Week 24-25: Intro to Plated Desserts

Our first plated dessert unit was only 6 classes long, but boy did it feel like a lifetime. Perhaps one of the units I was most looking forward to, it was almost a complete disaster. I'm now regularly blogging at Food 2, and you can read all about my class's struggles with plated desserts in the Food 2 School series here.

Chocolate Marquise with cherry compote & creme anglaise

Here's all the pictures I took from the unit. Everything we made was as delicious as it looked, if not more. My chef pants grew even tighter over those two weeks (and they're tight to begin with being as they're manufactured inexplicably so that the "elastic" waist is half the circumference of 1 pant leg). For many reasons, I was really happy to leave behind individual desserts for the time being.

Creme Caramel

My favorite items from the unit were probably the pineapple tarte tatin and the creme brulee (which has long been my favorite dessert). Any of the ice creams and sorbets we made were delicious, and I could usually be found covertly (ok, maybe not so covertly) taking additional scoops of them.

Creme Brulee with Pistachio Shortbread

My least favorite was definitely the creme caramel (flan). How can a cousin of creme brulee taste so bad?? For me, when I don't like an item it's usually because of the texture, and creme caramel is the perfect example of this.

Fennel Hazelnut Tart with Fig Ice Cream

To illustrate just how many components go into these desserts, for two of the pictures I identified each of the items on the plate.

Lemon Tart with Basil Creme Anglaise & Berry Sorbet

Milk Marmalade Tart

Manjari Chocolate Tart with Coconut Ice Cream

Banana Macadamia Financier

Pineapple Tarte Tatin with Pineapple Passion Sauce

& Lemon Frozen Yogurt

Spinach and Cheese Jalousie with Bechemel Sauce

Week 8: More Puff Pastry

Puff pastry continued into last week. I'm starting to get the sense that when it comes to puff pastry, it's a love it or hate it thing for my classmates. I'm firmly in the "love it" category. There's just something soothing to me in all the rhythms of making the dough. That said, I was not a huge fan of a new puff pastry we tackled this week - chocolate puff pastry. It was a huge pain to make, didn't produce as much rise as even the rapide.

On Tuesday, we made poires en cage (pears in cage), conversations, and fruit galettes. The poires en cage looked really cool and were fairly simple to make. We poached the pears in a caramel ginger spice liquid, which was delicious.

Poires en cage

Conversations are a pastry that is made using puff pastry, almond cream, and royal icing. It's all put together and baked. Out of the three desserts from that night, this one was my coworkers' favorite. I tried a bit of it (I'm not allergic to almonds, just hesitant to eat them) and thought it was really sweet. A little bit more than my liking.

Conversations - traditional on the right

A galette is a free form tart, and we used puff pastry to form the base. The fruit compote was made with a combination of cherries, blueberries, plums, and a touch of brandy. Nothing like some liquor to up the ante of breakfast.

Mini galettes

On Thursday, most of us braved the beginning of the snow storm to get to class and make jalousie, pithivier, and tarte tatin. Jalousie, pronounced "jealousy" is a puff pastry dessert made with a layer of almond cream topped with a layer of raspberry jam. It's made to resemble the Venetian blinds a baker always witnessed his neighbor peeking through, spying on his wife to catch her cheating.

Jalousie

Pithivier, also known as king's cake, is made with puff pastry, and frangipane - a mixture of pastry cream and almond cream. Traditionally, this pastry is made hiding a plastic baby inside the cake. I have no clue what the significance is, but I'd be freaked out to find a tiny baby in my dessert. Whoever finds the baby though gets to be king for the day.

No baby in this cake

Tarte tatin is one of my new favorite things to eat. It's so simple - just caramelized apples and puff pastry. With a splash of Calvados. First you caramelize the apples in a skillet using butter and sugar. Once you have a good color to the apples, you throw some Calvados (apple brandy) in the pan to flambe it. I poured a little bit too much in and ended up with a HUGE flame shooting up from the pan. Really, really scary. Fortunately, I still have my eyebrows. After the apples cool, you cover them with puff pastry and put it in the oven to bake. Once the puff is baked through, you take it out of the oven and immediately flip the skillet over to release the tart. All the snow made it impossible to get into work on Friday, so I was trapped in my house with this tart. At the end of Friday, there was no tarte tatin left.

Friday's breakfast, lunch and dinner

On Saturday, we used the chocolate puff pastry we had made the class before. We made and plated some banana tarts. Chef Joseph made some peanut butter ice cream to accompany them, and it was amazing. I'm not a huge banana fan though. It's just something about the texture I don't like.

Banana tart with peanut butter ice cream and chocolate sauce

We also made a chocolate Napoleon strip. The recipe called for only a creme d'or (a fast chocolate mousse) with the chocolate puff pastry, but our instructor felt it was just too much chocolate, so we also used a lightened pastry cream for a contrast of colors and flavors. The end result was really beautiful.

The crowning glory of the week