Week 8: Another Charlotte and Biscuits

Sorry there hasn’t been a new recipe up this week! I have been so run down with a really horrible cold that I have had no energy to bake out side of school and revising recipes for school. I’ll hopefully have one up fairly soon!

This week we learnt all about chocolate and where it comes from in our ever informative lectures. Some of the videos that get shown in those are truly bizarre. But the chocolate theme carried through to the first practical of the week, a chocolate and chestnut charlotte.

The chocolate charlotte was fairly similar to the mango one, but oh my, it did not go anywhere near as well. My mousse seized up as my chocolate was too cold and I almost sort of accidentally threw my whole cake across the kitchen when trying to get it out of the mousse ring. It didn’t help that I was warming up the mousse ring with a blowtorch when it almost went flying. It was just one of those days I guess. Still. It still looked pretty. I even got a “Your piping, it’s not bad.” Extremely high praise!

The second practical of the week was on dry petits fours, aka tiny biscuits to eat with your tea. No bigger than two bites. Not anywhere near enough biscuit if you ask me. We made two styles, a “fleur de lys” almond biscuit, and a chocolate checkerboard biscuit, otherwise known as sablés à la poche and sablés hollandaise respectively. These went a hell of a lot better than the charlotte and I’ll definitely be making some of these again. Was pretty happy with how these turned out!

My week however did not end there. I was asked to help out at a macaron masterclass on Saturday and I jumped at the opportunity! I spent the majority of the time in the back room making marzipan and chocolate decorations for the guests to decorate their eventual macarons with. It was a pretty fun day in general, although busy, and the chocolate decorations didn’t work anywhere near as well as we had hoped they would. Oops. But still, all in all I had a good week!

I just hope next week goes as well with my theory exam… Wish me luck!