Hazelnut and Poached Pear

I'm 23. This seems to be around the time when people start thinking about getting their lives together, because they've just come to the realisation that they can't stay students forever. A couple of my good friends decided to move permanently interstate, so as a goodbye present, I wanted to make them something special. Because cake makes everything better.

Since the mandarin and salted caramel cake turned out well, I decided to try another recipe from Darren Purchese's Sweet Studio: Hazelnut and Poached Pear chocolate mousse cake. I followed his recipe for the cake components, but I wanted to do something special for the decoration. In his book, he uses a spray gun to give a textured chocolate effect on top of the cake. Unfortunately, I didn't have a spray gun, so I stuck with the fool-proof recipe of his shiny chocolate glacage. (Recipe below!) I also wanted to try something using tempered chocolate...and ever since Zumbo's V8 cake episode on masterchef, I've been meaning to try to make tempered chocolate flowers. Why not?

Tempered white chocolate flowers, with ferrero rochers and crushed hazelnuts.

This cake consisted of a thin but moist chocolate and hazelnut brownie base, chocolate caramel spread, poached pear baked cream and pieces of poached pear scattered on top of the insert. This was then covered in chocolate mousse and glazed. 

The flowers themselves were surprisingly easy to do..all I did was follow a tutorial by Ann Reardon, over at How To Cook That. If you don't have time to temper the chocolate, you could probably use white chocolate melts (compound chocolate). This will set very quickly at room temperature, so you would need to work fast. 

The rest of the cake was just a matter of experimenting with what decorations I had on hand. For the ferrero rochers, I cut one in half. One half, I hollowed out so I had just the hazelnut shell left. This I used to sprinkle the crushed hazelnuts around. For the remaining half, I removed the filling, and filled it with my left-over chocolate/caramel spread, then placed a skinned roasted hazelnut inside. For the chocolate spaghetti, I just filled a ziplock bag with tempered white chocolate, and squeezed it out into a glass full of ice-cold water. This sets the chocolate instantly into interesting 3D shapes.

The hardest thing I'm finding with these cakes is to get nice smooth edges on the bottom. The glaze sets very quickly on a semi-frozen cake, so you will need to lift the cake up, and smooth the bottom using a hot palette knife before it sets.

Shiny Chocolate Glacage

Ingredients:

• 180g caster sugar
• 60g dark cocoa powder
• 140g water
• 105g cream
• 11g gold leaf gelatine (soaked in cold water, then drained.)

Method:

• Place sugar in a large bowl, and sieve the cocoa powder over it.
• Make a well in the centre, and add the water while mixing it to form a paste.
• Add the cream, and cook this paste in a saucepan by bringing it to the boil and simmering for 5 minutes to ensure cocoa is cooked.
• Remove from heat, and add soaked gelatine. Stir well and strain to remove lumps.
• Let it cool, and then either refridgerate until needed, or pour over cake at 35C. If refridgerating, I just heat it up in the microwave on short 20-30sec bursts until just melted and smooth.