Feuille d'Automne, foret noire, and giverny

Friday we finished up all of the cakes we had been working on throughout the week. At first I figured chef just wanted to have us work on several cakes simultaneously either to torture us, or as an exercise in managing different recipes. Well, Friday came along and I figured it out. We had to do some chocolate work for two of the cakes we were slowly building, and quite frankly it doesn't make much sense to coat the entire lab in chocolate twice a week.

We made a fueille d'automne, which I believe means autumn leaf. Quite fitting, since its starting to get cold and rainy here in Paris. The cake is made up of two layers of baked meringue with a chocolate ganache filling. It is then slathered in chocolate chantilly and covered in chocolate shavings. It was a pain to shave all that chocolate, but fortunately powdered sugar hides all mistakes!




We also used some chocolate shavings to coat our foret noire (black forest cake) and roll out some chocolate cigarettes. Like many things in the pastry lab, there are about five to ten seconds when the chocolate is at the perfect temperature to roll out cigarettes. Otherwise, you get a lumpy gooey mess, or chocolate shavings. The foret noire has several layers of chocolate sponge cake soaked in kirsch liquor, filled with kirsch infused griottine cherries that that reek of alcohol (none of that maraschino crap here), and chantilly. There might be some chocolate chantilly or another filling in there somewhere, but I forget.



My favorite cake of the week, aside from the opera, was the giverny cake. I think I really liked it because it looked quite impressive, didn't have any meringue, and wasn't covered in chocolate. We used some decorated joconde almond sponge cake that chef had made to line our ring molds. We placed a round of baked biscuit a cuillere (lady fingers) that was soaked in cointreau syrup in the bottom, topped it with pistachio bavarois (bavarian cream consisting of gelatin plus chantilly), another layer of soaked biscuit, and topped with raspberry bavarois.



Five cakes in five days isn't too shabby. The best part is that I was able to give all of them away! Here's the spread of this week's toils.