Chef Graeme's Charlotte aux Chocolat
We had Chef Graeme for Demo 14, he demonstrated both the Charlotte aux Chocolate and Charlotte aux Fruits de la Passion.
The Charlotte aux Chocolat is a chocolate bavarian cream encased (like mousse but technically not a mousse) in a light chocolate biscuit sponge. This is my favourite cake to date. It’s really light and fluffy, perfectly flavoured. Not too sweet, not to bitter and not too rich.
Chef Graeme's Charlotte aux Fruits de la Passion
The Charlotte aux Fruits de la Passion is a passion fruit bavarian cream encased in a light vanilla biscuit sponge with a chocolate biscuit sponge stencil.
A charlotte is a cake surrounded / wrapped in a sponge layer and the bavarian cream is similar to a mousse except that mousses contain whipped egg whites but bavarian creams do not. Although these days, the term mousse is used very loosely.
We had Chef Julie for our practical. She’s amazing!
I have just had the best day at LCB! Some days, you just have the luck and everything goes as you would hope and that was today. When baking something made up of multiple components it is likely that one of those components will not work out. Because we are doing everything for the first time, it is really all about luck and not so much about skill (yet)
My Charlotte aux chocolate
All sorts of things can go wrong with this based on the experience of my classmates:
Sponge – if you over or under beat the eggs you may not get the diagonal patter (i.e. the sponge doesn’t hold its shape and spreads leaving you with a thin flat sheet of biscuit rather than sponge), you have to bake it enough but not too much or it will be dry and crack, you also need enough of it to wrap around the cake without having to join multiple pieces
Bavaroise cream – the mixture can be overcooked and end up a scrambled eggy mess and mousse does not set leaving the cake a liquid mess. One of my classmates cried because her cake just spread out as a liquid mess when we it was unmoulded.
Chocolate deco – Need the chocolate to be spread fairly thick but not too thick, needs to be set but not too cold to be able to get the ruffles. Needs a fair bit of upper body strength to push the scraper to get the ruffles.
Top view of my charlotte aux chocola
beam me up, biscotti! 