The Sunday Pâtisserie: Bavarois Kiwi

Hello everyone, there's more of you checking this blog and it makes me very happy! This time I made a kind of fruity cheesecake. It was a lot of fun to make...

Bavarois Kiwi

Bavarois is a kind of cream cake, typical to French cuisine. It's made with either eggs, sugar, milk, and whipped cream or with a mixture of mashed fruits and whipped cream. Its main characteristics are its softness and delicate taste. The "bavarois cream" can be served on its own, but it's very common to use it as one of the layers in a cake. For instance there's a famouse strawberry cake in France which uses a bavarois cream made with fresh strawberries.

Mine was made with a base of génoise (sponge cake), on which stood my kiwi bavarois cream and topped by a lid of red berries.

I decided to make my bavarois with fruits (as I said earlier, it can be made without, but more of that another time), and more especially kiwis. Now I know it's not the season but I had kiwis sitting in the fridge for a good two months now (I have my brother to thank for that, he likes smoothies but not making them...) and believe it or not they were still pretty good!

But what I didn't know before, and which I'll make sure to remember from now on, is that kiwis don't go well with gelatin, a setting agent, key to the success of a bavarois cream (to make sure your cream stands solid). It worked this time but I could tell that given enough time outside the fridge, the cake would melt in a puddle of whipped kiwi cream quickly.

To make the cream, I mixed the kiwis and then added a syrup made of water, sugar and the gelatin in it.

Once the single cream (it's a thick liquid cream) whipped , I added the kiwi mixture to it and I obtained my kiwi bavarois cream.
I poured it on top of my sponge cake (I added grapefruit slices for taste). You need a cake circle for that, since at that point the cream is still pretty liquid and needs time to cool before solidifying.


Once you get the gist of it, the cake is easy to make. On the top, I added a covering of red berries. Those were frozen so I simmered them on low fire with sugar, added a bit of gelatin (red berries are full of a natural setting agent already), then dropped it on the top of my set kiwi cream. More cooling time and it was finally ready.

Have a great week! Sorry for the lack of Tuesday Spices recently but it should come back soon, I'm working on something else that takes much of my time at the moment but no worries, it definitely will come back. Also I'll post the recipes of the cakes I make as time goes by, so stay tuned!