dinette pastry party n°1

Dinette pastry number one, or how to make a "pâte a bombe" with two egg yolks.
God! just at the thought of it, my Chef would probably raise his eye brows, sigh and say :" Alors, Manon ! on joue à la dinette aujourd'hui ? "Yes, "je joue à la dinette" and today marks the start of my "off work"pastry parties. Today, there will be no consideration of profitability, efficency, speed (the "terrible threes" that rule a pastry shop.) Today, I want to bake something (oui, oui, a "montage" and "a pâte a bombe" for one and only one "entremet") that I have been meaning to bake for quite a long time: a cake mainly consisting in a cheese cake mousse or a Philadelphia cream cheese mousse, if you prefer. This mousse, which could be "tasted" a few years ago in several of Pierre Hermé's pastries, can still be found nowadays in Angélina's Saori, in Tokyo Eat's Cheese cake and in a Chrismas log ( the Ephémère ) by Des Gâteaux et du Pain (cf. Journal du Pâtissier, November 2009). This is not surprising since the three chefs who like to use this particular mousse ( handsome Sébastien Bauer, Hermès Agboton, and Claire Damon) have all worked at some point at or with Pierre Hermé. They usually use it as a sort of layer to a genuine cheese cake base and with a fruit insert (either red fruit or citrus fruit). I didn't have enough Philadelphia cream cheese, so I omited the cheese cake base and used a passion fruit curd as an upper layer. The result wasn't quite what I had expected. Separatly the mousse and the curd were pretty good. Next time, though, I will put in less butter into the curd because, as I made it, the amount of butter I put in gave a bland taste which sploilt the true flavor of the passion fruit. So the combination of the crumble base, the mousse, and the curd was alright without being fantastic. The passion curd prevented you from tasting the flavor of the mousse. Next time, for this cake, I will make a cheese cake base, a cheese cake mousse and a red fruit insert.
I found the recipe for this in Piere Hermé's book, Les Desserts Préférés de Pierre Hermé. For the passin fruit curd, I used the recipe I already had used for lemon curd (with fewer yolks).


Angélina, 226 rue de Rivoli, 75001, Paris.

Des Gâteaux et du Pain, 63 blvd. Pasteur, 75013, Paris.

Tokyo Eat, 13 av. du président Wilson, 75016, Paris.