lesson 11: succès

Today I spent 7 hours in school for demo and practical class. Class ends at 10pm, late but I don't mind. It will be really tiring if the next day I have to go to class at 8.15am, but hey, since it's at 3.30pm, whooo cares? :)

In demo class, Chef H made 3 cakes. They're the succès, progrès and gâteau russe aux noix. Since I'm not really a big fan of chocolate, I would say that the gâteau russe was probably the best because it's with coffee buttercream! In practical class, we're only going to make succès cake. I felt so nervous with this recipe because I will have to do piping with chocolate and usually we can't fix chocolate, unlike piping with buttercream or chantilly.

So, we have to start by baking succès base which is dacquoise. Then prepare the buttercream to be sandwiched in between layers of succès. After that we pipe the cream and layered the cake and dust loads of icing sugar on the top and let it chill while preparing marzipan for decoration. We have to make pockets where you can put the hazelnut in the center and make some leaves. Then we have to use the torch and burn the sides of the square "thing" (I don't know how to call this) where you have to pipe the succès on it. And as you can see on the pictures, I actually burnt the sides of the "thing" because the torch was crazy, the flames just suddenly went so big. Big enough to burn my marzipan. We were given some time to practice piping with chocolate before we finally pipe it on the marzipan, but since I was (always) the last to finish, I don't have much time to practice.

To me, my piping was okay (really!). I mean, I can totally read the word succès also it's not messy. I made some decoration on the right because I can't leave the space empty. I've decided to decorate it to make it less obvious to the chef. In any case, Chef H thinks that the letters should be bigger for this size of cake, it should fill up the whole square thing and the leaves for decoration should be bended to make it look alive (alive; he did actually said that).

To sum up everything, I am very happy with how my succès turned out.