This classic Tiramisu is not a cheap dessert for sure, it is filled with a delicious Mascarpone cream and covered with chocolate powder. We also have a couple of ladyfinger layers that are soaked with a coffee caramel.

A bombe is a frozen dessert, it is shaped and then frozen, it could be even a shaped Ice Cream or a Sorbet. In this basic bombe recipe below we mixed caramel with the egg yolk and added carefully melted chocolate. After refrigeration we fold in a whipped cream, shape it and freeze it. A bombe provides a lot of room for decorating as you can see in the picture below.

Soufflés kind of remind us of the preparation of a sponge cake, we separate yolk and later fold in egg whites, however, it is evident that the soufflés have a much higher proportion of eggs to flour and particularly of egg whites. This is why the soufflés rise so much in the oven and also one of the reasons they must be served immediately (within 2 minutes from the oven) because they will rapidly deflate, losing part of its presentation and charm.

A Creme Caramel is not very different from any other baked custard. To make it first make some caramel with water and sugar over the stove and line the bottom of your pan or cup it. Before pouring the custard on top, let the caramel cool down. Once it is cool pour you custard into the mold and put it in the over on a bain-marie. Let it cool and refrigerate, after refrigerating for some time, some of the caramel will be released and form a beautiful sauce when unmolded.

The white cover we used on this cake is an Italian buttercream. In an Italian buttercream we use the Italian method to make meringue, in this method sugar is heated with water to a soft ball stage (240F) and then slowly added to you beaten egg whites. Finally we add softened butter a little at a time, making sure it is incorporated to our meringue, to finish we flavor the buttercream with vanilla extract and it is ready for piping.

Traditionally a pound cake, like the name suggests, uses a pound of each ingredient, 1 pound of fat, 1 pound of sugar, 1 pound of flour and 1 pound of eggs. We used a lighter recipe and a smaller yield too. This is a cake with high fat content and we use the creaming method (combining sugar and fat first) to make the dough. We get a fine grain with moist crumb, the crust is thin and tender.

Napoleon in the picture below, also known as mille-feuille is made by layering puff pastry with a filling, in this case we used Pastry Cream. The layers of pastry are then topped with a glaze, we used Cheesecake filling here and the pattern was created with some chocolate Ganashe.

Discreet holes are made underneath our paste so we can get access to the airy interior and fill with pastry cream. Using a small tip in a piped bag we do a circular motion to get it as filled as possible but also in a consistent manner as every item should be pretty much equal in amount and weight.

Meringue is a very easy sweet to make, the mix of egg whites and sugar is beaten to the right consistency and we pipe them in a start shape over the sheet pan. If you let it stay too long in the oven the Meringue may crack easily like in the picture below. Just monitor the consistency while in the oven, it should be getting hard, but not too much.

The Brioches sorrounding the Challah in the picture below are traditional french Brioches called Brioche à tête (with a hat). As you can also see our hats came out pretty irregular in this batch. Don't get me wrong, the taste was still perfect but I have not done them enough to get the presentation technique correctly.