Phil's Birthday

I may have slightly overdone it this year for Phil's birthday. Ever since school ended I have been filled with a desire to bake and cook everything. And I certainly didn't skimp out on Phil's birthday. This year, it fell on a Thursday so I did a "little" something on the day of his birthday, and then a bigger deal on the Saturday.

Thursday started off with a maple pecan scone accompanied by lemon curd. The scone was filled with crunchy bits of maple sugar and topped with a scrumptious reduction of cream and maple sugar. It really didn't need any lemon curd, so we saved it for future breakfasts.

 
Dinner was a somewhat Scottish-inspired affair, as Phil had mentioned how much he was missing the comforting food. Start off with some french onion soup. Then gourmet veal sausages from the Glebe Meat Market (yum!) with veal gravy, brown-butter mashed potatoes and tomato-mozzarella salad. Those potatoes are game-changers. Nothing short of amazing. Thank you very much Chef at Home!

For dessert, we had walnut spiced cupcakes with maple french buttercream icing. The cupcakes were super fluffy and light, but the icing was the real winner. Using my new French pastry skills, I tried this recipe that I would never have even attempted before. It's French buttercream with maple syrup in place of regular sugar and simply explodes with maple flavour.

Everything was so tasty, we had to repeat it the next day!

On Saturday, or what we like to call "Brunch Day", we made hollandaise and poached eggs with applewood smoked bacon and garlicky homefries. It's a wonder I'm not waddling yet.

For dinner, I made Julia Child's Boeuf Bourgignon, which we ate with fresh baguette. It wasn't quite as delicious as hoped for... I don't think my French pastry skills are as transferrable to cuisine as I'd hoped. But still yummy.

Dessert on the other hand was a complete success. Time yet again to make the premiere dessert of Cordon Bleu: the lemon tart. And this one was as close to perfect as I've gotten yet. I really enjoy baking when it's not a mad rush to get everything done all at once. I relaxed and took the entire day to produce this masterpiece, which almost makes me a convert to pastry dough, something I usually hate to work with. On a normal day, I never leave the pastry long enough to cool in the fridge so it's a hot mess.

Intermediate Exam Prep

I may have gone a little crazy with the exam prep this time... We only get our list of possible exam recipes 2 weeks before the exam. And wouldn't you know it, my sister's bridal shower and bachelorette fell in that first weekend. With absolutely no time to spare what with juggling work, class and planning the bridal shower, I had to leave all of my exam prep until the very last minute. I took 2 days off of work and dedicated myself completely to baking every last one of those 12 cakes. Thankfully, Phil was able to find enough hungry co-workers to take every last cake off our hands, otherwise I don't think I would be able to fit through our door.

One of my first attempts was the Douceur Chocolat, which I haven't actually made before as I missed the practical class. A bottom layer of hazelnut dacquoise is spread with a praline crunch covered in milk chocolate mousse with a milk chocolate disc insert. The whole is covered in a dark chocolate glaze with white chocolate decor along the sides. Everything seemed to go along well until it came time to glaze the cake. I don't know if I added the gelatin to the glaze when it was too hot or if I tried to glaze too early, but the glaze really refused to set, as is evident by the chocolate mousse peaking out between the chocolate squares. Still delicious though!

 

This next one was a royal pain to make in the practical class. It is a triple chocolate bavarian cream, with a layer of sponge on the bottom. The trick with this is to ensure all the layers are perfectly even, which I still can't seem to master. Made for extremely tasty leftovers, though!

This is my latest Ambassadeur Exotique and one of the easiest of the term to make. It's a genoise cake with layers of pastry cream and chunks of oranges and pineapples throughout. The whole is covered in Italian Meringue and sliced almonds. 

One of my all-time favourites: the Marquise au Chocolat. Chocolate ladyfinger sponge topped with praline crisp and dark chocolate mouse, enrobed in dark chocolate glaze and decorated with macarons. I could eat a slice of this anyday of the week. Yum!

Delice Caramel - Coffee ladyfinger sponge with layers of caramel bavarian cream and pear mousse. I was out of clear glaze so just decided to drizzle the top with caramel sauce.

An assortment of chocolate candies: honey truffles, rochers and muscadines. Muscadines still remain the most difficult item for me to make in the Intermediate repertoire. I had quite a bit of leftover tempered chocolate, so I made some almond bark.

The Pacific. It should be a lot more colourful than it is here, but I ran out of food colouring mid-production. A joconde sponge coloured with cigarette paste holds together a layer of strawberry mousse and lemon mousse. It makes for a delightfully refreshing dessert!

This last one was supposed to be a strawberry-cassis tart, but I had absolutely no blackcurrants in my fridge so decided to improvise with blackberries and blueberries. It's a sweet dough with a layer of almond cream and pastry cream, covered with fresh berries.

Bread Workshop

This is one lesson that I have really been looking forward to. I've wanted to make my own bread for so long. I've dabbled in it a bit on my own, but too often had my bread rise too much or made silly mistakes. My biggest obstacle is a Kitchen-Aid that simply doesn't have the strength to work bread. I almost killed the motor on the last batch I tried. I've been longing for some real formal lessons on bread-making. And finally they arrived. The workshop was very similar to our plated desserts one. We arrived in the kitchen (no demo) and the chef did a run-through on how to prepare the various stages of the bread, then we got to work.

The first recipe was a simple white bread, which we turned into 4 different types of loaves:

Traditional Baguette

Fougasse sprinkled with herbs de provence

Fantaisie Baguette

Epi Baguette (shaped like a wheat stalk)

 The next batch of bread is Viennese bread, which is a white bread with milk powder and butter in it to make the bread a bit richer.

Grape-shaped Viennese bread

Daisy-shaped Viennese bread

Turtle bread

 The last batch of bread for the day was rye bread. I added pistachios to mine and soaked them in red wine first, then used all red wine as the liquid in the recipe. The decorations on top were made using "dead dough", called that because there is no yeast in it.

Loaf shaped with a bread tray and croissants decor

Round loaf with wheat-shaped decor

Crown-shaped

Plated Desserts Workshop

Today we had our plated desserts workshop. It was a bit of a change, as there was no demo preceeding it and we got to work in pairs. Chef H gave us a general run-down at the beginning of class on how to make each recipe and away we went. It wasn't too difficult a workshop. I just find that I am completely hopeless with plated desserts. The pressure builds up and I freeze; no ideas come to mind when it's time to plate everything.

We made two types of creme brulee:

Pistachio creme brulee filled with griotte cherries

Caramel creme brulee

Next came the actual plated desserts:

Craquelin with raspberry coulis and kirsch light cream

Macaron with anis cream and raspberries

Douceur Chocolat & Tresor des Iles

Chef J last class with us was the Douceur Chocolat (a truly divine chocolate cake) and the Tresor des Iles. We only had to make the Douceur in practical class, which I unfortunately missed as I wasn't feeling well. I'll include some pictures of what Chef J made, at least.

The Douceur Chocolat is a hazelnut dacquoise with a layer of praline crisp, covered in milk chocolate mousse with a disc of milk chocolate inside. The whole is glazed in dark chocolate and decorated with white chocolate squares. Unfortunately, the demo was running a bit late so Chef J had to glaze the cake when the glaze was still too warm so a lot of it just fell off the sides.

The Tresor des Iles is a nice tropical cake with layers of chiboust cream and strawberry mousse. Reminds me quite a bit of the Pacific cake.

I thought Chef J's plated Tresor was really cool. A very simple design but beautiful.

Triple Chocolate Bavarian

We seem to have driven all the pastry chefs out of town. Chef H has gone on vacation and now Chef F has left for a contract in Singapore. Thankfully, Chef J toughed it out and agreed to teach us again for the week. The first lesson of the week was the Triple Chocolate Bavarian cake, which is really quite difficult.

Three layers of white, milk and dark chocolate cover a thin layer of sponge cake with dark chocolate glaze on the very top. The trick with this one is that the outside of the cake is left uncovered by the glaze, so you have to be very precise in laying down the layers of cream. They have to be exactly the same thickness. We made a ruler guide to help direct us, but even so I botched the job.

Chef J's Triple Chocolate Bavarian - what it's supposed to look like

Chef J seemed poised to stop by at precisely the wrong moment and I was a mass of jitters. My hands were shaking so badly and I was too timid in pouring the bottom layer of mousse that the bottom layer of sponge was peaking out underneath. The layers are not even close to be the same thickness. And the cherry on top of it all? The glaze all stuck to the top of the ring mold and pulled off when I removed it. It's a chunky looking mess.

My sad mess

Opera

Another installment of Chef F's classes and this one was really fun. It's one of Chef F's favourite cakes and he made sure to instill the golden rules of the Opera cake in all of us. The cake was originally made for the grand opening of the opera house in Paris and is to be no more than 2.5 centimetres high. And EVERY single Opera cake needs to have it's name written on the top in dark chocolate. It's a decadent, rich and dense cake. Layers of almond joconde sponge are soaked in coffee syrup and layered with ganache and coffee buttercream.

We trimmed off the sides of the cake with a heated serrated knife to make sure the edges are pristine. The biggest criticism Chef had for all of us is that we didn't soak the joconde enough. It is to be soaked a meutre (to death), so much so that the colour of the sponge should be coffee. 

We made little individual portions with some of the excess cake and decorated the top. I tried to write "Opera" on those, but my writing was way too big.