Black Star Pastry will debut a soft-serve based on its best-selling watermelon cake at this year’s Smooth Festival of Chocolate in Sydney, happening August 12 and 13 in The Rocks. The watermelon cake soft-serve will be based on the original layer cake recipe, which features almond dacquoise, watermelon, strawberries, and a final layer of pistachio and rose petals. A white chocolate version will also be available.
The limited-edition soft-serve Black Star is creating for the festival follows the dark-chocolate version of watermelon cake the Sydney patisserie served at the last two festivals.
The weekend-long Festival of Chocolate, devoted to the craft of chocolatiers and pastry chefs, includes stalls, demonstrations and tastings of cacao-based treats, from chocolate bark to ales made with Dutch-process cocoa. There’s also two days full of demonstrations for those who aren’t content to simply taste their way around the festival. Taking the stage at this year’s Callebaut Test Kitchen are over a dozen doyennes of dessert including Jodie Van Der Velden of Josophan’s Fine Chocolates, La Renaissance’s Jean Michel Raynaud and GT‘s senior food editor Lisa Featherby.
Featherby will demonstrate how to create her dark chocolate mousse cake, a triple hit of sponge, orange-hazelnut chocolate mousse and ganache that will test the skills of many bakers with its complexity.
Dark chocolate mousse cake.
“There’s lots of interesting techniques used in this cake,” she says. “It also incorporates two different chocolates, which have different cocoa solid percentages.”
Also up on the stage is Riccardo Falcone of Rockpool Dining Group, who will showcase the secrets behind his oft-Instagrammed chocolate Dragon Egg, served at Saké with a rotating assortment of fillings from chocolate soil to crystallised ginger. Petal Met Sugar’s Elsa Li plans to make her panna cotta and chocolate Terrarium dessert during her demonstration.
Alongside Black Star, there will be stalls from the likes of Gelato Messina, Donut Papi, Serendipity Ice-Cream and Mr Black.
Smooth Festival of Chocolate Sydney, 10am-6pm, 12-13 August 2017, The Rocks, Sydney, smooth.com.au/smooth/festival-of-chocolate.
