A girlfriend's birthday cake

I bought two new cooking books recently. What's surprising is that:

1) I rarely ever buy cooking books, most of the time I borrow books from the library and scan the recipes I like to keep as jpeg files in my laptop.

2) The books are in Chinese! (Okay, one is fully in Chinese, the other is English/Chinese). Although I scored A1s for my O AND A levels (don't ask how I did it, I really have no idea), my Chinese is actually pretty sub-par and it's been so long since I last wrote any Chinese characters that most of the time, I find myself forgetting how to write even the most basic characters...(I'm always fearful that I'll forget how to write my own name in Chinese. Haha). I mean, I can read Chinese pretty okay, just don't ask me to write, so to buy the Chinese cookbooks is really a rarity indeed. It's just that I love layered cakes desserts and most of the pretty intricate looking entremets cookbooks are all in Chinese (or Japanese or French, which sadly I know neither). Thus, it can also be that reading the books I buy will allow me to brush up on my Chinese reading? :)

Anyway, exactly a month ago, it was one of my best girlfriend's birthday. Since I've been baking a cake for most of my besties this year for their birthdays, this was no exception. She, who doesn't like sweets stuff muchos, will probably suit a fruity cake yeah? And looking through one of my new books, I decided to make a grapefruit mousse cake.

Leftover miniature cakes...

...piled high with red red rubies.

I was going to add in a mandarin gelee layer in between the cake layers, but somehow, my gelee leaked (I set it in my 6 inch square ring) and I was left with...nothing. :( Ok, so scrap that idea, I manage to cut out one small flower from the mess and saved it for decoration. As for the final decoration, I added slightly more pomegranates after taking the photo above as it was looking quite bare. Haha. I love pomegranates and since there was a pomegranate fruit in the fridge, I decided that it shall be my decoration for the cake! Love the bright red colour of the fruit.

I liked the chewy coconut dacquoise (though one of the girlfriends said she prefer a traditional cake base texture, than the chewy dacquoise). The grapefruit mousse was a little bland though, luckily there were still the grapefruit segments embedded within the mousse to give it a slightly sweeter taste. I replaced the top yogurt mousse layer with a lemon mousse recipe from Tartelette as I do not normally buy plain yogurt and mascarpone cheese, which were ingredients needed for the mousse in the original recipe. I must say I didn't like the lemon mousse. It tasted very strong and overpower the delicate tasting grapefruit mousse beneath it. It had an almost cheesecake (?!?!) taste to it. A first recipe that I used from Tartelette that I didn't like! Wow.

It was my first time decorating with chocolate and I used white chocolate (to match the decoration theme of light pastels). I didn't temper it, but instead I used a way Evan had suggested before - just melting down the chocolate and then using it. I used Valhrona chocolate cos I just bought a box of it and I had fun playing with the chocolate. I think because I didn't temper it, the chocolate kept melting after it was removed from the fridge. I had trouble transporting the cake - from my house to work, fridge it, then after work brought it to meet my girls. I did check up periodically on the cake and when the edges of the chocolate curled, I tried to "straighten" it again using a knife, and the kind staff at Shokudo offered to keep the cake in the fridge while we had our dinner. :)

No more besties birthdays for the rest of the year! *phew. Now, how shall I find an excuse to bake another entremet??? Ok, no worries, there's still my own birthday...then again, I'm not sure if I want to bake myself a cake...haha!