Matcha Black Sesame Entremet with White Sesame Nougatine

This recipe is completely inspired by Evan’s Kitchen ramblings, one of the most visually appealing blogs, made more awesome by Evan’s generosity in providing recipes. Evan’s recipe for Matcha Black Sesame Entremet can be found here.

I’ve been meaning to make something different from what I usually do. To challenge myself with an entremet.

According to Stick of A Chef,

Within the pastry world, an entremet is typically a multi-layered mousse-based cake comprising of different complementary flavors with varying textural contrasts. A well executed entremet should adhere to the basic principles of visual appeal, textural contrast, and, of course, taste. The beauty of entremets comes from the myriad of shapes it can take on (round, pyramid, rectangular, hexagonal, teardrop, dome shapes) and the abundance of colours within the multi-layer attributes of this mousse cake. The taste receptor should be challenged as well with different combinations of taste sensations like salty, sour, sweet and bitter.

Conceiving a well constructed and well balanced tasting entremet lies in it the way each flavor component is assembled and complements each other.Within an entremet, it is typical to have three or four different complementary component flavors of varying textural contrasts.To the uninitiated, an entremet may seem like a lot of work that is very difficult to produce but in actual fact, making entremets are easy if you approach it in a step by step fashion.

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It was 100 times easier than I expected. Simply said, the sponge cake was the hardest part of the recipe.

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From this experience, I learnt:

1. Whipping cream is magical!! After whipping for a moment or two, the liquidy cream zaps into a more solid form, that’s spreadable like soft butter. Totally cool.

2. Baking full fat is much easier than baking low fat.

3. The addition of butter to sponge cake changes the texture of the sponge cake completely! But I still I prefer the butterless sponge cake. Its much more moist and soft.

4. Gelatin = magic. But gelatin ≈ cow’s skin = much disgust + uneasiness.

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I found this brilliant lower fat version of whipped cream that is miraculously more affordable that regular whipped cream. It worked perfectly in this recipe! 

Do try it if you get the chance!

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Chocolate Glacage is adapted from: http://www.worldchocolatemasters.com/en/763 

Matcha sugar syrup, matcha mousse and sponge cake are from: http://bossacafez.blogspot.com/2010/09/matcha-black-sesame.html 

Black sesame mousse and white seame nougatine are adapted from: http://mushitza.blogspot.com/2011/01/matcha-black-sesame-entrement.html

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