Tuesday, February 3, 2009

The Fall of Mogador or, My Personal Cake Wreck

Mogador Cake

Tonight's class covered fillings and Mousse, and we made several pies and one wonderful cake: The Mogador Cake. Yes, the name sounds more like a character or far off land in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but the actual cake resembles nothing of a hobbit or wizard. The cake is made of delicous and elegant layers. The first layer is a chocolate Almond Genoise. This is the first time we have made Genoise, a European style of cake that is slightly drier and contains less fat than it's American counterparts.

Once it is done baking and cooling, the Genoise is soaked in a raspberry simple syrup. Then a layer of raspberry filling is piped onto the cake and covered by a layer of rich chocolate mousse. The cake is then chilled to allow the mousse to set. After the cake is chilled, a raspberry glaze is spread over the top and then the cake can be decorated with designs in chocolate glaze and garnished with fresh raspberries.
Soaking the Genoise in the syrup

Adding the raspberry filling

Glazed and ready for chocolate and fresh raspberries

As usual we made enough cakes to each take one home and we had an extra smaller Mogador, which we cut into to tonight during clean up. Everyone made beautiful designs of chocolate glaze on the top of their cakes. I decided I wanted to bring mine home to take better photos of it......
As soon as I got home and opened the passenger door of my car and spied the tilted cake box, I felt that horrible feeling of having your scoop of icecream fall out of your cone at the carnival. I opened and the box and found my worst fears confirmed.

The Wrecked Cake

My roommate attempted consoling me with, "well at least it will still taste good". It does still taste good, but I'm still a little sad. I hope none of my classmates cakes met the same fate as mine.

The good news from tonight is: everything else turned out lovely and delicious, and I still feel like the luckiest person in the world. I made mini apple pie/tarts tonight. In the past when making apple pie, I've always mounded the apples as high as possible into the bottom crust before covering with the top crust and baking; knowing that the pie will shrink to half it's size once done baking. Tonight however, my little tarts swelled in the oven, the filling almost doubling in size. They oozed sticky, sugary apple juice over the sides of the tart rings and the apple slices looked like they were going to pop out of the tarts all together. I was worried I had overfilled them. No fear, I took the out of the oven and as they cooled they returned to their pre-baked level, but now with browned edges rounding out the translucent slices in the sticky syrup.
Mini Apple Tarts

It's well past time I should be in bed. Tomorrow's class is on commercial baking. Looks like we will be learning about Puff Pastry and Nougatine. Also another announcement coming soon. I'll give you a hint: I'm going somewhere.

1 comment:

Lilac Haven said...

I feel your pain. Once I made dad a really nice birthday cake and on the way driving to their house I had to swerve to miss a car that pulled out in front of me and the cake was toast. Dad just laughed when he saw it and was glad I was ok.