Thursday's lab day was pretty busy and we didn't end up being able to bring our product home that night. We made two mousse-like-cake-things (I'm not sure what to call them!) that needed to be frozen for 24 hours, so we left them there for the night and finished them during Friday's lab.
      I'll start with Thursday's lab and will write about Friday's lab tomorrow. We were making the mousse-like-cake-things that I mentioned before. The one was called a white chocolate mousse with a raspberry gelee that sat on a little cake. It's kind of hard to describe... The second was a dark chocolate mousse with a raspberry Bavarian, that also sat on a little circle of cake. The names are fancier than they actually are. Both basically consisted of chocolate mousses with a raspberry flavouring. To begin, we made the sheet cake that both desserts would sit on. It was a cake that was high in egg, ground almonds and sugar but low in flour. This was because it made it easier for us later on when we would be moulding strips of the cake into little cups and cutting it into little circles. We then made the raspberry gelee. We combined raspberry puree with sugar and two different thickening agents (gelatine and one other gelatine-like powder that I was not familiar with). We poured the raspberry mixture into little tins and chilled them. Once they had cooled, they became little flavour-filled jellies. Next came the white chocolate mousse- the most important part of the dessert. Making a mousse is fairly simple. You start by whipping whole eggs with sugar until it becomes thick and pale. Meanwhile, you heat cream to a scald. You slowly temper the cream into the egg mixture (making sure not to scramble the eggs...something I have done) then place it back on the heat. You whisk it madly on the heat until it's thick (like a custard almost) and take it off just before the mixture reaches 85 degrees. This temperature is where the eggs will cook and you will have a custard with bits of cooked egg throughout. Not good. You take the egg mixture off the heat and add the bloomed gelatine (gelatine sheets that have been softened completely in water and then had the water squeezed out). Finally, you pour this over white chocolate allowing it to melt. After letting this cool, you have a perfect mousse! We did the exact same thing for the dark chocolate mousse, but used dark chocolate instead of the white chocolate. Next came the more difficult part of this recipe. We cut 10 inch strips of acetate and taped them into 2 1/2inch cylinders. We then cut the cake we had made earlier into strips and into circles that fit perfectly in the bottom of the cylinders. The circles went to the bottom of the cylinders, then we placed the strips of the cake around the inside so that once finished, the cake formed a cup to hold the mousse. We piped a little of the white chocolate mousse into the bottom of these cake-cups, placed a raspberry gelee in the centre, then topped it up with even more of the mousse! Next came the dark chocolate mousse with the raspberry bavarian. We used moulds for this recipe that looked like this:

As I said before, we made the dark chocolate mousse the exact same way as the other mousse and half filled the mould. Next we made the raspberry Bavarian. Basically, you do the same things as you would to make the mousse, but don't add the chocolate like we did before. You let it cool, then add raspberry puree and softly whipped cream. We poured this bavarian cream into the same mould as above, but one size smaller and froze. The frozen raspberry bavarian sphere then went into the chocolate mousse and was topped with a little circle of the cake. Both of these desserts were frozen overnight then taken out of their moulds the next day. We covered the dark chocolate mousse dessert with a ganache and decorated with raspberries.