Day 11: The One with the Blueberries

Welcome to week three of pastry school, today we created a lemon blueberry petite gateaux. We started the day by creating a twill batter to create a swirled color design on the outside. Since the flavor was lemon blueberry we used purple and yellow to create the design, we did not use blue as where it would mix with yellow it would create a green color that we did not want.

We froze the twill batter very thin on a sheet pan and then made a light sponge to spread on top of the twill, we froze the twill so that it does not mix in with the sponge. To spread the sponge evenly we used acrylic strips to create an even height and spread. We baked this very quickly and then flipped it onto some parchment and peeled the silicon mat off to let the steam rise out. While this cooled we got the rings ready with acetate around the inside to easily remove the cake insert later on.

We cut the cake to perfectly fill the cake ring with no overlap, and used the excess to cut half circle to fill the bottom on the ring as well. We then moved on to make the lemon blueberry insert and the blueberry mousse. The mousse was made very soft and light to smooth very flat, we started by using a little mousse at the bottom. We used a spoon to pull the mousse up the sides of the cake and then threw them in the blast chiller to set. We then added some of the lemon blueberry insert then filled the rest of the way with the leftover mousse. We then chilled this until hardened.

Lastly we created an Italian meringue with a bit of purple in it, this was then swirled on top of the cakes. We used a fancy spinner to get the swirl even on the top of the cakes and then decorated with gold leaf, thyme, and frozen blueberries.

As a little lesson for tomorrow we tempered some chocolate to make some fancy rings and feathers. Damien taught us how to temper chocolate without a fancy temper machine and without cocoa butter, just melting the chocolate to a higher temperature such as 50 degrees Celsius for milk chocolate. Once the chocolate was melted to temperature 1/3 of the original weight was added in new unmelted chocolate to temper and cool the chocolate. The chocolate is at a useable temperature at 29 degrees celsius and can then be used to make chocolate garnishes.

Tomorrow we will be working on multiple different flavors of petite gateaux’s with different bases, inserts, and housings. Later this week we move to entremets and then only two weeks to go!