This feeling, when 4 hours before a wedding the fondant slips off your tiered wedding cake and you know you do not really have enough time to do cover it again. This is only one reason to be better prepared. It allows you better Time Management. You can ideally prepare a cake or dessert up to 2 months in advance, take it out of the freezer on the day you need it and give it its finishing touches.
The second aspect is longer shelf life of the dessert. In Modern Pâtisserie many desserts get frozen mainly for hygienic reasons. Compared to storing a dessert in the fridge, in a freezer, the preparation gets cooled down faster to a lower temperature where microorganisms multiply slower which causes the preparation to perish more slowly.
It also gives you flexibility. If the wedding gets canceled short notice, it does not matter…for the cake. You can just leave it in the freezer for now.
The last advantage is that freezing individual components of a dessert can give you additional possibilities in presentation. You can for example shape mousses into spheres, cubes, balls or any other shape, you name it.
But how do you freeze a dessert? First of all, it is important to choose recipes that freeze well like mousses, cakes, biscuits, ganaches, crémeux. Recipes that do not freeze well are anything that is bond with Agar Agar or starch for example, like pastry cream.
In the following some examples.
Furthermore it is to consider how to freeze different components together. Crumbles, for example, can be frozen, but not in direct contact with a mousse. During defrosting the crumbles would pull moisture from the mousse and get soggy and who wants soggy crumbles. Instead, it would be an option to bake a biscuit on top of the crumbles and then place the mousse on top of the biscuit.
The last aspect is how to defrost a dessert well. There are some easy things to consider to avoid condensation or other side effects.
So, let’s do it! Here are some examples of desserts that can be prepared in advance.
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Lemon Meringue Tart Before going to pastry school I made many lemon tarts and just could not figure out why it would always seep. I would spend a lot of time to research it until I bumped into an article that scientifically analyzed the cooking process. It did not answer my question…
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Entremet Sacher with Apricot The original Sacher Torte was created in 1832 at the famous Hotel Sacher and still today gets shipped all over the world. There are rumors that the recipe is locked in a safe at the hotel. It consists of 2 layers of chocolate biscuit…
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