Pave du Roy

Today in pastry we made the Pave du Roy...which is a chocolate "biscuit" as they call it. It's really a thin thin sponge kind of cake spread onto a baking tray to bake, if that helps you visualize at all. The biscuit is then cut into three, imbibed with rum simple syrup (barf) and then layered with ganache that we have perfectly cooled to the right consistency. It's then covered in ganache and you run your bread knife over it to make a pretty pattern. Of course I blew it on the top...my cake wasn't flat because of how it cooled on the rack...so when I ran my bread knife over it wasn't so good...then I went back over the spot that got missed and, well...you can see what happened. Everything else was perfect though! And yes, in case the eagle-eyed among you are wondering, those are sprinkles around the edge...jimmies.

My chocolate decoration was awesome...some of it too thin (and thin is hard to do). Check that out, it's whisker thin! That's a shot of it from the side and you can barely see it. (nice camera, no?) I had to use my thicker ones on the cake because you have to be able to poke it into the cake. The chef tempered the chocolate for us (that's how it gets so shiny).

When we get to intermediate we have to temper our own. And it's not easy. He showed us how to do it today, but he did it for us and then we just had to use it to make our decoration, which involved spreading it on acetate, skoring it and letting it cool between baking sheets in the fridge so it doesn't curl. The chocolate deco part is the most fun and new to me, which is why it makes me the most nervous to do...but it is what I came here to learn! Upon closer inspection...it would appear that some water was snaking its way onto my chocolate at the end there. But here's a picture of the leftover shards, which get melted back down.