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Valentine’s Day is just around the corner (eek!), and for me that means finding a special way to show my husband I appreciate him. This year, I decided to go a little crazy and make his favorite kind of cake (black forest gâteau) into a chocolate entremet with a mirror glaze. I have done a mirror glaze only one other time, and you can read about it here. I made mini entremet cakes for thanksgiving a couple of years ago. They turned out a little weird and were so fiddly, I decided not to do entremets again for awhile…but for him, I’d try again.
Once I’d decided on what I was going to make, I set about looking online for recipes and ideas. I found several examples of chocolate entremets, but none that really sparked what I knew my husband liked about black forest gâteaux. I looked at entremet cakes, and what the essentials of black forest gâteaux are, and how can I combine them?
I knew one thing: I did NOT want a white chocolate mirror glaze. I am discovering as I bake more and more, that other than on pretzels, I really am not a big fan of the flavor of white chocolate. The thing is, that’s what most mirror glazes are made with, because it is the most versatile in terms of coloring. I found a chocolate mirror glaze recipe on Sugar Geek Show’s website. I decided to use dark chocolate, because I wanted the intense flavor, and I knew it would be sweet enough because of all the sugar and the sweetened condensed milk.
I chose to use a 50/50 combination of dark sweet cherries and tart red pie cherries. I didn’t want the cake to be overly sweet, and this was the best source of a pop of tartness to balance the vanilla and chocolate sweetness. Plus, there was the added bonus of being able to use single cherries as little bonus bites in the black forest entremets.
I used this 50/50 blend of cherries to make a purée, part of which I used for the gelée and part I used in the cake batter. It did not make the cake taste like cherries, but rather gave it a rich depth to the chocolate and lovely moistness, that in all honesty made this the best chocolate cake I’ve ever tasted…and I’m not a huge fan of chocolate cake. It took quite a lot of self-control to not just eat all of the leftover cake in one go.
After baking the cake and making the gelée and vanilla bean mousse, I started assembling the chocolate entremets in mini half-sphere silicone moulds. It was very quickly apparent that I had WAY more cake, gelée and mousse than mini moulds, so I decided to also make a large size entremet using my new Silikomart Goccia mould. Even after filling the larger mould, I still had almost half of the cake left over, as well as a fair amount of mousse. Luckily, the cake was insanely good and so we had deconstructed entremets with mousse and gelée “scraps” for dessert that night.
One little thing I learned about the gelée…it’s meant to stay frozen while cutting it, because if you let it defrost, it tears and falls apart quite easily. It’s not set to a stiff consistency, there’s not enough gelatin for that, but since I’d never made one, I had no idea. Learning! Learning!
I froze the chocolate entremet cakes in their moulds for two days. Not because they need two days of freezing, but because life sometimes happens and delays things a little. I really like that there is a certain level of flexibility with these little cakes: you can make each element separately, and ahead of each other.
The mousse cakes came out of the moulds beautifully. I had a little bit of trouble with the Goccia mould, but that was because I was being so very over-cautious, not because of a problem with the mould. It was a little crazy how easy it was to pop the cakes out of half-sphere mini moulds.
I had the dark chocolate mirror glaze made, and cooling before I unmoulded the chocolate entremet cakes, and here was a little learning experience: I was waiting for the temperature to come down to what the recipe calls for (90 F), I kept stirring gently because it didn’t seem to be cooling very quickly, and eventually gave up at around 93 F. The glaze was too cool at 93 F to pour it beautifully on the entremets, much to my dismay. It became clear quickly that it was going to be lumpy if I wasn’t careful.
I called my husband in for reinforcements when it came time to transfer all the covered cakes to plates. Sadly, we only figured out the best way to transfer them (two forks) on the last two, but at least I’ll know for next time! He kept making really funny yummy noises, and I found him licking his fingers almost every time he came through the kitchen. Below, you will see why…
These turned out so pretty, and my local florist, Bobbi at Protea, happened to be able to get me Cherry Brandy roses just in time for my cake making. I love these roses, and it had the added bonus of being something of a little joke: cherry brandy, or kirsch, is a key ingredient of black forest gâteaux. These chocolate entremets were really rich, with the bite of the cherry gelée and the light creamy accent of the vanilla bean mousse. My husband was very pleased with this latest attempt at the black forest gâteau, and I have requests for seconds! This was a resounding Valentine’s Day success.
Do you have a favorite black forest recipe or chocolate entremet recipe? What are some of your favorite things to do for Valentine’s Day? Let me know in the comments!
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