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 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).

Pastry School Week 2: More Tarts & Cookies

Fresh Fruit Tart

My second week of classes at the French Culinary Institute were a lot less nerve-wracking. I had calmed down a lot since the start of class, allowing me to make some really great things in class. We're in the tarts and cookies unit of the course until February 2nd, and we continue to make more and more of these two pastries.

Tarte Bourdaloue

I hadn't ever really contemplated how many tarts one can possibly make. I had never made an actual tart on my own (only pies), and that has quickly changed over the past couple weeks. I am now on my way to becoming the Queen of Tarts.

Tarte Alsacienne

The class is extremely fast-paced and every class, in the matter of only five hours, we make between 3-5 completed pastries, depending on whether we have a sanitation lecture as well (that exam, my first at school, is this week!). Because we make all components from scratch - doughs, fillings, etc., it takes a bit of time to get to the finished product.

Pots de creme

The tarts we made this week were Tarte Bourdaloue (poached pairs and almonds), Fresh Fruit Tart, Apricot Tart, Tart Alsacienne (apple & custard), and mini fresh fruit tarts. In addition to this, we made gingersnap cookies, Vanilla Kipferls (vanilla hazelnut cookies), and Chocolate Heaven cookies, and pots de creme (kind of like chocolate custard).

Apricot Tart pre oven

Apricot tart after baking

The most exciting moment of the week was learning how to flambe. Being scared of both fire and knives, the choice of going to a culinary school may seem dubious, but I'm determined to overcome both in these next 9 months. I'm already making progress- I cut myself and lived and this week lit a pan on fire (on purpose).

Gingersnap Cookies

Vanilla Kipferl

Chocolate Heaven Cookies

For the Tarte Alsacienne, the apples were first sauteed and then using apple brandy, lit on fire. It was very cool! Seemingly unrelated, right after we were done flambeing, we saw a couple of firefighters walk by our classroom. They must have gotten word that there were beginner students playing with fire.

Fresh fruit mini tarts