“Joconde imprime is a decorative design baked into a light sponge cake providing an elegant finish to desserts/torts/entremets/ formed in ring molds. A joconde batter is used because it bakes into a moist, flexible cake. The cake batter may be tinted or marbleized for a further decorative effect.”
“Entremets is an ornate dessert with many different layers of cake and pastry creams in a mold, usually served cold.”
When Joconde and Entrement come together, they mean a delicate and sophisticated cake that I wasnt prepare to make (in terms of technical skills and pastry equipment that I have in my kitchen). Couple days before I found out the theme of this month's DBs challenge, I had been admiring at pictures of Pierre Herme's "Elysee" which he created during his time at Fauchon. I found its simple and perfectly straight chocolate brown and cream white stripy pattern utterly elegant. I like things with simple patterns and usually with two tones. My second thought was..... some expensive professional equipments must be used. Thanks to this challenge, I was very surprised to know that a plastic “comb” could do the effect! I need to get one next time when I visit a big city. But for the challenge, I used a chopstick!
This was the first cake that I had to come up with a combination of flavours and fillings. It gave me a couple of sleepless night just thinking about how I could actually achieve the structure that I wanted with the limited pastry tools that I have - a small ring! I guess that was sufficient! The look was disappointing, but the flavours were very very very good!
