the punishment light

beejuan's cake took over four days to make.

the cake layers were a chocolate genoise, which i made first and kept refrigerated.
genoise is very rich in eggs. (the cake used 5 eggs and 5 yolks.) the eggs and yolks are whisked with sugar over simmering water until warm, then transferred to a mixer and whipped until triple in volume so that thre is a lot of air inside.
after folding in the cocoa and the flour and the fat, the batter had deflated by a lot. but i think it was okbecause he cake stll rose a lot. i think the tripling in volume was meant to compensate the air lost during the folding.

the second component was the chocolate ganache.
chocolate, butter, cream. so smooth, so thick, so luscious. i portioned a small bowl out of the large pot for use as the crumb coat.

layering the cake took place on the second night of chinese new year.
i sliced the genoise into thinner layers and set the first one on the cake board, enclosed in a cake ring, and brushed with sugar syrup.
the filling was the sabayon, which used fifteen egg yolks. and getting fifteen egg yolks out of fifteen eggs was so difficult; i broke abot four yolks, so those were not usable. so you can see: a whole bag of egg shells, a bowl of fifteen yolks, bags of egg whites, and a bowl of broken yolks with whites.
the fifteen yolks were whisked with sugar and orange juice over simmering water until tripled in volume (like the genoise), just that because the whole process had to be over simmering water, i couldn't use the stand mixer. so i used the handheld, and the walls were splattered all over with blobs of sabayon.
the sabayon is mixed with melted chocolate, and then whipped cream is folded in to lighten it. then gelatin is stirred into it and then everything was poured into the cake ring, topped with the second cake layer, and brushed with more syrup.

after overnight refrigeration i took the cake out to finish the icing. it was done in m bedroom, because i used the air conditioner.
the gelatin in the sabayon helped it to set firm. and it looked nice. so i took out the small bowl of ganache and made the crumb coat. the crumb coat is a thin layer meant to glue crumbs to the cake, so that they don't show up in the final icing.

while the cake returned to the refrigerator for the crumb coat to firm up, i made the marzipan bees.
cute, no?

back to the final icing of the cake.
the ganache was whipped until lightened, though it looked like it was going to separate. in my cold bedroom, the icing remained creamy, and so i slapped the icing onto the cake. sides and top.
marzipan bees on top, and then the parchment paper was slipped out from under the cake to reveal a nice clean cake board.

there was too much icing i think. and the sabayon was quite glottally thick, but maybe because the cake slices were too big. anyhpw, this new year was characterised by learning to feed melanie.

the punishment light is the traffic light which is utterly useless; it stops you for five minutes to look at no other cars passing by. but you just cannot move on - yet.

so colourful, so complete.