This week we started with the French instructor again. We will be learning from him for the rest of the term. We're beginning our time with him by focusing on cakes. Tuesday we baked all lab long (four cakes total!) in preparation for the next two labs. So today we used two of the cakes; a white sponge cake and a chocolate sponge cake that we piped and baked into 10 inch wide circles. For the chocolate sponge layers, we made a white chocolate mousse. We used a cake cylinder lined with acetate and placed the first layer of the cake at the bottom. We then piped the mousse, encircling the cake and allowing it to be completely covered. We scattered raspberries on the first layer of mousse, the repeated the entire process with a second layer of cake on top. We covered the third layer of chocolate sponge with white chocolate mousse and smoothed it out. This needed to be frozen for a couple of hours before continuing. Meanwhile, we made a vanilla french buttercream. We sliced the white sponge cake lengthwise in three and took approximately a cup of the buttercream and mixed it with a hazelnut paste to make it a different flavour. The first two layers of the cake had the hazelnut buttercream and were soaked with a sugar syrup, and the top layer of the cake was masked with the vanilla buttercream. Masking is one of the handful of things that I have trouble with. My being a perfectionist makes it very difficult because I'm never satisfied with its smoothness and eveness. I tried my best today to not be too picky and to stop myself from over working the buttercream. We piped the top of the cake with eight rosettes and the bottom with a border. As an added decoration, we piped three little dots in clusters all over the cake. I think it ended up looking quite good. The masking wasn't perfect, but it was fine. Once the mousse cake had frozen, we unmolded the cake and made a dark chocolate ganache. We were supposed to pour the ganache all over the cake in one shot having it cover the entire cake. This is somewhat difficult because you only have one shot to cover the whole cake and you must do this before the ganache starts to set. Luckily I managed to cover the majority of the cake with the ganache, however some areas had a little too much that had set too quickly. But that was OK, because it was still pretty good in my eyes. Once the ganache had set, we decorated the border of the cake with any leftover butter cream ( I couldn't do this because I didn't have any left, so I whipped some cream and used that) and decorated the top with some melted white chocoalte that we piped into little designs.
I was very pleased with the way that both of my cakes turned out. Especially compared to how some of my classmates' turned out, mine looked very good! I had them graded. He said that the white sponge cake was ok, but the masking needed a little practice. However he said that my white chocolate mousse cake  was "almost perfect" which is a huge compliment coming from this instructor. He is very strict and rarely has a compliment to give about your work. So I was over the moon!
Tomorrow, we decorate our two remaining cakes. Four cakes in two days.... it's a good thing that it's Emma's birthday this weekend!

The white sponge cake with vanilla buttercream

 The chocolate sponge layers with white chocolate mousse and raspberries covered in a chocolate ganache