Arcachon: Equinox

Got my cake from Isetan again today, from the visiting shop, Arcachon. It was Equinox, for 500 yen, and seems to be tea cream inside chocolate mousse with a raspberry and mini blueberry macaron on top. Now, I thought there was blueberry inside, and maybe there was a subtle amount in the chocolate, but I'll need to go back to find out, which I intended to do because I've decided, partially from giving them the benefit of the doubt, that this was excellent. It's tiny, which is fine, put it puts some of the excellent shops in perspective, because they hold their cake sizes and just raise their prices as ingredient costs go up.

In other news, I've gone almost all the way with a cake recipe from my (the library's really) Super Patissier Book for "cake/batter/biscuit" (it's hard to translate "kiji" into English), which is by the Salon de thé Cerisier guy, where I've never been. There is some overlap between this and the SPB dictionary of "batter/cake", which is available in bookstores.

The first recipe, which was not the first I tried parts of, is the Marjolaine, which has a Japonaismasse (which is German) biscuit as the cake layers, between which it has ganache, creme praline, and creme chantilly. I don't do the creme chantilly for the top or the fancy decoration.

The biscuit is in the proportions 600 g egg white, 600 g granulated sugar, "appropriate" vanilla essence (so I skip, because I don't know, have, or care so much), 500 g hazelnut powder, 100 g of (not bread) flour and 200 g of powdered sugar. From my previous experience, I also add powdered egg white with the granulated sugar, because I can't make meringue without it. All the cakes in the beginning are nut-based biscuits as the cake theme. This makes 4 30-by-40 cm pans, which is 27 pieces of cake final 4-layer cake. For one 14 cm round tart form, which is what I've used, I only need 3% (18 g) of the base recipe, so one large egg is enough for two, and I can cut one in half, although I'd really like to get a fourth form and make all four layers together. Really, you are supposed to cut after you assemble and freeze.

As I was saying, you make a meringue with the egg white and graduated sugar (plus 5-15% of egg white power by weight of egg white, depending on the season) and whip it until the peaks just bend a little before cutting in the other ingredients, which should be sifted (I've got two sifters now, a big one for flour and powdered sugar and a tiny with big homes for nut powders). Then I spread it carefully in oil-sprayed and bread-floured 14 cm tart forms and bake for 30 minutes at 170 deg C in my convection oven (the recipe says 180 deg C, which is edible, but seems overly burnt, but the normal -10 deg C for a convention oven seems to work out).

The ganache for this is 150 g milk, which you boil (which seems extreme, but this is pretty much my first experience with ganache) and then add 300 g of 66% cacao chocolate and then 45 g of rum. For the creme praline, you need 600 g 38% fat cream and 200 g praline almonde (the paste). You combine and whip 7 minutes (or maybe the Japanese means seven-tenths), which means until paste-like. For the creme chantilly, you also need 600 g of 38 % fat cream and 40 g of granulated sugar and otherwise do the same thing. If you made topping, you would need another 150 g of 45% cream and 21 g of granulated sugar and do the same thing, plus some red food coloring and chocolate powder or something. The cake is assembled bottom to top, biscuit, filling, biscuit, filling, ..., so it gets thicker but lighter as you go up; but I couldn't pile the creme praline that high, so that's the one thing I left over of. Actually, I made extra fillings for the first try, so all the fillings were at refrigerator temperature this time, which is not actually part of the recipe. I'm thinking I'm put the creme praline in the freezer next time for long enough to get it thick enough to support the top two layers.

As a said at the beginning, after assembling, you put it in the freezer to harden before cutting, and of course, before eating. The first time, I just cut one biscuit disk into fourths, but this time I cut two disks into halves, so I'll try to actually cut that into two little pieces when it's ready. I'm not ready to take a picture.