Pastry Chef School: Entremet Mousse Cakes and Tiramisu
This week in pastry school we focused on making beautiful and delicious entremets (mousse based cakes). We also made Tiramisu and used a chocolate paint sprayer for the first time.
This Chocolate Entremet is a love poem to chocolate. It’s assembled as a 6" chocolate cake base with a layer of 6" creamy caramel piped on top of that. That cake-caramel base was unmolded and flipped upside down and gently pressed down into 8" chocolate mousse filled ring mold. Finally the 8" ring mold was unmolded and glazed witha mirror glaze.
What’s special about this Chocolate “Mirror” Glaze? If you looked at it, you can literally see your own reflection. It’s mostly cream, sugar and cocoa powder boiled and reduced for a while. The secret though is a meaningful amount of gelatin that gives the glaze that mirror finish once cooled.
We also made these Baby Chocolate Entremets. To make these we used dome silicon molds, filled with chocolate mousse, added a dollop of creamy caramel, pressed down a smaller cake circle and finally mirror glazed the top.
How to decorate entremets? The trick to beautiful entremets decoration is to make it asymmetrical. Don’t decorate the whole thing so each slice looks the same on top since it already looks the same under the glaze.
This Tropical Entremet was a dream with beautiful flavours of mango, strawberry and coconut. The bottom layer is a coconut dacquoise, topped with coconut crunchy, a layer of coconut mousse, a layer of strewberry jam, a layer of mango cream, more mousse and aa Dulcey white chocolate glaze. The assembly here is quite interesting because we first unmold 6" strawberry layer into mousse, cover that in more 8" mousse and then press down the dacquoise-crunchy layer.
What’s a coconut crunchy? My personal challenge with Entremet is the lack of texture since most of the dessert is a mousse. This crunchy layer on top of the coconut dacqouise gave this particular entremet a lot more texture. The coconut crunchy is just Dulcey white chocolate, butter, coconut and feuilletine poured over the dacqouise layer.
This Peach Entremet was delicious as it is beautiful. To assemble we start by freezing a 6" ring mold of peach jam, and then letting a layer of vanilla panna cotta freeze on top of that. We then fill an 8" ring mold with chocolate mousse and press down the 6" disc of peach-panna cotta. We then fill more chocolate mousse into the 8" mold and press down a 6" almond dacquoise. Finally the whole thing gets frozen, flipped, unmolded and glazed in a milk chocolate glaze.
Why is everything frozen? we work with frozen ingredients (jam, panna cotta, mousse, etc) to it easy to press down these beautiful consistent layers. We also freeze the whole mousse towards the end to make sure the glaze sticks to it.
What’s in the almond dacquoise? It’s a french meringue folded with almond flour, 10x sugar and a tiny bit of cake flour. Then piped into rounds and finally baked off in 350–375°F until set.
This Rhubarb-Buckwheat-Hazelnut Entremet is a great example of entremet that we didn’t end up pressing down into mousse but rather piped the mousse on top. The bottom layer is a hazelnut cake, covered in rhubarb jelly with a buckwheat-chocolate mousse and decorated with caramel hazelnuts.
How to make Hazelnut Spears: stick bamboo skewers in hazelnuts, dip in caramel and hang upside down to cool.
This week we also unmolded the Tiramisu we made last week. To assemble our Tiramisu we placed one layer of homemade Ladyfingers dipped in boozy syrup, one layer of filling creme, another layer of dipped ladyfingers and one more layer of filling creme. Finally, we sprinkled that with Cocoa powder.
How to bake Ladyfingers? The recipe we used is an egg yolk meringue and egg white meringue folded together with 1:1 ap flour : cornstarch. The key is to only soft whip the egg whites otherwise they deflate during folding and make flat lady fingers.
This week we also made Peanut Gianduja. It’s a delicious crunchy peanut butter bar we sprayed in chocolate to get a stucco finish.
Assembling Gianduja Bars: bottom layer is feuilletine, chocolate and peanut butter and the top layer is a chocolate-peanut butter ganache.
Spray Painting Chocolate: We used a normal Wagner spray painter, filled it with completely melted chocolate and sprayed in a confined space. We made our confined space with full sheet trays and parchment paper.
Read more about my pastry adventures by reading about last week’s Cake extravaganza:
