The Marquise

I'm going to start this post by saying that there were only 2 cakes that were presentable and sellable for this class, and mine was one of them. He thought the piping was a bit messy (it looked just like his) and my glazing was a bit off temperature, but my design was tempered and lovely, even if the sides were a bit blah because of the glazing. I have mastered tempering chocolate. Do I still need to use a thermometer? Yes I do. Do I care? No. I don't have the time in class for trial and error of tempered chocolate. I have time to get it done right first time, make a decoration and dress that damn cake.

So this one is thin chocolate cake (biscuit) on the bottom, them chocolate mousse, a thin layer of hazelnut and milk chocolate praline with feuillantine (think cornflakes), then more mousse, glazing, decoration. Not too shabby. I was just so excited that my decoration turned out. Yay!

Today in cuisine we did a garde manger workshop where they gave us 12 recipes and we had to prep and make a bunch of stuff (terrines, fish mousses, various other gross things) and then tomorrow we plate it all now that it's good and g and assemble our canapes, etc. I will take lots of pictures tomorrow to show you our wonderful work. Spoiler alert!: all I'm going to say is I made a salmon mousse spiral with spinach INSIDE of another fish mousse that I hope is going to knock their socks off...but that's all I'm going to say. Patience (as the pastry chef always tells me).

Also, we had our cuisine evaluations today. Rocked it. He had nothing bad to say really. Everything can always be better, but that I'm doing very fine. He went through our marks and told us which classes were our worst ones (but didn't tell us the marks) and one of mine was this most recent trout with the noodles. I was SHOCKED. Though now that I think of it, it was one of my lowest marks....maybe I'm doing THAT well in everything else. I thought I rocked that one and chef had nothing bad to say about it. But it was a different chef that we had for practical that day, so this chef couldn't tell me why it was lower than some of the others. Meh. I'm still awesome.