Soo. Here we are. Welcome to relet's late afternoon show. This is all about cuisine géometrique, the latest fashion north of New York and south of the Rio Grande. Today, we will be -you may have guessed it already, if you had a look at the TV programme- baking spheres.

For many of you, this will be a grand step forward from the usual pizza circles, so we will be taking things slowly. And as usual, you will be able to find all recipes and instructions in our paid subscription channel to re-read and re-cook.

But let's get things started. We've barely got four minutes left before the next ad break.

As we have seen last week, there are two main approaches to three-dimensional bakery. One: Raising agents. Two: Molds. We shall see an example of both today. Aand here is our menu:

~ Delicious garden soup in spherical bread boules. ~

followed by a dessert of

~ Five layered gâteau sphérique with cranberries and vanilla cream. ~

---

Garden soup in bread bowls

This is a recipe that is well suited to be prepared in advance, and should be prepared at least a day in advance. Many a good soup should be left to stand overnight to gain flavour. Therefore, assuming that you have prepared a tasty garden soup yesterday, let us proceed to the more geometrical aspects.

You will see that by the use of raising agents (aka yeast), we will be able to produce beautiful spheres almost automagickally. We start with a simple bread dough (please refer to the basic recipes in our paid subscription channel) with an ample amount of yeast. This dough is left to rise in the slightly warm oven at least two times.

Before the third time, we fill the dough into hemispherical bowls. You will find that some bowls are more spherical than others, but any mathematician or physician can help you overcome these minor details with the help of assumptions.



These bowls are left to bake in the oven at a temperature of 144 degrees Réaumure until they acquire their spherical form and a crispy brown outer crust. Adding a bowl of water helps to keep the moisture level in the oven higher, thus allowing the rest of the bread to bake more thoroughly before the crust develops.



Just have a look at the beautiful bowl on the rear right, which is my personal favourite!

Now cut a lid off your crispy bowl with a sharp knife and hollow out the innards with a sharp spoon.



With the help of a brush or a paper towel, coat your bread bowl with olive oil from the inside and let it bake again to seal the soft inside while heating up your soup.

Then, fill your soup into the bowls, and seal with the lid before serving. If you have extra soup, it is a good idea to offer refills before finally enjoying the crispy soupy bowl itself.

---

Gâteau sphérique

Disclaimer: Between these two takes, our cooking studio has been relocated from the center of a capital city to the middle of Nowhere. We had to improvize a bit to complete this episode.

Again, the dessert can well be prepared in advance, for example on the morning of the same day. We start with a simple cake batter, which again we fill into our spherical bowls. As you can see, We have even been able to improve on the spherical aspect of our bowls.



We do not expect them to rise much, this time. We will make up for this with two savoury layers of cranberry and vanilla jelly. Again, please have a look at the recipes in our paid subscription channel (or the very recommendable book: "The voluptuous vegan", where you can roughly follow the recipe dubbed 'a lazy mans way to make a fancy cake').

Now, the original recipe calls for Agar-agar, which we haven't been able to come up with yet. Our location scouts brought us this instead:



...which is locally used to produce a frozen jellied fruit dessert. It contains at least three obscure chemical thickening agents, which we had hoped could easily substitute a spoonful of Agar.



Now, under the assumption that we have used Agar powder, we heat up our cranberries in a sauce pot, and when the juice is boiling, slowly add the powder to the mix while stirring to dissolve it. If you use Agar flakes, it will take a little longer to dissolve things.



Pour the hot juice into the bowls, where it will jellify while cooling off. Meanwhile, prepare the vanilla-sauce-jelly in the same fashion, and add a spoonful of Agar.

Fill in the vanilla jelly until it fills the bowl completely, to the very upper lid.



Let's just assume it, ok?

Following all my assumptions made so far, by toppling the contents of the one bowl over the other, you will obtain a beautiful spherical five-layered cake, as depicted in the following artist's illustration:



And this is what it looks like when you make the same mistakes I do:

Can I have an ad break please! Now!

It was still as yummy as intended though...