Successful Opera

This week we've been working on cakes. They're called "entremets" here, and I'm not quite sure what that exactly translates too. They have "gateaux de voyage", which are cakes that are suited for traveling, individual sized portions, and entremets that usually serve six to eight people. My French dictionary translates the word as "desserts", but that just seems too vague. Two of the cakes we worked on this week were Succees and Opera.




You can usually find an opera cake at any French bakery in the States; they're quite common. However, succes on the other hand, I had never heard of and neither had a couple Parisians I had mentioned it to. With this dessert, pronunciation is key as it can mean two different things; either success or to suck, in the literal sense. I made the mistake of mispronouncing the dessert when I asked Chef, "Is my succes okay?".



A succes is essentially a meringue and coffee butter cream sandwich. There's enough sugar in it to kill a diabetic. I could only stomach a very tiny slice. On the other hand, I could probably eat an entire opera cake.

We started out by making several thin layers of joconde, which is an almond sponge cake. The base layer was covered in chocolate and inverted into a sheet frame.



Next we soaked the joconde in coffee syrup, added a layer of coffee buttercream, another soaked joconde layer, a layer of chocolate ganache, another layer of soaked jaconde, and finally a layer of buttercream. It sure is a lot of layering.







Most of the operas were frozen, but Chef unmolded one of the beastly cakes to enrobe in chocolate. Then it was just a matter of cutting it up, piping some chocolate, and wrapping them in acetate.







And though class sometimes seems like a ton of work, there's always a lot of fun going on. I really got a kick out of one of my classmates reenacting WWII, and had to snap a picture!