Week 2. More cakes. A little English puff pastry, and choux. First lesson was all about mise en place, preparing the ingredients for the pastries that we were going to make over the next two days. On the second day, we did Gateau Concorde. The components of this cake is similar to Feuille D'Automne. It also consists of meringue discs and chocolate mousse assembled in alternating layers. However, for this cake we use a chocolate meringue instead of almond meringue. For the mousse we just made it with couverture and cream, and whipped cream, unlike Feuille D'Automne where we also added butter, egg whites and sugar.

Then there was puff pastry tranche, which is French for "slice" or "portion". I didn't do this too well and I wasn't pleased with it. We made this with English puff pastry. 1 single turn and 3 book turns. On this day I was reminded that focus in the kitchen is very very important, and that as chefs we have to be professional and not let our surrounding environments affect our work output.

The next day I made sure I stayed focused. And the result was good. I managed to produce a considerably presentable St Honore and Chocolate Tart. St Honore is made up of a puff pastry base and a choux pastry rim and cream choux puffs all around the edges. It is filled with Creme Diplomat (which is pat cream mixed with whipped cream, and a little gelatine added to stabalise the cream) and piped into the pastry ring using a special V-shaped tube. The top is then garnished in extravagant fashion with a spun sugar nest and caramel decorations. It was fun to do the spun sugar nest for the St Honore. A little messy though.

It's really hot here - and it didn't help much that we made a whole lot of chocolate-based cakes for our first week.

We did a marble gateau, which is basically a pound cake with a third of the mixture mixed with cocoa and swirled together to give it a marble effect.

Then we did the famous sacher torte (pronounced as sah-kah tort) which was created by an Austrian guy called Sacher. This is an awesome cake because it is soaked in punch and coated with apricot jam and chocolate ganache. And we did the Swiss Roulade with strawberry filling. I was curious as to why the sponge cake had to be turned onto a sugar-dusted surface and Chef told me that it was to prevent the sponge from sticking to the paper. Sugar is hygroscopic, so it absorbs moisture and prevents the sponge from sticking to the paper.

Lastly, we baked Feuille D'Automne, which translate to leaves of autumn in English. This is a cake made from layers of almond meringue and chocolate mousse, then decorated with wide strips and ruffles around the entire cake.

I must say this term the chefs in Intermediate are teaching us alot more things, showing us ingredient substitutes and how to modify the recipe if we don't have a particular ingredient, what will happen if we do this and we do that, what can we do if we do something wrong whilst making the cake...it's all very interesting.

My resolution for this semester: 3/4 of all the cakes i make will go to my bench partner and the dish washers. Share the joy haha.