plaisir sucré, or sweet pleasure, is one of the many pierre hermé's masterpieces that i adore. apart from the ispahan, this is another well-known creation using a lovely combination of milk choc & hazelnuts. making this again certainly brought back lotsa memories as this was one of the earliest entremets i started out attempting and it reminded me of how intimidated i was with chocolate tempering and multi-component desserts then. and now, years later, it was nice revisiting just to see how i fared.


layers from top : milk choc sheet, milk choc whipped cream, milk choc ganache, hazelnut praline feuilletine & hazelnut dacquoise

the first time i made this, i followed the recipe's instruction and made them into 10cm x 5cm rectangles. the size was not only odd (they didn't look elegant at all), it was also kinda big for an individual portion. pretty hard to finish it all up since it can be rather cloying (its afterall milk choc & nutella). so this time round i made them into 11cm x 3cm rectangles, pretty similar to what pierre herme's patisserie is selling and they look so much better! this is also the size i'm using for all my sliced entremets now and i like it alot.


though not a huge fan of nutella (i think it tastes like cheap compound choc), this dessert, i must say, tasted exceptional. i can't decide which component i liked best since they complemented each other really well but if i had to choose, it'll definitely be the really crisp and crunchy feuilletine flakes embedded within the nutella. its important to use good ingredients hence i used valrhona jivara lactée 40% milk choc and instead of rice krispies i substituted with feuilletine flakes for the praline. i think feuilletine yields the best results even though its ok to use rice krispies or cornflakes. nx time round i intend to make my own nutella by combining praline paste (i'm eyeing on the max felchlin one) and milk choc. aesthetic-wise, i noticed quite a few people who made this had their layers really thick, like this one, making the whole dessert chunky instead of elegant. i didn't want that so i used the one pierre herme sells at his patisserie as a guideline - which is, the ganache at the bottom inbetween the 2nd & 3rd choc sheet shouldn't be visible. all in all, the whole thing should be low in height, just like all other entremets. i don't think this is anymore time consuming than the rest of the entremets i've made before but you could start making the choc sheets one day before, if making everything within a day seems overwhelming.



recipe source : chocolate desserts by pierre hermé

*recipe removed due to copyright restrictions.