day 8

barquettes souris
it's a mouse! made of chocolate mousse! and dipped in more chocolate! He's sitting on a financier, a buttery, cake-like cookie. We dipped this fellow yesterday and he's been in the fridge since then, hence the condensation on the chocolate coating.

le millefeuilles caramel
We've hit the mother lode here. This is layers of puff pastry with creme legere (pastry cream plus whipped cream), whipped cream with Grand Marnier, and caramel chiboust. It's incredibly delicious and I would make it a food group if I could.

l'andalou
My apologies that this is slightly out of focus. Those two candied almonds on top make it look like something from outerspace, right? It's layers of succes cake (which I am currently obsessed with---it has a slight sugary crunch to it), praline feuillantine, chocolate ganache, lemon cream and chocolate genoise. It's then coated in chocolate and decorated with the almonds, chocolate squares and a gold dragee. The best parts were the lemon cream and the succes cake. As I've said before, I can live without the genoise.

...and in other news
So Alexi didn't do so well as a manager today, mainly because he got flustered, lost focus and got in trouble with Chef. I wish he would get it into his head that I am not here to sabotage him. I want to help. We were putting the genoise circles on the bottom of the individual caranougats and I noticed that we weren't brushing any syrup on the genoise (you always do this because, and I can't say it enough, genoise tastes like cardboard). I mentioned it to him and he heatedly brushed me off. Two minutes later, Chef came in, saw the dry genoise, and really tore into Alexi. Once Chef left, Alexi continued assembling and still didn't stop to brush syrup on. Chef came in again to check, saw his order going ignored and lost it. I mean about ten minutes of yelling. Anyway, I might not get everything right, but I am observant and he shouldn't take my suggestions as a personal affront. We have to work as a team otherwise, like today, it will be all confusion and waste. After the incident, Alexi made vanilla cream for the Diamant rouge, totally overestimated and ended up throwing 3 liters of cream down the drain. He was very lucky Chef didn't catch him again.