Mousse on the Loose

So, enough about triathlons (until next year, or until they post the 2008 Danskin dates and I can start badgering some of you to do one with me). Let’s get back to pastry.

I started Contemporary Cakes yesterday here at Cookin’ School. Contemporary Cakes is just what the name implies, learning how to use recently developed techniques, post-modern visual aesthetics and newer flavor profiles to create things that, at least in some sense, can be considered cakes.

The funny thing is, every single person who’s taken the course says, when I ask what it’s like, "oh, it’s mousse cakes."

Tuesday, in his opening remarks, my newest chef sighed and said, with just a hint of whine, "everyone says all we do is mousse in this class, but really, not everything is mousse. Really. We do other stuff. Honest."

Whether it’s mousse or chiboust or whatever, all the cakes we’re making could be called Weird Floppy Cakes with Neat-O Cross Sections, though that’s not as catchy a name as Contemporary Cakes. We’ll do a lot of inserts, and lot of "textured" finishes to our mousse and, essentially, create a lot of fancy-schmancy cake-like objects that will be generally prettier to look at but less satisfying to eat than, say, a hunk of booze-soaked sponge cake slathered in Italian buttercream.

But that’s just my opinion.

Actually, I’m looking forward to this class because these kinds of cakes are crucial to know how to do, and because I think they’re visually interesting and challenging to assemble creatively. Just don’t ask me to eat one.

So far, I really like Chef, too. As one classmate remarked: "he is by far the most laid-back chef we’ve had." He’s funny and self-deprecating and stressed that he is extremely patient and doesn’t expect everything we do to turn out perfect, because hey, we’re learning, after all.

Contrast that with The Penguin last year, who used to make us call-and-answer "Are we allowed to make a mistake?" "No!"

He’s also allowing us a lot of leeway in terms of how we finish our entremet and petit gateaux (aka big cakes and little cakes), expecting us to choose the garnish, decide how to arrange the components and so on. We also have two projects where we get to develop our own recipes and then make it for Grand Buffet (the pre-graduation hootenany).

On the first day alone, he showed us how to do a bunch of easy prep items, including a delicious flourless chocolate sponge that is so easy to make I can’t believe we struggled with fussier sponge recipes for months on end last year (as a bonus, for VirgoSis and others with a Need to Know, said cake is totally gluten-free... Let me know when you’re in the area and I’ll make one for you).

My only quibble so far with him is that he, like many a more modern-leaning chef I’ve met, really likes passion fruit. A lot. My chef in Vegas was like that, too, as was my Individual Pastry chef last year. Let it go, boys. It’s just a fruit. You don’t have to put it in every goddamn recipe (in Vegas, we even made Passion Fruit Tiramisu and Passion Fruit Bread Pudding. No! Stop! Step away from the passion fruit, Chef!).

My only true concern right now is my teammate. Luck of the draw, I got the omega dog of the pack. She’s a nice person, but she just has zero kitchen sense. I don’t claim to be perfect by any stretch, but when Chef says "zest an orange" to add to poaching liquid, I grab an orange and my microplaner and go to town. I do not cut the orange in half, toss the innards (yes, as in the fruit part!) and put a whole half of defruited orange in the pot, bitter pith and all!

And when we measure dacquoise to fit in a mold and decide it needs to be 2.5" wide, I get out my ruler and measure it carefully so that it is, in fact, 2.5" wide. I don’t know how the hell she did it (I was busy doing other stuff), but our strip varied from 2 3/4" to 3" wide. That may not sound like a big deal, but when you have 2.5" of space, yeah, it’s an issue. I hate that I have to check everything she does, because she works slow to begin with and doesn’t leave time to redo things, which we usually have to do. Ugh. There, I’ve vented. It’s three weeks and then I’m done with her.

Anyway, I don’t think the work we do in this class will be as visually stunning as last class, but I’ll take pictures of anything interesting. As long as there’s no passion fruit involved. I refuse to feed the frenzy.