Hungarian Hippos

Technology has not been on my side this week, or at least not on my mind.  My week began with the disappearance of my beloved iPhone putting me out of communitcation, never on time and a bit lost. This set me up nicely for forgetting to charge my camera meaning, I'm afraid, this blog is a bit sparse. I managed to use the last second of power to quickly snap my three offerings but couldn't take any of the chefs, nor attempt to get a decent picture. Nonetheless, on we plough.

This week we made the second potential exam dish - the Opera cake. This is layers of sponge, ganache and coffee buttercream. My taste buds have only just matured towards coffee and can be a bit hit and miss, but this cake really is delicious. Its topped with a lovely shiny glaze and, of course, piped with chocolate. This week I was surprisingly pleased with my piping. It was perhaps a bit  simplistic after seeing the chefs swirly border (which I'm sure you can imagine by now) but it was neat enough and my writing was at least legiable this time!

The next cake of the week was a traditional Hungarian cake called the Dobos which is a thin biscuit-y sponge layered with mountains of ganache. The stacked cake is cut at an angle in half, shaped into a triangle and covered in more ganache and a glaze. The cutting is quite tricky because of the different textures of the cake and the unusual angle. In demo I thought the cake was a tad dry so I gave it a good rum syrup soak and it seemed to go down alright.

The third cake of the week was a very pretty raspberry roulade that made me go over all girly and giggly whilst making it. It is what I think should be called hippopotamus pink and tastes light and fluffy like a raspberry cloud. What a delight!

As pretty as a...

I've got my camera fully charged and ready to go along with a new phone so next week I will be more on the ball.