Just Desserts: All decorated out.

Today it was all decoration, all day. But at least I didn't have to do anything with chocolate.

[Except for heating up the chocolate miroir that I made the other day, but that barely counts.]

The miroir (i.e. glaze) went on top of the pumpkin cake and once that set, I started to use the decorations we made yesterday to assemble the cake. I had no idea what to do because I couldn't really remember Jean-Luc's demonstration from the beginning of the month. The decorations consisted of: chocolate tinged with yellow (and some orange) cocoa butter broken into shards; chocolate swirls; isomalt rings coloured with gold dust; and, caramelized pumpkin seeds. I made all but the pumpkin seeds. The Group A pair caramelized them yesterday. So, it was just a matter of putting it all together. No big deal, right?

I stared at my cake for really long periods of time, not doing anything. Jean-Luc must have asked me at least four times if I was done yet. I think he was hinting that I should probably move on to the next task... but my partner wasn't there today, so I decided on my own that I could go extra slow. Also, it's hard to speed up the creative process...

Bird's Eye View

Front View

Zoomed-In View

Once the cake was done, it was on to more decorating. Next up, the frangipane tart we made yesterday. This was relatively straightforward. Spread lemon cream (or, rather, lemon custard, because we ran out of lemon cream) over the top of the tart and then make sure the fruit goes all the way to the edges of it. When we did the lemon cream frangipane tarts last time, we piped little lemon cream dots all along the side. Lucky for me, Jean-Luc decided against that for these ones. I do like arranging the fruit on top of tarts because I feel like you can be so creative in terms of fruit choices and colours and it's fun to play with different combinations. I do like the modern variation of decorating but I went with the classical for this one, because I think that's what we were supposed to do.

It took forever to figure out the centre. Here is a
blurry close-up of what I ended up doing.

After the tart was packed and ready to go, I went on my break. It was really hard to come back to class afterwards. I think I was even a few minutes late. It has just been an intense week. And the stress of what we're doing has resulted in a lot of negative energy in the kitchen which isn't fun. Also, even though it's Friday, a bunch of people are coming in on Saturday for finishing touches, on Sunday for the event, or even both. Which takes a bit of the excitement out of the concept of Friday. But I do think that the energy in the classroom will get better once we're back into the rotation schedule. Everything just seems a little out of whack this week.

I did return to the classroom eventually... and then it was onto the last decorating task of the day, the cheesecakes. Pretty much everyone else was already doing a massive clean-up of the lab, so I think I might have been the only one still working on something for Sunday at this point. For the cheesecakes, Jean-Luc wanted me to do a little rosette of whipped cream, the chocolate hearts and circles from yesterday, and some fresh fruit.

The funny part was when Jean-Luc was showing me how to assemble it...

He said, "So, first a rosette of whipped cream, then we'll use up these chocolate cigarettes we have left, then add some fresh fruit in front."

And I said, "Wait... so you don't want us to use the heart chocolate we made yesterday?"

Then, he said, "Oh, I totally forgot about those! I'm glad you reminded me."

Yeah, right. Good cover, Jean-Luc.

Also, the first time I started piping the whipped cream on, first of all, it was too soft [I didn't want to overwhip it!], and I didn't add any icing sugar or vanilla to it, because apparently who needs sweetened whipped cream anyway? [Um, everyone.] So I took it off the third of the cheesecakes I'd already done and made the whipped cream delicious and better textured and then started again. Some of them have heart-shaped chocolates, but most of them have circles, because they were easier to remove from the acetate yesterday and fewer broke. Some of them have strawberries, but that's only because we ran out of blueberries. And now, a series of mediocre cheesecake pictures -- zoomed-in on various individual cheesecakes -- because I couldn't choose the best one(s).