Weekend's Projects

I had to make 5 different cakes/dessert last saturday. The above picture is another pandan swiss roll cake with cheese and cherry. Although there was a little incident with the oven when baking these cakes, everything turned out to be ok.


I had to make a cake for a friend's farewell party. By the time I have time to start doing it, I was already exhausted and very tired from the other cakes I made in the morning. So I had to think what cake is fast, easy, and taste good. This cake was a result of the swiss roll cakes. I had a leftover pandan sponge cake and vanilla sponge cake batter that I baked in a 8-in pan. Stacked them together and fill them with vanilla buttercream and cheese (again). Sponge cake, buttercream, and cheese, is always the favorite among my Indonesian friends. you can't go wrong with this combination.

I know the look is deceiving. From the outside, it looks like a chocolate cake or something. I wanted to make something more elegant, but I really didn't have time for it. So, I made use of what I have, my new marble pastry board, acetate sheet, metal scrapper, and my 10lbs belgian dark chocolate that seems to never decrease in quantity.

I used a plastic container that I got from a grocery store nearby, but it made it looks like a Safeway kind of cake :(.

Other than these cakes, I also made a vanilla swiss roll cake (again, with cheese and cherry) and cream puffs for a small celebration on Sunday. It turned out that I added a little too much rum (which is good for me to take off all of the stress I had :( ), but I totally forgot that there will be kids on that party. Since I used the never ending 10lbs belgian dark chocolate for the topping, people might think that the bitterness came from the too much rum instead of the bitter choc. Lesson learned. Study your audience first and don't take the stress onto the cake.

Sus Ragout

This is the savory kind of cream puff with chicken ragout filling inside.

New Addition

Finally, the long-awaited book is here. I've been wanting this since forever. After one day, this has become my favorite among many books in my bookshelf.

There are a few drawback to this book though. First, you have to scale down the recipe to make the standard amount/size for home-based baking. The recipe doesn't tell you what size of pan you should use and how many cakes it would make, so you don't really know what to scale it to for just one standard size cake. Second, these recipes were written for French pastry chef. A lot of the ingredients in the recipes are not available in the US. I flipped through the pages and there are only less than twenty recipes that I can actually make and although those ingredients are available in the US, they're not easy to get.

But, we'll see how it goes. I won't know for sure until I tried out one of the recipes and see the result. Stay tuned.

Duet

I made these two individual cake this morning since I had leftover vanilla sponge cake in the freezer, a little buttercream, and a small chunk of Kraft processed cheese. I made two kinds of mini cakes. The first one is two layers of sponge cake with two layers of shredded cheese, topped with cherry. I made the second one using chocolate sprinkles for the bottom filling. Both of them turned out very good!

Mini Mocha cake

I had a leftover rum-brandy pastry cream, coffee buttercream, and a little espreasso-rum soaking syrup from the previous giant cake. So, I used it to make mini version of it, since I also remember that I had mini chocolate sponge cake that I kept in the freezer. I know the fondant flower decoration doesn't really go with the chocolate/coffee theme, but hey it's the taste that counts right?

Cherry Blossom Cake

This consists of two different cakes, which combined into one big giant cake.

Half of this cake (I don't remember which side it is) is a three layers of dark chocolate sponge cake, moistened with strong espresso-rum simple syrup, and filled with a layer of creamy vla/pastry cream, which flavored with both rum and brandy for the bottom filling, and baileys-kahlua coffee buttercream for the top filling. This is the "adult" side of the cake.

The other half is also a three layers of dark chocolate sponge cake, moistened with raspberry simple syrup, and filled with whipped dark chocolate ganache for the first layer of filling and raspberry buttercream for the second filling. This is the "kids" side of the cake.

Princess Cake

This is a Swedish Princess Cake. Didn't have time to take a picture before cut :(. Traditionally, it is covered in a light green marzipan. I used pink instead since I was out of green food coloring :).

It is a two layers of vanilla sponge cake, moistened with raspberry liqueur simple syrup, and filled with a thin layer of raspberry jam, a layer of vanilla bean pastry cream, and fresh cream, shaped like a dome and then covered with marzipan.