Disney week 6: Revealed. Changing the subject.

As was previously stated, this was written several weeks ago, and I'm just about ready to talk about everything that happened. Here is what I was thinking and feeling at the time.

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Wed, Nov 14, 2012

Let’s talk about something more fun this week. Let’s talk about the one product we make that has anything to do with what I want to specialize in: The Grapefruit Cake. We make some portion of this dessert every day. We make about two dozen of the cakes every other day, which get portioned out into 8-12 slices. That’s a rather successful turnover with a $8 price point per slice.

I absolutely love working with the grapefruit because it is such a light fresh scent when I am constantly surrounded by all of these heavy sweet smells. The little notes of citrus flung wild in the bakery come to me at unexpected moments and I almost swoon every time.

I feel that my training has given me all of the skills necessary to prepare these layered cakes, and I have done well with them. Like many of the cakes featured in my Euro Cakes and Tortes class, this dessert is made as follows:

Prepare, bake, cool, wrap 10” rounds of yellow cake. Label, date, and freeze.

The cakes are leveled, sides and bottom trimmed, and split into four layers. I love filleting off the delicate layer of brown from the bottom.

Ring molds are lined with strips of acetate and placed on cake rounds. The cake rings are lined with jacond to hold the whole product together.

The cake layers are soaked with a grapefruit maceration, and slathered with layers of grapefruit jam and a cream cheese based grapefruit puree filling. The process is repeated until all layers are used, ending with a leveled layer of filling. The cakes are chilled and later finished with a thin grapefruit glaze, sliced and plated, and topped with a dried slice of candied grapefruit. It is glorious.

Here are the tips I have picked up that were not learned in school:

Instead of preparing the jacond in the traditional method with a contrasting batter that creates a unique design, they carefully thinly spread the jacond onto transfer sheets and baked, which guarantees a consistent product. They have a dedicated rotary blade device which cuts the jacond sheets into the correct sizes for lining the rings. When the jacond is trimmed to make a perfect seal around the ring, it is cut slight longer than needed, overlapping by about half - one centimeter, and then pushed into position which creates a tight lining.

The layers of fillings are spread out with a standard plastic icing smoother which has been cut in half to facilitate getting into those small spaces without giving up the benefit of having a wide blade to work with.

Like most everything else, the fillings are portioned out with specific sizes of ice-cream scoopers to get a quick consistent distribution of product.

Finally, the candied citrus slices are made by slicing the grapefruit while frozen, laying out the slices on halved silpats on small racks, dusted with powdered sugar,

and left in a dehydrator overnight instead of cooking and soaking in increasingly dense syrups.

The whole process and experience is what has made this internship useful to me and my future in this industry.