Week 11: End of Viennoiserie and Start of Cakes I

Thank God viennoiserie has ended. I love it, don't get me wrong, but I just can't eat that much of it before I need to order my chef pants in several sizes larger. Last week we had one more class of viennoiserie, and then we started cakes on Thursday. I'm really excited for the start of cakes; it finally feels like we're getting to more challenging parts of the curriculum.


Using some of our brioche dough, we made a brioche fruit tart. The base was the brioche, and it was covered with some pastry cream, apricots, and blueberries before being baked. This was a big hit in my office. I really love apricots; they remind me of 5th grade. In 5th grade, I ate a peanut butter and apricot sandwich every day for lunch. I'd get stuck in year-long kicks...one year cream cheese and grape jelly, another year just cheese on white bread. The apricot year was probably one of my healthier ones.


We also made a pannetone, which is a traditional Italian bread made at Christmas time. As far as breadish cakes with raisins go, I much preferred the kugelhopf, which was a lot more moist. The picture above was after the pannetone got squished in my tote on the trek from school to home to work. It was initially less misshapen.


Our last bread was a pain de mie, or Pullman loaf. This is a pretty simple white bread. Much better than Wonder Bread (as much as I love it). I had to give the majority of this loaf to a coworker to take home or else I would have made the whole thing into grilled cheese.


These ruche, or beehives, were so cute, and delicious. On the inside was 3 layers of brioche that was soaked with a honey/wine/lavender liquid. Those three things are delicious together. The layers were sandwiched with some creme legere (lightened pastry cream). The whole thing was then covered with a meringue, and then we took a blowtorch to it. I really love the blowtorch. Almost as much as I love this meringue. It tastes exactly like marshmallow fluff. We had made some bees out of marzipan to put on the hives the class before. Not realizing we were going to be making mini beehives, mine were on the larger side. Chef Cynthia called them killer bees.

Close up of the tiny bee face

Thursday was the start of cakes, which like I said before, is really exciting. I've seen pictures of what we'll be making, and some of it is really beautiful. All this is working up to when we eventually make a 3 tier wedding cake in Level 2.


Our first cake we made was a traditional genoise (pronounced jen-wahz). A genoise is a plain cake that is leavened simply with a meringue. There is usually no flavor added to the cake before it bakes. These cakes are frequently soaked in a simple syrup (sugar) or a flavored syrup. I will go on record and say that this cake sucks. It's dry and flavorless. I can't really see myself using this type of cake unless I'm compelled to for school. This particular cake in the picture was a plain genoise soaked in a raspberry liquor syrup with raspberry filling and a standard buttercream. Don't get me started on this pate a bombe buttercream either. My partner and I refer to it as "sugar flavored with butter." Not a good thing.


So cakes got off to a slow start, for me at least. We made these poundcakes, individual size. I LOVE poundcake. I would eat it everyday for breakfast if it wouldn't mean committing to being compared to Shamu for the rest of my life. Unfortunately, there was just something not right about these poundcakes. The texture was more like cornbread, then the buttery, soft poundcake I like.


To redeem the slow start of cakes, there was this dacquoise. A dacquoise is a cake made up of layers of meringue and buttercream. In this case, it was almond meringues and coffee buttercream. Being allergic to nuts, I couldn't try the whole cake, but the coffee buttercream was an improvement from the butter-sugar. I served this to my parents on Sunday, and they declared it the best dessert I've ever made. That's pretty huge being as I've made a lot of things they've sampled.


Continuing on the upswing was the angel food cake. This one was everything you'd want- great flavor and light, airy texture.

Also on Sunday for my parents visit, I got some low fat Cool Whip (I would have preferred homemade whipped cream, but cut backs need to come somewhere) and fresh strawberries and made the angel food cake into a really simple layer cake. This was hands down my favorite creation of the week.

Airmail Cosmopolitan Cupcakes

Last weekend, I baked some cosmopolitan cupcakes in jars to mail out to my aunt's coworker. During her training process, this woman had been particularly helpful and my aunt wanted to send her something to thank her.

Dozen cupcakes boxed up and ready to ship

After discussing a few flavor options, we settled on my cosmopolitan cupcakes, the very first cupcake I ever posted on this blog. They are raspberry cake with lime frosting and hot pink sanding sugar sprinkled on top.

Before the lid went on

It's been really hard to find time/energy to bake anything outside of class, so I was happy for this opportunity. These went out on Monday and were received in Pennsylvania on Tuesday. Hopefully they were enjoyed!

Week 10: Viennoiserie

Week 10 continued with viennoiserie - breakfast pastry, generally enriched breads. This unit was not kind on my waistline.


These were raisin nut danishes...a big hit at my office. At the beginning of this unit, our class soaked a large container of raisins in rum to use in various recipes. They were a really great addition to everything we used them in.


Fruitcake is one of those things that the mere mention of elicits groans and eye-rolling. I was doubtful too, but this fruitcake has totally changed my opinion. It was a butter cake base with dried cherries, raisins, pears, and apricots. I want to make one of these cakes for everyone I know-- a one woman crusade to reverse the opinion of fruitcake forever.


The challah bread was really good. Very rich and soft. Chef Toni taught us how to do the more complicated 6 strand braid for this loaf. Having never really mastered the art of French braiding hair, I didn't feel very hopeful that I would be able to do this. My braid turned out pretty well though.

Kugelhopf

Kugelhopf is a traditional Austrian bread, that's kind of like a cross between a bread and a cake, and contains more of the rum raisins. I really loved this bread; it was moist and had a really tender crumb. Definitely one of my favorites of the week.


Brioche was sort of similar to the challah to me, but better. It was extremely soft and buttery. I think I ate half the loaf. Like I said, my waist is looking for a reprieve from breads.


These brioche a tete are supposed to look like little heads (tete means head in French). I'm not sure why you'd want to eat something that resembled a head, but this is just another quirky example of French-named pastries. Mine looked basically nothing like they're supposed to look like. I'm okay with having not yet mastered the art of making breads that look like heads.


The only scones I had ever had came from Starbucks. I like Starbucks for some things, but their pastries are not one of them. Their scones had led me to believe all scones were like hard, dry rocks. Not so with these currant scones. They were really delicious with a little bit of strawberry jam. Chef Cynthia made us her variation of this recipe, which was even more moist and amazing. I'm a new scone convert.


Stollen is another bread like the fruitcake, a cake-ish bread filled with dried fruits and nuts. The whole thing is then covered in melted butter and rolled in powdered sugar. It's a traditional Christmas bread, and is supposed to look like the baby Jesus swaddled in a blanket. I'm not sure I saw the resemblance. Maybe if you squinted and turned your head to the side.

Croissants are one of my favorite pleasures in life. Even bad croissants usually taste good. And these that we made in class were really terrific croissants. Croissants are made similarly to puff pastry - layers of dough and butter rolled out, and folded, but they have yeast added to help with the rise. We made both traditional croissants and pain au chocolat (chocolate croissants). The French traditionally bake their croissants (and other pastries) a deeper brown color than most of us are used to, but I think this just made them even better.


I used the leftover croissants to make croissant French toast Sunday morning for my parents. There's this restaurant in Hoboken, Amanda's, and they make the absolute best brunch. My favorite thing there is the croissant French toast with strawberry compote, and I tried to recreate that. Mine was good, but Amanda's has made me cry tears outside the restaurant when I can't get Sunday morning reservations.

Week 9: Puff Pastry Exam and Start of Viennoiserie

Last week was the end of our puff pastry unit, and our exam was on Thursday. After the exam, we moved into what I suspect will be one of my favorite units - viennoiserie. Viennoiserie is breakfast pastry made from yeast-levened dough. I haven't worked much with yeast, so I'm excited to start. Plus I love eating croissants and breads.

To finish off the puff pastry unit, we made speedy vol au vents, an apple dartois, and a mille-feuille (more commonly known here as a Napoleon). I don't know why these vol au vents are called speedy. I'm pretty sure they took just as long as the first ones. These were a square/diamond shape and we filled them with pastry cream and fresh fruit.

Mangoes and blueberries

The apple dartois was kind of like a fancier apple tart made with puff pastry. To make the top, we used a lattice cutter and then stretched the cut piece of puff pastry over the compote. I put cut outs of leaves on the sides. I love everything with apples, so this was a highlight of the week.

Apple Dartois

We made our third Napoleon on Tuesday. This one was just the classic version. Some classmates used some fresh fruit and jam in theirs, but I wanted to do the traditional version.

Napoleon Strip

Puff pastry was our third exam so far. It's getting progressively more relaxed for these exams, but it's still a very frenzied 3 hours or so. I was pretty fortunate this time. To determine what everyone would be making, we each drew a set of three items out of a mixing bowl. I got mille feuille ronde (round Napoleon cake), palmiers and paillettes. Both pailletes and palmiers are two pretty simple puff pastry items, and a Napoleon cake isn't the worst thing you could need to make. Paillettes are puff pastry cheese straws with a bit of spice. I had missed the class when we made them because of the flu, but they were pretty simple. A couple of my classmates weren't so lucky and received sets of pastries that were far more complicated. They all did really well though, so it was nothing they couldn't handle!

Puff Pastry Exam Tray

Vienoisserie started on Saturday morning. First, let me state that yeast is really the most foul smelling thing in the world. Particularly if you have a slight hangover. That being said, the bread it makes is delicious. There's also a lot of waiting involved in making bread. You mix the dough, then let it rest and rise in the proofer (something that looks like a cabinet and stays at the perfect temperature for yeast activity), then deflate it a little, then put it back in the proofer, more rising, and eventually it's ready to bake. The first thing on the agenda was orange cinnamon swirl bread. It tasted as awesome as that sounds. The inside of the bread was so soft and delicious. I will definitely be making that again.

Orange Cinnamon Swirl Bread - Outside and inside view

Using a portion of the dough from the orange bread, we made pecan sticky buns. A caramel, whiskey, pecan mixture gets poured into the bottom of the pan. Then the dough gets rolled into a log with a brown sugar spice mixture on the inside. We sliced the log into the rolls and fit them around the pan. After they baked, we flipped them out of the pan so that the caramel nut mixture was on top. These looked really great. It definitely made me wish I wasn't allergic to nuts. We also made something called Sally Lunn rolls, but somehow I forgot to take a picture of those. I'll see if I can steal a pic from a classmate to post up here, so you all don't feel left out.

Before Oven

Post baking

Saturday in Hoboken was the annual St. Patrick's Day celebration. St. Patty's Day in Hoboken is a really big deal. The town has a really large Irish population, 100 bars in 1 square mile, and a lot of young people. It's a recipe for a really great celebration. The drinking starts early and lasts all day (well as long as you can stay awake. I was in bed, asleep, last year by 7:00 pm), and when I left for class at 7:45 am, there was already people lined up outside the bars waiting for them to open. When I got off the PATH train with all these baked goods, I was engulfed in a sea of drunk revelers, who seemed to all want a piece of the sticky buns. I was able to protect them in order to bring them to the party all my friends are at. If you ever want to feel like the most popular person, bring a bag filled with home baked bread to a party with a bunch of people who are drinking. It's a big hit. The 24 chocolate Guinness cupcakes with Bailey's frosting I made as well didn't hurt either.

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

Week 7: Puff Pastry

As I mentioned previously, last week the flu struck. It has been extremely challenging working the balance of a full time job and almost 20 hours of class a week, and the illness threw a major wrench in everything, bringing it all toppling down. My dad is probably going to call me up tomorrow and tell me how dramatic that statement sounded, but I'm going to keep it in anyway. Tuesday was the introduction to puff pastry dough, which is an extremely challenging dough. The dough needs to be rolled, folded, turned, chilled...and repeated over and over again. This process produces a dough that is almost a 1000 layers of dough and butter (!! 500 layers of butter?!). It is delicious. I can't even describe how delicious it is. I want to eat puff pastry wrapped around my every meal. Cheerios in puff pastry? I'm on it!

Vol au Vents

Tuesday we made two type of puff pastry - rapide and classic. The rapide is supposed to be a faster dough to make that produces less rise. With the use of no leaveners, this dough rises to up to eight times its size. It's baking magic. That night we assembled our palmiers and cheese straws, but didn't get to bake either.

Pineapple Bar Tart

Unfortunately, I had to leave class on Thursday almost immediately after getting there. It's really, really hard to stand in a kitchen, next to a 400 degree oven for over five hours straight, and it wasn't happening that night. I went home, rested up, and came back slightly recovered on Saturday. Saturday we made some vol au vents first. Vol au vents are a puff pastry case that is filled with with something. For these Chef Cynthia made two savory fillings - spinach & goat cheese and a mushroom. They looked great, but even puff pastry won't make me like spinach.

Palmiers, also known as elephant ears

We also made a Bar Tart that we used a touch of almond cream and some pineapple. This was the first time I ever cut a whole pineapple. I've seen whole pineapples in stores, but never had any idea how to cut them. My knife skills are slowly improving, and the whole pineapple was a big accomplishment for me.

Mille-Feuille

My mom always tells me how when she was pregnant with me, she and her godmother ate a steady diet of Napoleons. Maybe this is why I'm so in love with puff pastry. We made a Napoleon cake, called a Mille-Feuille, which I believe translates from French to "thousand leaf," referring to the layers of pastry. It was three rounds of puff pastry with a lightened pastry cream in between each. We put crumbs of the puff pastry around the edges of the cake. We sprinkled powdered sugar on top and then used knives heated over a flame to caramelize a cross hatch pattern.

Croquembouche Improvements

As promised, I have dug up a picture of the Christmas Eve croquembouche disaster. Actually, my mom did. She wasn't able to come up with any photo of just the croquembouche. At the time she probably thought it would be best if this went undocumented. I think you can get this idea from the picture though....


If I hadn't pointed it out, you might just think that was a plate of cream puffs, instead of an attempted croquembouche. I'll repost the picture of my 2nd attempt at a croquembouche because I'm pretty proud of it and because that first picture is just pathetic.


And while we're on the topic of last Christmas (sort of), I found some pictures in my phone of the cake I made for Christmas Eve as well. I'm not sure why these never got posted to the blog, but now is as good of a time as any. This cake was more or less a total rip off of one that the very talented cake decorated at My Sweet and Saucy made and featured on her blog. I still have a very long way to go with my fondant skills, but I think they're improving somewhat.

Front of the cake

Back of the cake

Chocolate Raspberry Macarons

I've been wanting to make macarons for a while now. They always seemed so tricky and like they'd be a sure failure. Wikipedia says it itself, "Making macarons requires a great deal of discipline and is a process that is highly dependent on exactitude, technique, and proper equipment. For this reason it is a notoriously difficult recipe to master and a frustrating endeavor for the amateur baker." I read up on them before taking the plunge last weekend. When I told people what I was making, most people immediately thought of macaroons, the coconut cookie. The French macaron is a sandwich cookie. The tops and bottoms are a meringue cookie that is supposed to be crisp on the outside and chewy and moist on the inside.


My first attempt was surprisingly successful. The filling I used was a chocolate raspberry ganache. I think there were several key steps here. The first was bringing the egg whites to room temperature. Several recipes recommended leaving the egg whites out for 24 hours. That seemed to go against everything I ever thought about eggs...like that they needed to be refrigerated. I consulted with Chef Cynthia, and she said that while there's no harm in leaving them out, they probably only need to be out for an hour or so. The second step was after piping out the meringues was to let them dry out a little bit before putting them in the oven. I'm anxious to try these again in a variety of flavors.

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