vu to the beginning of the previous section's tart, I once again ended up with a dessert that looked fairly reasonable, tasted good, but was impossible to serve and eat in a dignified manner.

Patisserie 6: Apple Almond Danishes

 As I mentioned at the end of my post revisiting tartlets, I feel comfortable moving on from this section, but I was concerned about many of the classic cakes having dependency on berries or other soft summer fruit that was not currently in season. I am currently rolling in an abundance of apples, and I still had those cranberries from the fruit tart I made at the beginning of this month, so I have decided to wrap up this first month of patisserie with a spot of viennoiserie in the form of apple danishes with almond cream. This recipe is technically from the brioche and breakfast pastries section, but as I am pretty experienced with brioche at this point from previous projects and have done two lamination recipes this month, I felt it would be reasonable to try this recipe which combines aspects of both. 

Patisserie 5: Kouign Amann

I decided to make kouign amann because it's such popular classic pastry in recent years, for obvious reasons. I feel like this recipe was a bit of a softball, because it's hard to go wrong with something that's laminated with butter and sugar. But I have some quibbles nonetheless! 

A kouign amann (pronounced like kween a-'mann) is a type of Breton cake, with a yeasted dough that is laminated with butter and sugar and then baked until the sugar caramelizes and the combined steam from the butter and the yeast doing its thing causes the pastry to puff in layers. They're definitely delicious and definitely not good for you. But I had a suspicion I would be able to find enough people to consume the 15 pastries this recipe was going to make.