First, of course, best wishes and happy birthday to my dear friends. I’ve started working on their birthday cake since Thursday, there’s a lot of preparation work based on my imagined design. They ended up looking good and liked by the birthday people, so definitely worth all the work o(￣▽￣)ブ
I’ve ended up baking two cakes, one is a basic Basque cake with chocolate ganache top and the other one is what I called an afternoon tea and fruit chocolate cake. The basque cake is relatively easy that consists of a basque part that I baked and cooled in the fridge the night before and a chocolate top part. The chocolate cake was consists of its chocolate chiffon body part, a chocolate milk jelly part inside, mixed berry jam that I made on Thursday in advance, and the hazelnut cookies black tea cream that was basically the heavy whipped cream boiled with the hazelnut cookies black tea I got from The Spice and Tea Exchange.
I think the basque cake was an average level. There’s nothing you can go wrong with the basque cake recipe I used (shared in the recipe section). But the combination with chocolate was, well, not outstanding. I’d still say, the combination with strawberry cream is my favorite so far. For the chocolate cake, needless to say, the mixed berry jam is the MVP. It’s sour & sweet taste reduce the greasy of cream. The hazelnut flavor was not as strong or outstanding as the coconut one I used previously, also from the same store. The middle jello part was also not as bouncy as I imagined, probably need a few more experiments with the recipe’s ratio. Nevertheless I think I’ve been generally doing a great work in combining all the flavors. I could definitely improve on the looking of the cream next time if I have better tools.
I don’t quite have the time out for pastry today and it’s been raining a lot too, so I ordered some pastries from Ovenbird. I’ve been craving their sourdough for a reeeeeeeeeeeeeally long while. The comments on Pain au chocolat will be leave to the pastry comparison post as well as the pictures. Here I put the picture for the danish and sourdough. The danish was good, the smooth taste of cheesecake part combined with the sour sweet of respberry sause, perfect. The only problem I feel: I’d like to have more filling… The sourdough on the other hand, was a really big portion. I forgot to take a photo of its size…terrible mistake…but it’s a large fulfilling portion. I personally like sourdough pretty much, and my favorite way of eating it is to bake it crispy in the airfrier, then add my homemade jam with some unsweetened greek yoghurt (mind here because the jam is already sweet). God, it’s perfect. Please, everyone, try this out!!!