Yesterday, we didn't have anything too complicated to bake seeing as today and tomorrow we have our lab exams. We made three different mousses: a raspberry mousse with raspberry gel, a panna cotta with the same raspberry gel and a sabayon (which is a sort of mousse made with Marsala wine) with strawberries. None of the recipes were too challenging seeing as they mostly consist of warming a milk product or fruit puree with gelatine. The main focus for the day wasn't the actual recipes, but rather how to plate a dessert and make it look nice. So I made the recipes without trouble and moved on to the plating. Our instructor showed us multiple ways to plate desserts like these by piping different kinds of chocolate into designs on the plate. We also had to use chocolate to make small decorations to place on top of the dessert or on the plate itself. It all seemed a little daunting seeing as my instructor makes everything look easy and I knew that chocolate was a very finicky ingredient. Luckily, he melted and tempered the chocolate for us. We piped all kinds of decorations and I think that mine looked very good! I then moved on to plating. I felt like I would be decent at this, seeing as I doodle often and know how to not go over the top. I made a plate that had dark chocolate swirls going around the mousse and used white chocolate asa a high light. I filled the circles with raspberry puree and with chocolate. I think that I did a good job, and some of my classmates also commented on how they liked it as well! I was feeling good! I showed my instructor my work, and he liked the mousses and didn't say much about the plating. But I think he thought it was fine.
Here are the different mousses with chocolate decorations:

And my plating: