12/03/09 - Class - Tortes, Frozen Desserts, and Chocolate

Back to class after a bit of a break. Today we did tortes, or mostly, their components.

First though we began frozen desserts, namely ice cream. We made a base for a cherry ice cream. It's chilling overnight, then tomorrow we churn it, then chill it again. A soup of ice cream base isn't very impressive, so no picture.

We also began work on truffles. Like the ice cream, it is is just a soup of ganache right now, so nothing worth seeing. Tomorrow we'll shape it and it'll be prettier.

Back to tortes. Tortes are kinda like intricate cakes. They're layered cakes, with some kinda filling, topped with an icing, usually some garnishes and other stuff on top as well, often even writing/piping and stuff. They're supposed to be pretty luxurious I guess. They have a lot of steps and a lot of components.

Today we put together a Sacher Torte. We used the chocolate genoise which we saved from a couple weeks back. Between the two rounds we filled it with apricot jam, then constructed it. We sealed the cakes with apricot glaze and chilled it, then topped it with chocolate ganache. It came out okay. Nothing that pretty, and we didn't do any piping, but it's passable.

The rest of the time was spent doing components for our later tortes. We made a chocolate spongecake for a torte tomorrow. We also made ladyfingers again since we need those for Saturday's torte. They came out better than our first try a couple weeks ago, but still weren't all that great. They were probably overwhipped again. We also made a vanilla spongecake for Saturday's torte. Unfortunately, it was a failure and had to be tossed. Too much sugar was in it, which ruined the texture. We also were going to make pate choux for practice for the exam and that screwed up too. This is why I hate working in groups. I have to give up control and rely on others. And I know which group member caused the problems for all three of these, because she was doing each failed part-mixing the pate choux, mixing the ladyfingers, and doing ingredients for the spongecake. I wish I could just do everything on my one sometimes. My other teammate is great, but I am a loner and that's how I like to work.