A walk in the garden - Looking at the fifth course of my pop-up restaurant

Course 5 of the pop-up was (in my opinion) the best of the 5 courses. It was my take on an apple cider, but in the form of an apple on chocolate soil. So what do you imagine when you think of apple cider? 

Well, I'll tell you what I think of. Firstly, the beautiful flavour of poached apples. As the apples slowly cook, they gain a beautiful flavour, which is the first and most prominent flavour in the whole cider. Secondly, spices. Star anise, cinnamon, ginger, clove, interesting winter time spices. Thirdly, chocolate. Not in the apple cider, but with it. Apple cider late at night after dinner with a bar of chocolate is just a comfort drink for me. Fourth and finally, other complimentary flavours that you add to it - vanilla, butterscotch, white chocolate, etc. 

Okay, so now we have an idea of what flavours we want. Do we have an idea of how the plate should look? This isn't a question we usually ask here, but I already had an idea about the plating, so I wanted to develop the dish on that. I wanted it to look like an apple, but when you break it apart, it is actually a dessert. And, I wanted it on some sort of soil to look like an apple in soil, like you would imagine in a real garden. 

Now, how do chefs make dishes that look hyper-realistic? 2 options. Option 1) cake with fondant. Sponge cake with icing and fondant is extremely malleable, and it can be made to be incredibly realistic. The upside of this is that it can be extremely realistic if done right, and compared to the other method, this is the easier of the two to make realistic options with. The downside is that firstly, it doesn't have enough scope for the depth of flavour that I want, and 2, sponge cake doesn't make me feel like I'm drinking my mother's smooth apple cider. I want something that is not solid, maybe creamy or liquid, but not a dry sponge cake. Also, I really don't like fondant in the slightest. 

So not that option. Option 2) Ganache and culinary trompe l'oeil. Lots of weird words there, and some you maybe didn't expect to see. Yes, I'm talking about ganache, and yes ganache is used on cakes and on cupcakes, and although the basic premise is the same, this is a different version of it. Trompe l'oeil - it is a painting technique used to make things feel like they have depth, but in food, it is a technique of coating food items in a layer of chocolate (I'm not sure if other coatings can also be applied and if those count, but my research showed me that it is for chocolate). Advantages - Creamy, smooth, can be equally realistic, and it keeps the form I imagined for my dessert. Disadvantages - WAYYY MORE EASY TO MESS UP COMPLETELY. 

So to the dessert. The first thing I did is make a white chocolate whipped ganache. In these types of ganaches, the special ingredient is agar agar. When you add agar agar, it makes the ganache set much thicker. Combining this agar agar with whipping cream gives it the potential to be whipped and for it to be very airy. 

Here's a note though. These ganaches have an extremely strong white chocolate flavour, so it takes a lot of ingredients to get through that. What I did is poached 3 apples in the oven with lots of gingerbread spices and brown sugar until they were super soft. Then, I blended them into a very thick puree and mixed it in to the main ganache. Here's what that does. The apple puree is much thicker when done with poached apples, so it actually matches the consistency of the ganache. Since apple cider has a very intense apple flavour, you could go even further with the apples to make it even stronger (I would add a bit more agar if you do that though). Additionally, the ganache looks very white without any apples, but with the addition of this puree it begins to match the inside of an actual apple. 

At this stage, I popped it into the fridge and moved on to the next elements. 

As I said, we want apple in as many elements as we can get, so an apple jelly makes sense. It adds another texture to the dish (almost a chewy texture) along with some flavour. I had already used red apples in the main ganache, so to add some of the beautiful green apple flavour, I made sure that all of the internal apple-based elements used green apples instead of red. Therefore, this was a green apple jelly. It's literally green apple juice and agar agar, so there's nothing super complex about it. 

With the jelly, I also made an apple butterscotch sauce. Some green apple juice instead of the water in the recipe and the rest was the same. Lots of apple flavour in here, but also the beautiful caramelised brown sugar and butter flavours of butterscotch. 

Finally, I made a cinnamon spiced sponge. I'm attaching a recipe by nigella below which is for a coffee sponge, and all I did was use that recipe but instead of coffee, I added gingerbread spices, especially cinnamon. Remember, this is just a center, so there is no way to add too much gingerbread spices, so long as the ratios are correct and no one spice is super overpowering. I'd bake it in a layer of around 1.5 inches, because you can always cut off excess centre but you cannot magically attach more. 

Now comes the assembly. You whip the ganache until it's airy, fill two hemisphere moulds till they're 3/4ths of the way full and then press in the centres. On one hemisphere, the green apple jelly and then a spoonful of butterscotch sauce over it, and on the other hemisphere, the sponge cake. Then, you set the two hemispheres individually. KEEP A BIT OF GANACHE ASIDE FOR LATER. 

HERE'S THE BIGGEST CRISIS OF THE ENTIRE POP UP. Of all days, this was the day my freezer failed on me. It literally stopped freezing things. All the ice cream melted, the ice wasn't setting as quickly, and especially my hemispheres didn't freeze at all. After 6 hours, I realised what had happened and I had to move it to the other freezer and pray that it set in time. It did. 

Now you join the other hemispheres, smooth the full apple out a bit and freeze it. The recipe I've given below should give you a nice detailed description of how to do it. Finally, the coating. Again, the recipe below tells you how to do it, but here's a tip. The chocolate sets quite quickly, so if you leave it too long, it may set. But, you need to wait as long as you possibly can for it to cool before you dip the apples. If it's too hot, the outside layer of the ganache begins to melt upon touching the chocolate and makes little pockets from where ganache starts dripping. It isn't like the apple won't be edible if this happens, it will just look terrible. If you can, try to cool it to below 30°C before dipping, ideally 25° is the perfect number. 

As for the chocolate soil, I used yotam ottolenghi's valentines day recipe to find the soil, and there's really not much more to say...no wait there is. Firstly, the chocolate soil burns quickly. In the heat of the kitchen, I left it in for exactly 25 minutes instead of 22. When I pulled it out, the chocolate soil had become a bit bitter, so I had to restart with a new batch. This may also be because of my other tip - secondly, add more cocoa powder than is in the recipe. I think this may have contributed to the burning of the first batch, but the chocolate flavour needs to be strong enough for you to feel it, so I still recommend adding extra (around 1.5 - 2x what the recipe suggests). 

And yeah, that's it. The chocolate soil can cover up any mild issues near the base, so don't worry too much, and it is honestly much simpler than it sounds. Try it, you'll see what I mean. 

Recipes - 

White chocolate ganache, coating (you may need to translate this page, so I recommend using chrome) - http://les-sucreries-de-yory.blogspot.com/2018/04/citron-vert-mojito.html

Spiced sponge https://www.nigella.com/recipes/coffee-and-walnut-layer-cake

Chocolate soil - https://www.theguardian.com/food/2022/feb/12/ricotta-squash-pasta-mushroom-meatballs-strawberry-cream-yotam-ottolenghi-valentines-day-recipes-for-two

Butterscotch sauce - https://www.biggerbolderbaking.com/butterscotch-sauce-homemade/