Chocolate Mousse Cake

My latest creation last weekend using various recipes in the recipe book 'Crave'. This is made up of various layers. Base a chocolate base with chocolate and feuilletine, followed by a chocolate sponge, topped with chocolate mousse. Chocolate sponge and chocolate mousse repeat another layer each and topped with a chocolate gananche.

A very delicious combination and was all consumed quickly. My sister-in-law and son requested for 2 of these each.

I am quite happy with my creation but would like to improve it further. Next time, I will make it into a square ring and then cut them into slices. Maybe not to make it that sweet as well. :)

White Chocolate Almond Cake

I recently bought a book called 'Crave - A passion for Chocolate' by Maureen McKeon. For some reason, I love this book. The recipes are easy to follow and not that difficult to make. And the cakes tastes good. This was the first recipe from this book. White chocolate Almond Cake with a white chocolate glaze.

I was doing stock taking on my ingredients to realise that I had 1/2 a kg of compound white chocolate bought months earlier meant to be used for cake decorations, but the problem with these white chocolate was that they do not melt properly and it was impossible to do any cake decoration with it. Instead of wasting ingredients, I decided to melt the chocolate and use it for this cake. Half of it went to the cake, half of it went to making a glaze for it.

The cake turned out pretty well and was quite well liked by some of my colleagues. I personally do not fancy the cake as the white chocolated tasted a bit like condensed milk to me.

White chocolate is very sensitive to temperature. Too high a temperature, it gets burnt. After you have opened a bag of white compound chocolate, it cannot be kept too long even though you try to keep it in an air tight and cool place. Judy, my baking teacher thought it could be due to some evaporation of the moisture in the white chocolate resulting in it not being able to melt properly. Thus conclusion would be to buy good quality compound chocolates in small quantities and try to finish using them ASAP.

Cake Making Stage 2 - L4

This was the fourth and last lesson of Cake Making Stage 2. I am glad that the course has ended as I was feeling rather tired from all these lesson. The last lesson was slightly disappointing as we were only taught one type of cake, which was the Green Tea Mousse Cake. Judy prepared broiled red beans for us to put in the cake, but my partner and I weren't a great fan of red beans, thus we decided to exclude them.

The other two items taught were the chequed cookies which I have to admit is a very time consuming cookie to make. As the dough is very soft due to the high butter content, it had to be returned to the fridge after every few steps to be hardened again before we can continue. I am quite sure I won't make these cookies.

The scones were quite nice. Tasted a bit like cake and also like bread. It uses bread flour for the recipe. I am thinking of trying them out with normal plain flour to see the difference. I felt that bread flour gave it a very dense texture and wonder if using plain flour would result in a lighter texture for the scone. Will let you know when I try it out in future.

Christmas is fast approaching and I have been busy baking biscottis to freeze up so that I can slice and rebake them again closer to christmas for my sister who has requested 15 boxes and 20 mini packs to give away to her colleague.

Cake Making Class 2 - L3

Cake Making Class Stage 2 - Lesson 3 taught us more detail knowledge on buttercreams and the different types of butter cream. We were taught how to make the Pistachio Gateau, which is made of a light and fragrant sponge cake with chopped pistachio, finished with a delicious pistachio butter cream. This cream has pistachio paste added in to give it a fragrant. I thought the pistachio paste tasted more like almond than pistachio.

The second cake we made was the Nana Choco cake, made of a moist chocolate cake made of real chocolate. It has bananas sandwich between the layers of chocolate ganache and sponge. Mini bunches of bananas made of marzipan is used to decorate the cake.

We were taught how to make mini decorations and also chocolate decorations for the top and side of the cake.

Blueberry Cupcakes

Made these blueberry cupcakes with the two boxes of fresh blueberries that I bought 2 weeks ago on impulse. Two weeks back, I attempted to search through my recipe books to find the ideal blueberry related recipe and for some reason, I was not able to find anything despite having a whole bookshelf of cookbooks! I realise that this always happens to me. Whenever I intentionally try to find a recipe, I can never find it in my recipe books. But if I am just browsing though my books, I would find recipes that I tried searching for previously. How frustrating!!!

The fastest and easiest way to this problem would be to do a google search online on the internet and it will provide the solution! Despite the fact that may recipes can be found online free, I still enjoy buying cookbooks. It is a hobby of mine and I have to admit that I haven't even tried cooking 10% of all the recipes I have. And this boils down to the next questions that my mom always asks - Why are you buying recipe books if you aren't cooking anything from them?"

And my answer to that - 'They are for browsing through and looking at those delicious pictures prior to bedtime! " (*wink*wink*)