Red wine poached pears entremet

Hi. Does anyone even drop by anymore? :)

I know I'm not an expert in many things, but I'm certainly a master in procrastinating. These days, I have simply no urge to blog, nor even, *gasp* bake. It seems my lackadaisical plateau has hit an even lower bottom than I had possibly imagined.

Oh well. I'm not going to question it, but go with the flow. Perhaps I've spent too much time overanalysing this, but I'll try to post some photos today to make up for the absence for the past two weeks. I had a baking session some time back with Evan, and we had decided to make another entremet together (yes, it's so hard to find like minded people who love to bake entremets - or rather, I'm just a very shy person to begin with so I don't reach out my hand first to know more people hee).

Red wine poached pears entremet

It was a little hard to settle on one recipe, as Evan has so much experience behind her belt, and cos we have quite differing taste buds preferences, but thankfully, we managed to choose one that we thought would be quite interesting. And who is to say our choice was anything other than interesting...

I poached the pears the previous night, omg it smelt so awesome (I didn't have some stuff on hand so I sorta subbed whatever I could think of). We didn't have a problem with the cake. And that's just about whatever we didn't have any problems with. The rest of the recipe was a...mess.

Like Evan said, it's not that we are inexperienced bakers, but this is certainly one weird recipe! The steps were quite ambiguous, and in the end we just took matters in our hands and ran with it.

Let's start with what I liked shall we? I liked how burgendy red the pears were on the outside, but was a bit puzzled why it wasn't a deeper shade when sliced. Oh wells.

Now let's move on to what I didn't like (which is plenty). What I didn't like was how ugly the shade of red wine mousse was. Lol. The colour looked...(not just a tad, but a lot of tad in this case) unappetizing and appealing. No other word to descibe it. And the pear mousse doesn't have any pear taste whatsoever. Not to mention that we had so many problems with all the steps of the recipe. I can safely say that this is one of the thumbs down recipe I've ever tried so far. Nevertheless, we shouldered on and barreled our way to complete it. Heads up to Evan for being so optimistic about it cos I recall that I was pretty grouchy that day as I was having my period, and the problems we faced just made me grouchier.

Anyway, though we had plenty of problems with the recipe, I'm just glad that it churned out such a pretty cake. Just look at the above layered piece (where I used the leftover smaller pear slices). ;)

Innards layers top to down - Glaze; poached pear slices; red wine mousse; genoise; pear mousse; genoise)

Red wine poached pears entremet

(makes eight 8cm (3") sphere entremets)

Red wine poached pears

(*proportions and the steps will be up tonight when I go home to check my notes)

Genoise

75g almond meal

75g icing sugar

90g eggs

65g egg whites

15g sugar

20g cake flour

15g melted butter

Pear mousse

116g pear syrup

1/2 tsp vanilla bean paste

56g egg yolks

18.5g sugar

3g gelatin

140g whipping cream

Red wine mousse

102g red wine poaching liquid

40g egg yolks

27g sugar

4.5g gelatin

102g whipping cream

Glaze layer

75g mirror gel

30g red wine poaching liquid

2g lemon juice

10g water

Combine all in a small bowl. Microwave for 40 seconds (in 20s intervals). Stir to mix.

If the mirror gel still looks clumpy, microwave for another few seconds and stir again. Leave to cool.

Assembly steps

Make the pear mousse as stated above. Pour into a small baking tray lined with plastic wrap. Freeze till firm.

Drain and thinly slice the poached pears. Line the silicon sphere molds with the pear slices. Place in freezer.

Dice the remaining pear bits. Remove silicon mold from freezer. Place a bit of diced pears into the molds.

Cut out the cake base rounds using a 4cm (1.75") cookie cutter. Set aside. Cut out inner cake rounds using a 3cm (1.5") cookie cutter.

Pour a bit of red wine poaching liquid into a small bowl. Dip the smaller inner cake rounds

into the poaching liquid just to moisten, press down on top of diced pears.

Pipe some red wine mousse around the edges of the diced pears and inner cake rounds.

Remove pear mousse tray from freezer, use a 4cm cutter to cut out the portions. Place one frozen pear mousse round into each sphere mold on top of the red wine mousse.

Pipe in remainder red wine mousse, leaving some space for the cake base.

Dip the cake bases into the red wine poaching liquid, press down atop the red wine mousse.

Return silicon mold to freezer. Freeze till firm. Unmold by carefully popping each cake out of the mold. Chill in fridge.

Make the glaze as stated above. When cooled, place cakes over a baking rack placed over a baking sheet, pour over the cakes, allowing the excess glaze to drip down onto the baking sheet.