Petits Fours

After all the stress of the sugar exam, the school planned a very relaxing day of petits fours for us. It was so much fun! Nut allergies: beware! Everything in this practical had almond powder in it, and are simply delightful for it.

The first batch of petits fours were pistachio macarons: simple green-coloured macaron shells with a pistachio and almond paste filling. If canisters of pistachio paste didn't cost a fortune, I would spread that stuff on my toast in the morning. Yum!

The next treats were little almond souffles with bits of griotte cherries and/or pineapples in them.

Then there are the sables guitarres: hazelnut pastry squares filled with lemon-almond cream and topped with a square of dark chocolate.

We were given a bit of freedom to play around with the filling for the last batch of macarons. I was hoping to make some gingerbread ganache, but settled for a maple buttercream as they didn't have any molasses on hand. I used some brown food colouring to make the macaron shells more "maple" in colour, but they turned out some soft pink colour. I'm not normally the fondest of pink, but this one I liked.

Sugar Showpiece - Part 3

The date for our sugar exam approached much too quickly for me. I was able to get in a couple hours of practise with some friends and homemade heat lamps, but it still didn't feel like enough. It was a weird exam. Everyone was so laid-back, including the chefs, and I caught myself joking around with a classmate more than once. Little could anyone tell that I was sweating like crazy with stress under my jacket.

It didn't start off too badly. I was able to make everything I needed to and extra before the break. The biggest problem I encountered mid-pulling was the growth of an enormous blister on my thumb which hurt like hell! I had to stop what seemed like every 5 minutes to replace the protective tape around it. The heat from the heat lamp kept melting the glue of the tape.

There was one other issue I had before the break that caused me no small amount of grief when I got back. My middle sugar piece, shaped like a large flat donut, didn't come out of the mold very well and had a minor crack. I'm not sure if I jostled it too hard when moving the silpat or someone else knocked it walking by, but when I got back from break the donut was broken completely in half. I nearly had a panic attack. After eyeing the exit longingly and contemplating throwing down my apron for a moment, I set back to work and patched everything back together with hot glue. It wasn't too pretty of a patch job, but with a few strategically placed flowers and leaves, I was able to cover most of the damage up.

Here is the end result with the original sketch of my plan.

Sugar Showpiece - Parts 1&2 of 3

We are now officially finished with cakes and chocolates and will be focussing on creating sugar art for the next three weeks. I've seen pictures of past class' showpieces and they are nothing short of intimidating. The entire class is a little reluctant to start and I think half of us are battling to find some motivation. This year has been seriously draining on everyone and I think we're all find graduation day a huge relief, albeit a bittersweet one.

On the 3rd week of sugar, we'll have one of our two practical exams and create a sugar showpiece. Chef has been trying to get us to prepare for this by encouraging us all to start making up a sketch of the showpiece, which I am finding incredibly difficult. I just can't seem to visualize anything on my own.

For the first class, Chef H showed us how to create pastillage (kind of like gumpaste) and some pulled sugar techniques. All of the pastillage that we make in this first class will be used on our final exam showpiece because it needs time to dry completely. No small amount of pressure there!

Here are some of the things that Chef H made in class with pastillage. The bright yellow at the top (looking a bit like fried eggs) is made with compressed sugar.

Chef also made a rose out of pulled sugar and some multi-coloured ribbon. He made it seem ridiculously easy to do, but we discovered how difficult it is the next day in workshop.

I won't post any pictures from my first workshop, as everything turned out pretty rough. The pastillage was simple enough, but the pulled sugar was something else entirely. Both Chef H and Chef F made it seem so easy and completely painless. I didn't realize how hot the sugar is the entire time that you're working with it. Almost everyone's hands were covered in blisters by the end of the workshop. And we all made the genius move to cover our blisters in medical tape. I won't describe the pain or mess of peeling those off of blisters. (shudder)

The next class went a little bit better, for me at least. Chef H showed us some blown sugar techniques and poured sugar in the demo. At the end, he whipped together a sugar showpiece with complete ease. The bird on top was made with blown sugar and the bases are all poured sugar, which Chef marbled with white colour and gold dust after pouring.

For our workshop, we had to put together a mock-up showpiece to test out how everything will work for the sugar exam next week. I found this class so much more fun than last week, now that I finally have a sketch drawn up. That being said, there were some elements to my sketch that really didn't turn out as expected.

The  biggest drawback to my winter themed showpiece was the fact that the blue dye only comes in powder form now, whereas last week we had liquid. (Somewhere in this school is an extremely blue cake.) So my dark blue base is almost black, and when I added the blue to my pulled sugar it resulted in a very gross grey colour. Not very appealing. Instead I made some "barbie" pink (as Chef H likes to call it) and had to make some other last minute colour change decisions. We're quite confined to the amount of colours we can use in our showpiece with the pulled sugar - three is the maximum. It makes sense after struggling first-hand to keep 3 colours at the right temperature under the heat lamp. But also the chefs will take off marks if we waste too much sugar. I'm going to compensate by colouring my pastillage leaves and flowers at home. One of the few things we can do to help prep for the exam and I am taking full advantage!

This is the finished piece. Not quite what I had in mind but good enough. I had more elements to add to it (more ribbon, curlicues, and snowflakes), but simply ran out of time. Hopefully the exam goes at least as well, if not better, next week. Fingers crossed.

When it Rains, it Pours...

I had guests coming over on the weekend and work was extra busy this week. Signal three special cake orders! It was a week to test my limits, but the extra challenge of those cake orders really thrilled me. It was definitely worth the effort!

The first one was a really special order. Through a co-worker's suggestion, I was asked to bake a baby-themed cake for an expecting couple. The twist on it was that the couple hadn't yet found out their baby's sex and would only discover it upon cutting open the cake. They arranged to have their doctor call me directly and I got working to make a very pink cake (it's a girl). I haven't worked with fondant that much, so it was a bit of a challenge.

The cake was a simple white cake recipe (one of my all-time favourites) coloured pink, with a raspberry-flavoured italian buttercream icing in the middle. I found the cake a little dry without the regular heaping of buttercream on top, so added a layer of strawberry preserves between layers for a burst of berry flavour. The whole of it was covered in white fondant with baby-coloured flowers all over it.

The biggest challenge, though, were the baby booties on top. I made the first few prototypes out of pastillage, but I found them way too dry. The edges started to crack and looked really rough. After those failures, I decided to move onto the more pliable fondant, which was so much easier. Here are the finished booties:

The next order was a last minute birthday cake. I had made a birthday cake in October for the grandson; this week it was for the grandmother's 70th birthday. I hit a couple of snags in this one when I ran out of eggs and sugar for the frosting. I must have been just powering through my bags of sugar because I'm sure I bought a few kilos recently... but a quick run to the store solved all of that.

Layers of moist chocolate cake covered in pink italian buttercream frosting and topped with white buttercream roses. I haven't made buttercream roses since my cake decorating classes a couple of years ago. It was amazing how much better I've gotten since studying at Cordon Bleu. What would have paralyzed me with fear last year was actually kind of fun!

 

My last order of the week was a pretty simply one, and done in such a rush that I didn't have time to take any pictures. One of the agents at the office was celebrating a big birthday, so I made some white cupcakes with fudge frosting - a recipe passed down from my family and a real favourite. Thankfully all the cupcakes were eaten at work, otherwise I don't think my willpower could have stopped me from eating them all.

Chocolate Candies

We continued this week's foray into the world of chocolate with a class dedicated to chocolate bonbons. I started drooling just looking at the recipe list. Chef H made a whopping 7 types of candies within 2 hours. That man is a machine! Luckily, we only had to churn out 5 types during our 5 hour workshop.

It wasn't too arduous a class. The biggest difficulty I encountered was trying to keep both my white and dark chocolate tempered. And then the filling of the chocolate molds proved a little trickier than expected. Those things are ridiculously heavy - you have to balance a thick plastic mold filled to the brim with chocolate in one hand while tapping the living daylights out of it with a spatula. The cherry on top of it all was the appearance of a cameraman to shoot some promotional footage for the school. He arrived just in time to see my struggle to dip candies in lumpy chocolate. I got so flustered I spilled white chocolate all across the floor. Not my finest moment in practical class. That's for sure.

The assortment of chocolates we made in class were absolutely divine. In front are Palets Or - coffee truffle filling flattened into discs and dipped in dark chocolate. The next are filled with hazelnut praline and crunchy feuilletine. My personal favourite are the green ones - white chocolate filled with pistachio and cinnamon cream. The squares are chocolate caramels that are chewy and completely melt in your mouth. The last are coffee marzipan squares partially dipped in chocolate.

I brought everything in to the office after class, as I could not trust myself in such close quarters with so much chocolate. I think I would gain 10 pounds this weekend alone! They were a great hit and it looks like I'll be getting a few orders in for Christmas. Have to get working on an order list very soon.

A little bit of Basic and Superior

I had a special order this week for an agent's dinner party in which I got to practice one of the cakes we just learned in Superior and one I've made many times since Basic.

I feel like I'm becoming a real pro at making Black Forest cakes. It seems to be one of the most asked-for cakes we've learned at school so far. Funny thing is that it is one of my least favourite to eat. I really can't stand the cherries or alcohol in it. Yuck! I guess that works out for the best as I'm really not tempted to dip into it at all.

I had some advance warning so was able to start soaking the cherries in rum a full 24-hours before so they would have a true burst of cherry-rum flavour. The biggest issue with this cake was placing the rosettes on the top, believe it or not. They wanted it to be divided into 10 portions for the number of guests that would be at the party and you wouldn't believe how difficult it is to portion that evenly. Quarters, eighths, even sixths aren't that hard, but 10 is just ridiculous. Here's a handy trick if you have to do something like this yourself - before you place the final rosettes, arrange toothpicks on the top. You can move them around a bit if your spacing is off because once those rosettes are on, they aren't going anywhere!

The other cake was the Field-Berry Mousse Cake that we did in class just last week. I find that it's one of the easier mousses to make as the base is just pastry cream, which we've done countless times since Basic Pastry. The most odious task was making the raspberry coulis. Unless I'm working with really large quantities of it, I have to make raspberry puree from scratch and straining out those tiny little raspberry seeds is quite tedious. The result is always delicious, but halfway through I'm dreaming of storebought tubs of seedless raspberry puree. Yum!

I made a slightly smaller version of the cake for the order, but made a full recipe, so Phil and I had plenty of leftovers in the house. There goes my household baking for the week! The finished product wasn't quite as bright as the one in class, as I didn't have access to cocoa colouring. Instead, I used white and dark chocolate to glaze and decorate the cake.