11/21/09 - Class - Cakes

Well today went a bit better then yesterday, though it wasn't perfect. We had one failure, and I burned myself a few times. You'd think after all the burns I get and exposure to high heat, my hands would get a little more resistant.

Our first order of business was to get the carrot cake done right. This time we used three shorter rounds as opposed to two tall,and baked them in the conventional oven. They came out perfectly this time. Since we got them done early they were cool enough to slap some cream cheese icing on. Time was running short so we weren't able to do the whole icing shebang-layers and whatnot, but it's all good.

Next we went on to a cheesecake. Technically it's a custard, but whatever. The book recipe had us bake it like a custard as well-in a water bath. The chef said it's fine however doing it as is, and he was right. It came out very nice.

Third was an orange chiffon bundt cake. It was a nice egg foam and the chef said that it is a really great recipe. It baked off very well and it came out really nice and airy. I wanted to give it a try but didn't want to mess with it. We topped it with a simple orange glaze to further enhance it while still keeping it light (the recipe called for buttercream which doesn't make much sense-very heavy topping for a very light cake).

After the chiffon we made chocolate genoise. They were very similar to the spongecake of yesterday. The only real difference is the addition of some butter and fewer eggs (and yolks and whites aren't separated). They came out nicely but I didn't take a picture of them. We froze them for a future recipe.

Our last baked items were ladyfingers. I'll keep it simple and say that's our failure. They didn't rise, were brown, and seemed pocked with air holes. I'm not sure the exact cause of the problem. I think that the sugar measurement was wrong, which may account for the collapse and probably accounts for the browning. It's also possible that it overwhipped and the volume was lost there. I guess it's not a total loss-we didn't throw them out but instead broke them up for cake crumbs. We will have to make them sometime in the future however because we were supposed to save them for a future recipe.

The final item of the night was Italian buttercream. It's really just Italian meringue that we add butter to-lots of butter. Seeing as Italian meringue is a bit of a pain to make this was the same. I am just very apprehensive about sugarwork, the exacting temperatures and ease of ruining the batch with minor mistakes make it tough. It came out fine however and we used it to ice yesterday's spongecakes. We had a lot of buttercream so I went through the effort of layering the spongecakes and making a big thing. With all that buttercream it's gonna be rich as hell but that's what you get when you eat cake.