French Modern Cake Art

One of our newest colleagues hails from France as in Vive la!  For one of her first contributions she reached to a French recipe. How appropriate!  This was a yellow cake with many layers and homemade chocolate frosting. Despite the disclaimer that the cake did not rise correctly in fact the layers looked pretty good. The cake was a little squat so squeezing all four layers into it is an impressive accomplishment. Of course the best part was the decorative chocolate "art" on the top of the cake.  Not content to leave it a plain surface the cook used decorative shards, shavings, drizzle and a dollop of fruit to embellish it in a very modernistic way. This is the kind of thing that contemporary pastry chefs do. Throw conformity and all those florets to the wind and be creative with your cake decorating. It's definitely imaginative and probably a lot easier because you don't have to get out one of those pesky pastry bags.

Un gateau français

Compact but multi-layered

Jackson Pollock au chocolat

The cake certainly tasted good and the chocolate was great. As a bonus we got a French version of chocolate chip cookies both with and without the chips. As in the case of most Euro-treats these were nowhere near as sweet as the American version but we won't quarrel with an American classic. We enjoyed these extra tidbits with the artful layer cake and were impressed with the first cake offering of our new colleague française!

Cookies de la France!

 A lighter and less sweet version of the Toll House!