Thornado

I need some ideas and suggestions on some quick, yet good and fancy-looking dessert components. I'm participating in the finals of a dessert and baking contest for amateur bakers this coming Sunday. We are being judged on two different desserts. One should be a chocolate based dessert that we should make at home and bring to the venue. This is not a problem and I know what I'm making for that. The second one is something that we make on-site. We will bake this on the stage during a chocolate festival, and we have a time limit of 60 minutes. This is from when we start until the desserts have to be plated and served to the judges, so we are under a bit of time pressure here (it also means that anything that involves things that need to set for a longer time is out of the question). I obviously have some ideas floating around in my head regarding different components that I want to incorporate (thinking of a hazelnut daquoise base, a chocolate chantilly at some level, and some other things that bring out different textures (and to some extent flavors). One thing I've been considering is using the "40-second microwave cake" technique from El Bulli, which is good in terms of time, but I'm not sure how to include this in the final dessert in a way that is visually appealing. We can't really decide on a final recipe yet though as we will be given a "secret box" the evening before the contest with some ingredients that we have to use. In addition to this, we will have access to base ingredients, but are not allowed to bring any ingredients of our own. Anyway, if anyone has suggestions of good components to add to a dessert like this, please feel free to let me know. I'm not really looking for complete dessert suggestions, but more on a component level... Now I'm rambling again. Mostly looking around here for inspiration, so I'll just shut up now. Anyway, any

I recently received some silicone demisphere molds. I have a party coming up, and I would like to use these for my dessert. My idea was to first create a "shell" chocolate in the molds (either by brushing the chocolate on, or the "fill up and pour out" method (though I worry that doing that would require more chocolate). I would then (after the chocolate is set) like to fill them with a panna cotta and let that set, and then finally unmold them on plates to have nice panna cotta domes with a chocolate crust on them. Is this a reasonable idea, or will the panna cotta release moisture that will mess up the chocolate shell in a bad way? If it is reasonable to do, are there any special precautions I need to take (cover the molds or the chocolate with something, etc)? Thanks

I've been away from eGullet for a while, but now that I come back here and read this thread and see all the nice pictures (especially of the Plaisir) I really feel I need to take out my PH books again (just need to find the time to bake....). Anyway, about the Plaisir.... The good thing with it is that even though it looks very advanced, the recipe is very well divided into subtasks, and each of these subtasks are quite easy to do (I would say that, unless you've done it before, tempering the chocolate and creating the thin chocolate sheets is probably the most work intensive and tricky part). What makes it even better is that most of the parts can be made ahead of time, so you can spread the work over several days if you don't have time to do it all at once. Good luck with your Plaisir.

I'll be spending a week in Toulouse at the end of the month, and I would really like to try some good patisseries in the city. Can you recommend any patisserie there?

Argh! Disaster! We were going to PH tonight, but just to make sure we wouldn't come there and see that they had closed for the day, we had the concierge at the hotel give them a call, and apparently they are closed until August 24 for some reason... So, seems like there won't be any PH for me. I've just consoled myself with a chocolate macaroons from another patisserie close to my hotel. There are a bunch of other patisseries all over the city, but it's hard to know which ones are good. Any recommendations on good ones when PH is closed?

So, I'm finally in Paris, and might be going to PH tonight if I'm able to get out of my meetings early enough. Do any of you know when they close? Don't want to come there just to find out that they just closed... ←

This isn't really a baking question, but as it relates to Pierre Hermé, I hope it's OK here anyway. I have gotten the opportunity to go to Paris for some meetings the first week of August, and apart from attending the things I'm there for, I have two main goals with my stay in Paris - to see the Eifel Tower and to visit Pierre Hermé's Patisserie. I've baked a bunch of stuff from his books, but never tasted the "real thing", so I'm looking forward to it. Anyway, I have a few questions to those of you that have been there before. First of all, any recommendations to what I should try? I think a selection of macaroons is an obvious choice as they are small enough to be able to try some different kinds without the stomach starting to protest, and I've also heard so many good things about Pierre's macaroons. I'm also a bit interested in trying the Plaisir Sucré as I've made it myself and really liked it and would like to see how far off from the original I was. Any other suggestions? What kind of price ranges should I expect? I am guessing that it's not a cheap place, but it would be nice to know how much I should prepare to spend to avoid getting too big a shock if prices are high... Finally, my French is virtually non-existent. Will I be able to get what I want by pointing and waving my arms and using a few words of French (which might not always be the correct French words...)?

Last weekend I was going to make a Mother's Day cake for my mother (in Sweden, Mother's Day is the last Sunday of May, so I wasn't completely off on the weekend ). After the success of my Plaisir Sucrés, I was inspired, and wanted to try something similar, but as a cake. Furthermore, I wanted something fairly simple to make. So, what I made was something like a big (cake sized), slightly less complicated version of the Plaisir Sucré. It has the daquiose and the praline, but then I skipped the two layers of ganache and the bottom two chocolate sheets, and went directly for the chocolate whipped cream and then finishing off with a chocolate sheet. A few pictures below: The text ("MOR") is Swedish for "mother". Unfortunately, my lack of skills in doing nice writing with melted chocolate is painfully obvious here... Cutting the cake: A final picture: It doesn't have all the elements of the real thing, but it was a lot less time consuming than making lots of "real" Plaisir Sucrés, and it still tasted really great.

Tempering wasn't that difficult, it was mostly time consuming... Especially the first time I did it as I melted all my chocolate and didn't have any seed chocolate to bring the temperature down with, so it took forever for it to cool to the correct temperature. When reheating the chocolate, you might also want to remove it from heat slightly before it reaches the target temperature. As I was melting it in a metal bowl over water, the bowl got heated and continued to heat the chocolate after removing it from the heat, i.e., easy to overshoot the target temperature. Yes, I used the cutter when the recipe said to score the chocolate. By making round sheets instead of rectangular ones, you will of course get a lot of "left over" chocolate in between the rounds, but this can be used for the other parts of the recipe (or, even better, you can keep those around for the rest of your baking session and snack on them every now and then...). No special occasion, and no dinner either (who needs dinner, when you can have good desserts? ). Just some friends coming over.

One of the main reasons for me buying this book was the Plaisir Sucré. Actually, the first time I even heard of Pierre Hermé was when I was reading a food blog and saw pictures of a Plaisir Sucré. That made me determined that I wanted to make one. Now, I've finally gotten around to doing it. Some pictures and description below. It was really a great dessert, and not that difficult to make either (it is a bit time consuming as there are several different components, but each component in itself is fairly simple). The things that required the most work was the chocolate sheets (first time tempering chocolate...). Since I had just bought a number of circular cutting thingies I decided I wanted to make round Plaisirs instead of rectangular. The first picture shows the daquiose discs with the praline on them and being piped with ganache: In the next picture the ganache, a sheet of chocolate, more ganache, another sheet of chocolate and the chocolate whipped cream are present, and the final sheet of chocolate is being put in place: The final plated desserts are shown below. The chocolate sauce from the Plaisir Sucré recipe is on the plate, then the Plaisir itself in the top left corner of the plate. The truffels are the caramel choclate truffle, and the milk chocolate and passion fruit truffle (this one turned out way too soft, so I had to keep it in the freezer, and also really really sweet, so dusting it with cocoa was better than with confectioner's sugar), and in the bottom right corner there is a raspberry, strawberry, and kiwi mousse. A few more pictures of the dessert below: All in all, it was a fun dessert to make.

Yes, glucose can be found at the pharmacy. Thanks for the suggestion.

Yesterday, I was invited to a friend to try his Tarte Grenobloise (which he has taken a bunch of pictures of and has promised to post here soon), and after eating that (which was very good, though also very rich, so you can't have too much of it...) we started browsing through CDBPH again trying to figure out the next project to do. We came upon the chocolate and lemon caramels, and those seemed both tasty and fairly simple to make. There is however one problem with them. Corn syrup is not easily available in grocery stores in Sweden. Is there anything else that we could use as a substitute for the corn syrup? Some other kind of syrup or something?

It should be thick enough to eat with a spoon without it being "soupy". It should be somewhat gelatinous. ← Still not really sure I understand what the right consistency would be. How is it supposed to be if you compare to e.g. a mousse or panna cotta? It's not really "soupy", but it definitely is a bit loose (turning it upside down above my head would be a bad idea). Oh, well... At least I've made the caramelized Rice Krispies now, so I'll bring the puddings to work tomorrow for some tasting...

Hmmm.... This is going to be interesting. When I first saw the recipe, the rice pudding wasn't something that I had planned to do, but after all the discussions here, I got curious and wanted to try it. I used 700 ml milk, 70 g rice, and 190 g chocolate. After just taking it off the heat, it is very liquid, but I guess it should be like that now. It will be interesting to see what the result will be after having it in the fridge for a while. I've never made a rice pudding before, what is the consistency supposed to be like?

At the link below, there is a recipe for pistachio macaroons by Nigella Lawson. That also includes a pistachio buttercream recipe (that uses pistachios, not the paste). http://www.styleathome.com/StyleAtHome/cli...e=3228&idSm=325

Patricia, I think that the dome should work fine in smaller molds as well (I actually thought of the same thing as I was browsing through a kitchen supply store that had a sale this weekend... didn't buy any small molds though). You probably want to make sure that the layer of cake in the middle is really thin as you don't have that much space. I guess one option would be to omit that layer completely and only have the bottom layer - gives you more of the mousse in each dome. (Of course, since I don't have any real experience in doing this, I'm only thinking out loud here... If anyone has actually done this before, their opinions are worth more...)

Thanks for all the suggestions. I live in the north of Sweden, and it is somewhat difficult to find the more "exotic" fishes fresh here. There is basically only one dedicated fish shop here, and they have things like cod, bass, herring, and possibly halibut fresh. They also have other kinds of fish such as red snapper, tuna, etc, but those are usually frozen. I've seen that many of you have suggested that I should go with white fish, and stay away from things like e.g. salmon. My experience is quite the opposite. The fish I really have a problem with are white fish like cod. While a salmon still isn't the thing I'm most happy to see on the dinner table, it definitely beats a white fish any day, as the non-white fish actually *do* have a flavour apart from that "fish" flavour that I'm not very fond of. Oh, well.... One setting, in which I think fish can be pretty OK is, surprisingly enough, sushi.

Hi, So, here's the deal - I really don't like fish. Even if you try to prepare it in a good way, that typical fish flavor always comes through in a bad way. I am however also aware that it is good to eat fish, and maybe maybe there can be a good way to cook fish. So, what's an excellent way to cook fish if you are not a fish lover? I want great recipes! :)

I just received a kitchen "mini torch" as a birthday present, so now I'm looking for recipes that I can use that in. I am mainly able to find lots and lots of recipes for Creme Brulee, but I would like to use it for something else as well. Suggestions anyone?

Not really sure how many people were there, but there was a lot of people in my apartment. Probably somewhere around 25 people in total....

So, my birthday party turned out to be pretty successful, and my guests enjoyed the stuff I baked. As promised, here's a bunch of pictures (I'm not as good as some of the previous posters at getting excellent pictures, but I'm working on it). Oh, and BTW, I got one of these kitchen mini torches as a gift, so now I need to find good recipes that I can use that for. Let's start off with the Korova cookies. This is what they looked like just coming out of the oven: and here they are a little bit later: The next project was to make the Chocolate Dome from DBPH. After managing to unmold it, is looked like this: and glazed like this: I also made a Nutella tart: And a Melody cake: When it was all ready to be served it looked like this: In front of the cakes are (from left to right) pistachio macaroons (not a PH recipe), Passionately Chocolate tartlets from DBPH and the Korova cookies. Some more pictures: The recipes all turned out really well. I would have to say that my favorite among these are the Chocolate Dome, and I'll definitely make that one again. The Nutella tart was good, and wasn't that hard to make. The Melody was also really good, but it's also quite labor intensive....

Thanks for the welcome Dorie. Yes, it does feel like a pretty ambitious menu, but this is a good opportunity to try out some of the recipes and not "have" to eat it all myself (as good as that would be, it might not be very good for the size of my waist). I guess the main risk of doing too ambitious things is that people might start to expect stuff like that from me at other parties as well. Unfortunately I didn't have any completely round bowl, so it is flat on the bottom (one of the reasons I worried a bit since I understood that it would be easier to unmold it with a round mold).

Hello all, I'm pretty new on eGullet (less than a week), but I've been reading this thread with great interest. I'm just a happy amateur baker, but I enjoy trying to improve my skills, and after getting both CDBPH and Desserts by PH two weeks back, I've been doing some reading of those. Tried to make the chocolate macaroons when I just had received the book, and they turned out really good. Made them again earlier this week, but then they didn't turn out as good as last time. Anyway, I'm having a small birthday party this weekend, and I'm planning on making some desserts for that. I'm thinking of doing: Korova cookies (dough done, just need to bake it) Chocolate dome from DBPH Melodie from DBPH Nutella Tart from CDBPH Passionately chocolate tartlets from DBPH Pistachio macaroons (not a PH recipe) I made the chocolate dome yesterday and it's in the freezer now. One thing that worries me about that one is getting it out of the bowl it was made in. I'm also a bit worried that the mousse won't hold the shape and that the cake will just collapse... Anyone who have made this that has any tips or suggestions that can ease the process? (Oh, and BTW, I had some of the left-over mousee, and I couldn't believe how insanely good it was. PH sure knows what he is doing...) Anyway, just thought I should do a first post here, and hopefully get some hints on how to improve the performance (it's a good thing that I read this thread, as I saw here about the typo in the metric units for the butter for the Nutella tart). I'll try to get some pictures of my creations and post here after the party (well, at least if they turn out fairly decent).