Caramel Delight

As a culinary student, I am often asked to come up with concepts for potential dishes or desserts and then put them into production. For my advanced contemporary pastry class, I had to dream up a dessert utilizing methods that we had learned in class. Being a bacon lover, I attempt to incorporate it into as many dishes as possible which resulted in this:

Chocolate sponge cake with caramel mousse topped with bacon crumbles and a caramel drizzle. This may sound like a very odd combination, but it has a similar flavor to chocolate covered caramels sprinkled with sea salt with an additional smoky depth added by the bacon crumbles and the salty/sweet combination worked out well thank goodness. 

Batter Up!

I went into making this cake with the thought that carving a cake into a ball could not possibly be too difficult. Fortunately, I wasn't completely wrong but on the other hand, I also wasn't completely right either. One thing you definitely need is a turntable because no matter how perfectly round you think it looks, it does NOT look like that once you turn it around. And around. And around. After about ten minutes of carving and five minutes of spinning and staring at it to check for imperfections, I finally deemed it "baseball shaped" and stuck it in the fridge to set up while I made the fondant. I typically use store bought fondant but I recently found a recipe using marshmallows, powdered sugar, water, butter, and vanilla extract and decided to try it out. The texture ended up being a lot easier to work with and it tasted a lot better too. A little melted red colored chocolate stitches and voila, a baseball! 

I used this recipe for my fondant: http://allrecipes.com/recipe/marshmallow-fondant/ but if you prefer a different flavor, by all means change it up and switch out the vanilla for something a little more unexpected. Until next time, happy baking!