Week 18: End of Petit Fours & Exam

Last week was the end of the petit four unit, and the exam was on Saturday.

We started off the week with some caramel mou (pronounced moo). It's a soft caramel that has chocolate and butter mixed into the cooked caramel, which is then poured out and cut into pieces when it cools. It sort of had the texture and taste of fudge. On one of our pieces, we sprinkled fleur de sel over top the caramel mou. I just love the combo of sweet and salty. Not my favorite item of the week though. I don't think this was really special enough to warrant making again.


The lemon cookies were sandwiched with raspberry jam and dipped in chocolate. They were a little bigger than the size of a dime, which means they were teeny tiny. If I made these again, I would make them bigger. American cookie-sized, as I call it.


We also made some glazed petit fours - pyramids, domes, and the traditional petit four cakes I initially thought covered the whole petit four spectrum. The picture below shows the pyramids and domes before they were glazed in chocolate.


Once the pyramids were glazed and set, we cut them into small, bite-sized pieces. There were three buttercream flavors in this one - raspberry, vanilla bean, and chocolate. This was one of my favorite items from all of Level 1.


These iced petit fours are soooo cute. I can't wait to make them again for a fancy tea party (now I just need an excuse to actually have a tea party). The cake was an almond sponge, sandwiched with raspberry jam, with a layer of marzipan on top. The whole thing is then covered with an icing glaze, and decorated individually. They are VERY time-consuming.


Thursday we "trayed up" all the items we had stowed the prior Saturday and Tuesday.


Thursday night we also made Chef Cynthia's tahini cookies. Tahini is a paste made from sesame seeds, and it's used in making hummus. I wasn't sure if I would like tahini and how it would work in a cookie, but these were awesome. The tahini is kind of nutty and I sandwiched them with grape jelly, so it was reminiscent of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.


I previously mentioned last Saturday's petit four exam, and what a disaster it was. It would take way too much space here to describe all of what went wrong, so I won't. If I had to give the incoming Level 1 students any advice, it would be: Do not drink on the night before an exam. It was a really, really bad idea. I had an off-the-charts hangover, the kitchen was hotter than normal, and everything was just going wrong. In addition to three petit fours we picked at random, we also had to prepare an original petit four of our choice.


My three random picks were chocolate macarons, tartelettes with passion fruit curd, and raisin cookies. My original petit four was a tartelette with a tangerine honey caramel and chocolate ganache, sprinkled with citrus fleur de sel. The flavors paired really well together, and it was by far the biggest success on my tray. As much as it was 4 hours of baking misery, my evaluation by Chef Cynthia went pretty well. There was no hiding the fact that my chocolate macarons were burnt, but she was a big fan of everything else.

My tartelettes next to my partner Aoi's mochi

Some other classmates' trays:

Week 6: Pate a Choux & Exam

I'm really behind on my blogging and baking. As if it hasn't been hard enough balancing work and school, this week I got some sort of cold/flu/plague that just completely knocked me out for most the week. I had to miss class on Thursday, and I'm still playing a bit of catch up.

So for the first of the blog posts to get up to speed...last week's pate a choux unit! Pate a choux (cream puff pastry) was only a four class unit - pretty short compared to the other units.

Austrian dumplings with cherry compote - the chefs made these and plated them for us

On Tuesday, we made gougeres, which are cheesy puffs. I love, love, love the gougeres at Artisanal, one of my favorite restaurants in NYC. I'm not sure the ones I made were as good as theirs, but it was my first attempt. And it didn't stop me from eating them for breakfast the next day.

Gougeres

That class we also made St. Honore cake. St. Honore is the patron saint of bakers, and he was obviously not present in our class that night. I don't know what it was about this cake, but it seemed like putting it together was a disaster for everyone. It consisted of a base of flaky pastry with three rings of choux piped on top. That was baked, along with some ball-shaped cream puffs. The puff balls were them filled with the prepared cream, which was a chiboust. Chiboust is pastry cream with gelatin and Italian meringue.

Base of the St. Honore cake

Finished St. Honore cake

Everything was going well at this point, and I put the chiboust in the fridge to set up. Unfortunately, when I took it out, it had the strangest consistency. In order to get it smooth again, I needed to mix it so that it was a bit looser than I would have liked. The cream puffs were dipped in caramel and "glued" with more caramel around the base. Caranel is HOT. Like, really hot. And I dipped my finger into it. Like I said, no St. Honore in Pastry I that day. The remaining cream was then piped into the center of the cake. The cake itself was really delicious, but I don't think I will be making this cake again anytime soon. Maybe I'd need to stop by a church and make an offering to St. Honore before attempting it again.

Dipped cream puffs waiting to be assembled

The crowning glory of our choux unit was the croquembouche. A croquembouche is a cone-shaped tower of cream puffs that is held together with caramel and then decorated in a variety of ways. It's the traditional French wedding cake. This past Christmas, Martha Stewart had mistakenly led me to believe this would be an easy endeavor. It was a complete disaster. I think it ended up looking like a haphazard pile of leaking cream puffs. I can't say with 100% certainty because by the time it hit the table Christmas Eve, I was over a bottle of wine in. I'm feeling vindicated with this croquembouche though and am going to have my mom email me the pictures so I can post them to show how far I've come. While this croquembouche came out much better than the first, I don't know if I'm jumping to make another one any time soon. Maybe next Christmas.

Finished croquembouche - the puffs were dipped in caramel, cocoa nibs, and pink coconut

On Saturday we had our choux exam. This one was smooth sailing in comparison to the first. Everyone was significantly calmer, and we all were assigned to make eclairs in vanilla, chocolate, and coffee and a Paris-Brest. No St. Honore cake? No croquembouche? Piece of cake! I'm pleased with the way my exam results came out.

Exam tray

Pastry School Week 4: Last Week of Tarts & Cookies

This past week was our last week of tarts & cookies. Our big exam is Tuesday and I have a lot of studying to do (and Grammys to watch), so I'm going to keep this brief. Or at least try to...as I'm sure you have already noticed I have problems with brevity.

Tuesday was chocolate day in class. We made a chocolate Bavarian tart, a ganache tart and sablee cookies, which are not chocolate.

Chocolate Bavarian Tart

We had real issues with the heavy cream (well, at least I did). It seemed much thicker than usual, and it was warm. Now that it's been several days since I ate it and no food borne illness, I can say that I'm sure it was fine, but it was definitely sketchy. The chocolate Bavarian tart was amazing though. We made a chocolate custard and lightened it with whipped cream--soooo good.

Ganache Tart

The ganache tart was very rich. We also got to practice our piping skills, adding the white chocolate as a finishing touch.

Sablee cookies

Ok, so these cookies are one of my favorite things we've made so far in class, if not my absolute favorite. Pate Sablee could be used as a tart dough, but we rolled it out into cookies. We added a bit of candied orange & lemon peel into the dough and finished them with a lemon glaze. And then I ate all of them for breakfast the next morning.

Thursday's theme was caramel- we made it both for the tartelettes tatin and caramel nut tart. I've had issues with caramel in the past, but this one went pretty easily. However, at one point we were watching our instructor demo something and the room filled with a lot of smoke. Someone had left a pot of caramel on the stove and it had turned to char.

Tartelettes Tatin

These apple tartelettes were something else I ate for breakfast this week. Tarte tatin is a classic French dessert with the caramel is poured into the tart pan first, followed by apples and then covered with dough. When they come out of the oven, you quickly flip them over, out of the tart pans.

Bourbon Pecan Cookies

Caramel nut tart

Inside the caramel nut tart

The caramel nut tart got really great reviews from my coworkers. Even though I can't eat it (nut allergy), I think I'll definitely be making it again.

Saturday was the last class before our exam. We did some review and finished up the last tarts.

Raspberry compote

We made a raspberry apple compote for our linzer tortes. Those are two of my favorite fruits, so I thought it was great.

Linzer Torte

I also couldn't eat the linzer torte because it had hazelnuts in the dough. Stupidly, after rolling out the dough, I must have touched my lip and it was sooo itchy after that. The lattice top of the torte was a real challenge, but I'm happy I know how to do that now.

Quiche Lorraine

If I could eat one food for the next three months without gaining 100 pounds, it would be quiche Lorraine. I was iffy on it when I saw it on the syllabus. For some reason I didn't think I liked quiche, but this one was really amazing. It was a flaky crust and a really creamy custard with bacon and gruyere baked into it.

Now it's time to study for my test! That was definitely not brief!!!

Another Perfect Fall Cupcake: Caramel Apple

Apples are one of the reasons I love fall so much. I know they're available all year round, but autumn has things like apple cider and caramel apples. Last year I had made caramel apple cupcakes, but I wasn't 100% happy with it. While looking for apple cake recipes this year, I kept coming across ones that essentially used an applesauce as the source of apple in the cake. I finally found one that sounded interesting that had you grate the apples and then caramelize them in a saucepan with butter and brown sugar. I made note that it was the recipe I wanted to use and exited the page. A couple days later when I was trying to figure out where the recipe was that I found, I could not remember what website it was on for the life of me. I still have been unable to find it, and I'm not entirely sure that I didn't dream this recipe.

Butter & brown sugar in the skillet

Working off that, I went about caramelizing the grated apples (I used Gala apples). I used my pumpkin spice recipe to work off. First I melted the butter in the pan and mixed in the brown sugar. I should have let the mixture caramelize a bit more, but it came out pretty well. The texture of the cake was really moist and less muffin-like than the one I made last year.

Grated apple after cooking it on the stove

For the frosting, I first made my own caramel and let it cool, I used it to make caramel frosting. I used the remaining caramel to swirl on top of the frosting. The caramel frosting complimented the apple cake really nicely. I'm hoping I have an excuse to make these again this autumn.

Finished cupcakes