Week 28-29 Chocolate II

Week 28 brought the return of the dreaded chocolate unit. I did not enjoy the first chocolate unit - it was messy and tempering chocolate proved to be challenging. Surprisingly, I really enjoyed our second chocolate unit. I now have a feel for the tempering process, and the whole thing went much smoother.

Spiced Caramels

This unit we got to make a bunch of candies - both traditional and some not so much (beer ganache anyone?). In the first unit, we did hand-rolled truffles which have a less uniform look than their molded counterpart - bon bons.

Chocolate-dipped Butter Toffee

Peanut Butter Nougat - Soooooo good!

When I think of bon bons, lazy housewives lounging on the sofa eating them comes to mind. This is probably because whenever my dad would come home from work, a frequent refrain from my mom would be "What do you think I did all day? Lay on the couch and eat bon bons?"

"Paint-splattered" Dulce de Leche Bon Bons

My Glitter-ized Dulce de Leche Bon Bons

Bon bons are great because there's so many different fillings you can make. Almost any flavor can be used. One of the best class days in this unit was when our class had free rein to make a filling of our choice. I made a passion fruit caramel filling and a beer ganache filling. Some of my classmates fillings included caramel apple, tiramisu, wasabi, fig, peanut butter, and so many more. In the locker room after class, the culinary students just descended on the beer ganache bon bons, devouring almost all of them.

Gold=Milk Chocolate Bon Bons with Passion Fruit Caramel
Red= Dark Chocolate with Beer Ganache

Inside the Passion Fruit Bon Bon

In the chocolate unit, we also made our first 2-tiered cake, a chocolate cake with a delicious chocolate raspberry mousse filling, and a chocolate buttercream. Using cocoa butter colors as "paint," we made transfer sheets and poured chocolate over them. When the chocolate was partially set up, we bent the chocolate strip around the cake. It's a pretty cool technique, and the finished cake looked pretty good. The picture's deceiving though - it was way tinier in real life - just a 3" and a 6" cake.

Week 17: More Petit Fours

Week 17 continued with petit fours, and it was delicious. Mini cookies, cakes, candies...what's not to like?

We started off the week with langues de chats (cat's tongues....ok maybe this sounds gross), pate de fruits (jelly candies for grown ups), and coconut macaroons dipped in chocolate. The pate de fruits my partner and I made was raspberry apple and extremely sugary and addicting.

On Thursday, we made our Opera cakes. Opera cake is made with a hazelnut cake layered with coffee buttercream and chocolate ganache and then the top is glazed with chocolate. The whole cake is then cut into bite-sized pieces and decorated with chocolate piping. This was my coworkers' favorite item of the week. It seems like the inherently know which items took the most amount of time and effort to make, and pick those as their favorites.


On Thursday, we also made nougat, a candy made from basically sugar and nuts. We used a combination of whole roasted nuts- almonds, pistachios, hazelnuts, and some I'm probably forgetting. Then we cooked two sugars to different temperatures - one just sugar and the other with honey (which has a lower browning temperature than sugar), and poured them over an egg white foam. Once the mixture was whipped to be white and fluffy, we added the nuts, and poured it out over a nonstick surface. The nougat is dusted on both sides with A LOT of cornstarch, which I found to be odd and kind of unappetizing, and then cut into pieces. Alas, I will never know though because with all the nuts in this candy, it was strictly off-limits for me. Judging by the rate my classmates were eating it, however, it seems like the cornstarch couldn't have been that bad. I got a major workout cutting the nougat - it was HARD.


We also made a coconut version of puff pastry Thursday, which unfortunately I forgot to take pictures of my tiny bear claws and vol au vents. I also just forgot about them, leaving them in class for I guess whoever came in after us. The palmiers made it onto our tray though. We also made madeleines - which immediately made me think of this Friends episode where Freddie Prinze Jr. plays the male nanny who bakes madeleines. "Lighter than air... But that's not the point." (For my Friends-loving friends).

My team's tray. Left to right: nougat, coconut macaroons, palmiers,
langues de chat, opera cake, madeleines, pate de fruits

Whole class's trays

Saturday we tackled two types of cookies using a chocolate and vanilla dough together: swirls and checkerboards. These cookies look pretty, but they were a serious pain. Neither of the doughs wanted to roll out nicely, and it took a lot of effort to get the final results. In order to speed along the process, I felt the need to consume half the raw cookie dough (it was so good...my inner 8 year old was exposed, sneaking pieces of cookie dough). Unfortunately, the dough tasted better than the baked cookies (isn't that the worst?), which were just sort of boring.



Florentine is another sort of candy we made with a sweet tart dough base with a caramel mixed with almonds and candied orange peel poured over the baked dough. It's then returned to the oven for some final baking.


I'm almost all caught up with my petit fours posts! One more left, this past week that ended with our exam (which was one of the worst baking days I've ever had). Stay tuned for that sure to be dramatic story (sorry, Dad, I'll try to tone down the drama).