BISCUIT JOCONDE IMPRIME/ENTREMET: Daring Bakers January 2011 Challenge

The January 2011 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Astheroshe of the blog accro. She chose to challenge everyone to make a Biscuit Joconde Imprime to wrap around an Entremets dessert.

I was excited about this challenge, as it looked like a very beautiful technique. The actual execution was a bit more trying. One key conclusion is that it would have been helpful to read the posts with everyone else's comments before beginning as opposed to immediately after. Oh well - now I know for next time.

We began by preparing the colored paste for the joconde - we used green since we planned to serve the completed dessert at a festival celebrating the new year for the trees later that week. We spread the paste and created a wave design. We noticed that the paste went on a bit thick - others commented that only 1/7-1/3 of it was really necessary - oops! In hindsight, I think we would have made less paste and piped it instead of spreading it.

Next we spread the joconde batter on top of the paste and proceeded to bake it in the oven. As a result of all the extra paste, the cake run over off the pan, creating some oven excitement. It also cooked much faster than expected. Unfortunately, again, because of the extra paste, not very much of our design could be seen.

Next came the task of assembly. We measured the cake and cut it into long strips for our event cake, which were then frozen to stay fresh, and we used the remaining cake to make individual desserts for us to enjoy that evening. Due to the thickness of our joconde (again, from the extra paste), it was hard to maneuver. We eventually rememdied this problem by slicing the cake into top and bottom pieces.

For the final version of the dessert, the joconde was molded in a springform pan. The filling began with a layer of sliced joconde, then a yogurt mousse, lemon curd, raspberry sauce, and white chocolate sauce. The lemon curd came from Trader Joe's; the recipes for the remainder of the fillings can be found in my next post. The yogurt mousse in itself was an adventure, as a vegetable-based gelatin product, Natural Dessert's Unflavored Jel Dessert, was used instead of the usual animal-based product. It is a quick setting gel, so I had to amend the recipe a bit to make it work.

I was crossing my fingers that the dessert would not fall apart after we took it out of the pan, and hurrah, it did not!