Week 6: Peach Yogurt Mousse Cake

For this week's cake, the work was spread out over 2 weeks!  So after making the Linzer torte last week, we made the sponge for this cake and left it in the freezer.

The sponge for this cake, Hot Milk Sponge, was really yummy and different from other sponge cakes I've made before and it was fairly simple to make.  What makes this cake so unique, moist and delicious was the heating up the milk and eggs with sugar separately and then whipping them together later in the recipe.  When the cake was right out of the oven, it smelled like it was going to taste really eggy, but by the time I tried some the following week after the freezing, it didn't have an eggy flavour at all.

The yogurt mousse filling was a mixture of whipped cream and yogurt, with a little bit of gelatin for added stability.  We used a full fat yogurt, but at home, you can substitute for a lower fat content, but you'd have to increase the gelatin to compensate.  The instructor explained if you were to switch out the peaches for citrus, you would have to increase the gelatin even more to prevent the citrus from breaking down the mousse.   

When using gelatin, it's important to dissolve it over heat and temper it when incorporating.  The tempering ensures that it is not shocked when mixing it into the cold mousse and the heat makes sure it fully dissolves with no lumps.

The assembly was pretty quick.  We used cake ring molds to cut the cake layers out of the sheet tray. After lining the cake ring with a strip of acetate, we layered a cake circle, brushed on a good amount of simple syrup, spread some yogurt mousse and then some diced peaches.  We repeated this, until the cake was the desired height, except the diced peaches on the top layer. 




For the top, we sliced peaches and arranged them nicely.  This was the most time consuming part, and it didn't even take that long.  To finish it off, we sealed everything in with some apricot glaze and covered the sides with mousse and sliced almonds.




We used canned peaches for all of this, so I'd be interested to see if fresh fruit would hold up the same.  I think this cake could work really well with strawberries :)