cake rotation

SO MANY CAKES. These are roughly in the order in which they were made.

lemon-raspberry pound cake: easy to make. Very pink. A bit too sweet for me (especially with the glaze).



These cheesecakes cracked a bit, and so we got to decorate them with chocolate. Trying to do neat stripes failed me, so I went the Pollack route. One of the chefs overheard me talking about me pollack cheesecake and he called out, "you need a cigarette and a shot of whiskey, THEN you'll be doing it right!"



For a cake that gets no respect, Tiger cake is quite delicious. It's pretty easy (no one respects the easy things, eh?) -- just vanilla cake with lemon zest swirled with chocolate cake and then coated in chocolate ganache.



This next cake I tasted when someone else made it and then begged to do it during our rotation. It's a black forest cake-- a devil's food cake flavored with kirsch cherries (in the batter) and then layered and coated with kirsch buttercream. This process taught us to level cakes when slicing layers, to frost, and to make rosettes. And it tastes like heaven. I bought a whole cake.



The outside of the cake is coated in chocolate cake crumbs. This is a useful tactic if your frosting job isn't particularly spectacular. You can also use nuts.



The rosettes are topped with a kirsch cherry (we soaked the dried cherries in kirsch brandy). The frosting swirl in the middle of the cake is actually very hard to do-- you need a very steady hand.



We had made a swiss roll cake (often jellied or something and then rolled up into a log and sliced) but forgot about it in the fridge for a while. We also had some extra devil's food cake and kirsch syrup from the black forest cakes. We made some chocolate mousse and learned to layer. The white layer is the swiss cake, which we soaked with the kirsch syrup to soften it up, and the dark cake is the chocolate-cherry, and then the mousse. Getting mousse layers to be level is quite a challenge.



We decorated one cake to be sold whole (cocoa powder and bits on top) and sliced the rest for individual sale (in background).



The last project was petit-fours for the bakeshop party. This is an opera cake, but a bastardized version. It's a milk chocolate sponge, coffee buttercream, chocolate ganache, and shiny chocolate glaze. i think.



We spent an hour cutting the cake into wee pieces for party serving. It was an extremely rich cake, so the small pieces were for the best.