Blueberry and Cheese Mousse Cake

I hope I haven't bored you with cakes by now as I still have a couple of other cakes on my archive to be posted. I know I should have posted it as soon as I made it as it's still fresh in my mind, but most of the time, it's very difficult to do.

Anyways, onto the cake now.
It was my good coworker friends, Tony's and May's birthday a few weeks ago. It was actually two weeks apart but due to time limitation, I combined the cake on the second birthday. I feel grateful to have such good friends at work. They're not just coworkers to me, in fact, I don't work often with some of them at work, but they are my good friends and I won't take it if they order a birthday cake from somewhere else :D. Well, with exception of course, but I do want to bake their birthday cakes if I can and I'll try to. We don't usually see each other at work, other than lunch time, but it was the time where we "bond" I think, that includes joking, story-telling, even arguing. We are completely different individuals but for some reason we became good friends and I'm thankful for that.

It was one of busy weeks and I had to come up with something quick and doesn't need a long time to make but still tastes good, a new cake I've never tried before is preferred :). But one thing leads to another and I decided to make this cake. I always love the combination of cream cheese and blueberry. I made the combination a few times before but I wanted to make something different with these two flavors, in terms of texture.

So here's what I came up with. I made blueberry compote with lemon juice, zest, sugar, and gelatin. The blueberries I had was very sweet and didn't need much sugar, it was very fragrant as well. Next, I made cheese mousse, which was based on pate a bomb. I usually made a quick cheese mousse with just cream cheese, sugar, gelatin, and cream, but I wanted to try something different and see if I can notice the difference. I think mousse made with pate a bomb base has better texture, although it is definitely more time consuming to make, involving boiled sugar syrup. I had some difficulties when I made this cake. Other than that I burnt my hands twice, it was cold in my kitchen that night and after beating the cheese until soft, I let it sit at room temperature for a while, about two hours because I needed to do something else. When I was about to fold the cream with the cheese, the cheese was cold and was harder to mix with the whipped cream. You can see little bits and pieces of solid cream cheese in the picture. Oh, and I forgot to put the gelatin in!!! First time I've done this. It was late already and I couldn't wait to rush to bed, but fortunately, the mousse held up well. The base was two layers of cotton sponge cake which I always use with blueberry and cheese combination.

The farmers' market was out of blueberries the day before when I was looking for it to decorate my cake with and I only had a handful of frozen blueberries left in my freezer. I thought hard of how to make it look nice, but it was one of those days when you really can't think of anything, you just run out of ideas. As you can see, the decoration is very poor and I'm not happy at all. Even the chocolate on the side had problems. Originally, I was about to do woodgrain pattern on the white chocolate sheet, but the dark chocolate set up too quickly (again, it was cold and this time was early in the morning) that it clogged the woodgrain pattern tool. So I scrapped everything off and started everything again and did a plain white chocolate sheet. I wrapped it in ribbon to make it more "colorful", and not too plain and boring.

There was another friend that has ordered a guava cake from a bakery. I couldn't actually make it to the celebration as I has my weekly meeting that day but I made it clear to them to save me a piece (a big one) of the guava cake as I was SUPER eager to try it. Sure enough when I came back to my cube, there was a HUGE piece of hot pink-colored cake waiting in my desk. From what I heard, my cake was gone so quickly and everybody loved it as it was really light and not too sweet at all. Phew... I was relieved, and I actually ate a little spoonful of it from my friend's plate. I definitely need to work on my cake decorating skill, but as long as my friends like it, that's all that matters the most right? Happy Birthday dear Tony and May!