Bouchon Bakery Challenge: Palet d’Or

It’s my final Bouchon Bakery Challenge!  I wanted to go out with a bang, so I made Palet d’Or (“gold disk”).  It’s a fancy, rich, chocolate cake with chocolate cream filling and chocolate glaze.  A lot of chocolate went into this cake!

This recipe caught my eye as soon as I received my copy of Bouchon Bakery.  It looked like it would stretch my skills a bit, but I wanted to give it a try.  Christmas seemed like the perfect occasion for such a decadent dessert.

Making and assembling this cake took a fair amount of time over three days (it can be done in two days), but it was fun to make and none of the steps was difficult.  I learned several new techniques and ended up with a super dessert.

Unmolded cake ready to glaze

The Chocolate Cream layer is incredibly delicious!  I may or may not have had a hard time not eating all the leftovers.

The Chocolate Glaze was very interesting in that it used gelatin to help it set.  I have never seen a recipe do this before and I have to say it was the easiest chocolate glaze I have ever used.

All in all, this cake was fabulous!  Everyone ate it very enthusiastically with lots of oohs and ahhs.  What more can a baker ask for?

Recipe Notes

• I do not own a cake ring and didn’t really want to buy one for just one dessert (also, I had trouble finding the exact right size).  I used my 8″ springform pan without the bottom instead.  It was too tall, so I was not able to make the top as smooth as I could with the ring, but I am not selling this cake at a bakery and am not looking for absolute perfection.  The pan worked well for making the layers and freezing the cake.

• The recipe calls for Brune pâte à glacer (also known as compound chocolate) or plain bittersweet chocolate.  Since it was for such a small amount (to coat one side of each cake layer) I used the regular chocolate and it worked just fine.

• I easily found the gelatin sheets on Amazon.com for a reasonable price: PerfectaGel Silver Gelatin Sheets.

• Instead of garnishing the cake with gold leaf, I used gold edible glitter, which I found at King Arthur Flour.

Cake with glittering Christmas lights reflecting off it

Altitude Adjustments

I made several adjustments for altitude (I am at about 4500 ft.).

For the Devil’s Food Cake:   I used a scant 1/2 tsp. baking soda and a scant 1/8 tsp. baking powder.  I used one whole egg and one egg white, for a total of 90 grams of egg.  I added an extra tablespoon of water.  The adjustments seemed to work, as the cake turned out well.

For the Chocolate Cream:  When warming the egg mixture in the double boiler, I took it off the heat when the temperature reached 175°F to account for the lower boiling point.

Next Month

There is no next month as I intended this to be a year-long project.  However, I will continue to make an effort to use this book and try more recipes.