Cooking with Pierre

FaubourgPave.jpg

If there’s one thing better than chocolate, it’s chocolate icing. And lots of it. Not too long ago, I was inspired by a thread on eGullet to finally make use of my copy of Pierre Hermes’ Chocolate Desserts book. And decided to make this, a Faubourg Pave: chocolate cake layered with salted butter caramel ganache and little bits of poached dried apricots (flavoured with lemon and pepper). The star of this dessert is the ganache – the slight saltiness is unusual but really highlights the flavour of the chocolate. For this dessert, I used Lindt because Valrhona is a little harder to get at short notice.

The following is a condensed version of Pierre Hermes’ ganache recipe:

185g Valrhona Manjari, finely chopped
120g Valrhona Jivara, finely chopped
140g sugar
20g salted butter
275g heavy cream
335g unsalted butter, at room temperature.

1. Mix the chocolates together in a bowl.
2. Bring the sugar to a dark caramel in a pot. Stir in the salted butter, and then the cream. Bring to boil and then remove pot from heat.
3. Pour half the hot caramel over the chocolate and gently stir with a spatula until smooth. Pour in the rest of the caramel, stirring. Set the ganache aside to cool.
4. Soften the unsalted butter with a spatula. Gently stir the butter into the ganache. Use straight away, or chill and bring back to room temperature before using.

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3 Comments »

  1. Mir said,

    June 26, 2006 @ 9:51 am

    Using that amount of icing on anything should be illegal! It looks sooo good though.

  2. Y said,

    June 26, 2006 @ 2:53 pm

    The amount of butter alone is a bit scary, but it really is fantastic. It reminds me of the way B eats toast – the bread is just the vehicle for the butter!

  3. Calamari said,

    July 3, 2006 @ 10:22 am

    Y, this cake… its da bomb…

    Thanks for introducing it to me, and thanks for providing over the phone technical support on how to make it too!

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