More Puff

This week has been better than last week. I'm not a baker so I'm actually absorbing what's going on in class.

Here is a picture of the demo Chef Christopher gave of how to sear the powdered sugar on the Mille-Feuille

As always, here are some picture from the week with some descriptions:

1.28.08: Tarte aux Poires en Cage (Pear tarts with lattice)

We also made these little berry compote galette's on Monday, but mine overflowed while baking, so no picture.

1.28.08: Conversations (Almond Tartlets)
It's an interesting name, although the Chefs didn't have an explanation for us as to why it's named that. These little tarts are first filled with an almond cream, a layer of puff pastry on top of that, and then a layer of royal icing. I wasn't sure how it would taste, but it was actually very good.

1.29.08: This is a picture of one of my classmates flambeing her apples for a Tarte Tatin

Our (me and my partner Emily) Tarte Tatin (Upside-down Apple Tart)
After flambeing the apples they are covered, while still in the saute pan, with puff pastry and then baked in the oven. After baking you have to flip it out while it's still warm so the pastry is on the bottom. I was really nervous to flip it, and couldn't really hold the saute pan by myself, so one of our classmates flipped it for us. While flipping it over all the caramel poured out and almost got all over Emily. That would've been really bad considering it was REALLY hot.

1.29.08: Jalousie
This pastry is filled with alternating rows of rasberry jam and almond cream

1.29.08: Gâteau Pithiviers
This is a puff pastry cake filled with frangipane (almond cream + pastry cream).

1.30.08: Mille-Feuilles au Chocolat (Chocolate Napoleon)
This is layers of chocolate puff pastry filled with Crème d'Or - whipped cream with melted dark chocolate. After I finished filling the Napoleon I ate the Crème d'Or by the spatula full from the bowl... needless to say I was sick to my stomach by the end of the day.

1.30.08: Tarte aux Bananes et Chocolat (Banana and chocolate tart)
The bottom is a chocolate puff round covered with banana slices that we sprinkled with sugar and caramelized. Two of my classmates made some fresh vanilla ice-cream with peanut butter and some other classmates made some peanut brittle... a delicious combo!

Last night I went to dinner with Dina for restaurant week at Anthos. On Monday I found out that Emiliy's sister is a manager there. We had a fabulous experience at the restaurant. The service was great and the food was really good. At the end of the meal when it was time for desserts Emily's sister Melissa brought us two desserts from the regular menu. After that the waiter brought over two more desserts from the regular menu! They were all really good. I paid her back the only way I knew how - by giving her pastries that we made in class yesterday!

Tomorrow is our last day with Puff Pastry and then Friday is our exam. After the exam I'll be going to Philadelphia for the weekend to see George. :) The perfect ending to my week.

Jacques Torres demo pictures

As I stated in a previous post, a couple of weeks ago a couple of us from the pastry class volunteered to help Jacques Torres during a demonstration he gave at school. Here are some of the pictures I received from one of my classmates: (got to LOVE our uniforms!)

My classmates helping set up for the demo

Chef Torres cutting some butter during his Viennoiserie demo

Helping the chef roll some fresh Pain au chocolat (YUM!)

week from hell... TGIF

As you can see from the title of the post, this week has been the "week from hell". We had an exam on Tuesday, which went well, and started our new unit - Puff Pastry, on Wednesday.

Puff Pastry is an amazing product. There are basically three different kinds and they all take a lot of time and care to prepare correctly. But they all make amazing products!

As for the "hell week" title... Each week four individuals in the class act as "bakers". This involves two people on each side of the room tending to the ovens the entire week: making sure everyone's items get in the oven, get turned/flipped, taken out, and most importantly that everyone's items don't get burned or dropped on the floor in the process! This is all on top of getting your own stuff done and most often missing the Chef's demonstrations on what we need to do during the class. This is extra frustrating since we just started a new unit.
And of course, I burned myself again! I burned the palm of my hand on a hot sheet pan.

But enough of my complaining and on to some pictures from this week!

1.24.08: Bande de Tarte aux Fruits (Fruit Strip)
There's a layer of lightened pastry cream beneath the fruit. If given the opportunity, I could probably eat an entire vat of fresh pastry cream - it's really one of the most delicious things I've ever tasted!

1.24.08: Petite Galette aux Pommes (Individual Apple Galette's)
They look a little dark because the sugar caramelizes on top, but these are scrumptious!

1.25.08: Mille-Feuilles de Forme Ronde (Round Mille-Feuilles)
These were interesting to make - we heated skewers over a gas stove to make the design in the powdered sugar. It's basically two layers of lightened pastry cream between baked rounds of puff pastry.

1.25.08: Tarte Feuilletée (Fruit Strip)
We first baked the puff pastry base and then applied a light layer of almond cream to coat the base. After applying the layers of pineapple, a coat of melted butter and vanilla sugar we re-baked it. After baking we applied an apricot napage to glaze the top and then decorated the sides with chopped pistachios. Doesn't it just sound delicious? Everything is better with extra butter!

1.25.08: Palmiers (Palm Leaves or commonly known as Elephant Ears)

1.25.08: Vol-au-Vent (round puff pastry cases)
French for "windblown" to describe its lightness. These small hollow cases can be filled with either sweet or savory. We filled ours with chive-goat cheese. YUM!

We also made some spiced cheese straws this week, but I forgot to take a picture of them. I brought them over to Lisa's apartment after school. She let me know that Thomas loves them so I need to make another batch! (For those of you who don't know who Thomas is, he's my adorable nephew - check him out by clicking on his name.)

There's a new french bakery in Pleasantville that George and I visited last week. I spoke to the owner (whom I found out is an FCI alum!) and she said I could intern there when I have time to see how the kitchen is run. I was scheduled to go in tomorrow from 6 am - 1 pm, but called and canceled after class today. My body is physically exhausted and I really need a day to sleep in... I feel like I'm running on empty.

when working with caramel, proceed with caution...

I came home from class today with two second-degree burns... both on my right hand - one on my thumb and one on my ring finger. And I think I burned my tongue in the process as well. I am not a happy camper right now. Lucky for me, George is arriving tonight and he will surely lift my spirits. Although I don't know if he'll be up for it considering he's driving from Philly right now and is stuck in MLK weekend traffic.

Today we made Croquembouche - a high cone of profiteroles bound with caramel, and usually decorated with threads of caramel, chopped nuts, chocolate, flowers, or ribbons.

Here is a picture of Chef Christopher giving us a demo on how to assemble the Croquembouche:

I burned my fingers in the process of coating the choux (baked pastry dough balls) with caramel. We had the hot sauté pan propped up on our station and were dipping our choux in the hot caramel. Each work station is instructed to have an ice-bath when working with caramel for 1. stopping the carry-over heat from cooking the caramel any more, and 2. BURNS!
The first time I burned my finger I was putting a caramel covered choux ball down on parchment paper and it tipped over, when I went to fix it the hot caramel got all over my finger. This is where my instincts instructed me to stick my finger in my mouth... hence the tongue burn.
The second burn was when I dropped a ball in the sauté pan and went to pick it out. This time I had learned my lesson and immediately plunged my thumb in the ice-bath.
I had to wear a rubber glove over my hand for the rest of the afternoon. As morbid as it may sound I was comforted to learn that a couple of other students had burned their fingers today as well.

Below is the product that caused my blisters:
I had written out "Coles" with the pastry dough to put across my Croquembouche and had wanted to decorate the tower with pretty threads of caramel, but after the burns I was fed up and didn't want to go near the caramel:

After most of the class had finished assembling their pastry towers we went on to make Austrian Dumplings - brandy soaked cherries, covered in marzipan, wrapped in the dumpling dough. These dumplings are poached, rolled in bread/sugar crumbs, then served with a cherry compote and Crème fraîche:

It's been a long week and I'm looking forward to the long weekend with George. Although, we have our second exam on Tuesday and also have a paper due that day as well.
Time to start studying... again.

cheese in pastry?

Sorry it's been a couple of days but my computer decided to stop working for a day and I was also waiting on some photos from a classmate (which I'm still waiting for).

Every now and then big shot chef's in the industry come to the school to do demonstrations for the students. Even better than getting a tutorial from these amazing chefs and getting to watch them work is tasting the products from the demo. Last week I attended a demonstration given by Jacques Pepin on smoked and cured seafood's. It was absolutely amazing to watch him talk and use his knife at tremendous speed without looking down once!
This past Tuesday myself and five of my classmates volunteered for a demonstration given by Jacques Torres. His demo focused on Viennoisserie so he made some fresh croissants, pain au chocolat, danishes and bomboloni, which are these little dough balls filled with cream and rolled in sugar. It was all absolutely amazing! And he was so nice to all the volunteers.

Jacques Torres during the demo

I have a new appreciation for éclairs. A lot of time goes into making them and they are delicious when freshly made! We made vanilla, chocolate and coffee. We also had our first opportunity to work with fondant, which we used for the vanilla and coffee icing. I must say I do not enjoy working with fondant. It's a very temperamental product and if you don't do everything just right, it won't work.
Here are some other pastries we made in class this week:

1.16.08: Paris-Brest - ring of almond-topped dough filled with praline-flavored cream

1.16.08: Cygnes (aka Swans) - these were fun to make, although during assembly I broke a couple of their necks.

1.16.08: Profiteroles filled with fresh vanilla ice-cream served on a warm chocolate sauce (YUMMO!)

1.17.08: Gateau Saint Honoré - not the easiest thing to assemble, but worth the effort!

We also made some Gougères in class today. I was soooo excited for this when I saw it on our syllabus! As my friends know, I have a ridiculous love of cheese, and Gougères are little bite size cheese balls (usually made with Gruyere)! Naturally, while we were making these in class today I kept cutting off chunks of cheese to leave at my station for me to nibble on throughout the day. Below is a picture of the container full I brought home with me after class today.

Exam I done!

This is a picture of what I made for the practical portion of the exam today: Chocolate Ganache Tartlettes, French Nut Tart and Spritzkakor cookies (with chocolate centers).

Today was CRAZY!!! The written portion of our exam went from 8:30-9:30 and then the practical went from 9:30-1:30. Each person had to make a tart, 2 tartlettes and 5 cookies. The kicker is we didn't know what we were making until this morning. Lucky for me I got all items I've made before (I missed two days of class because of food poising over the holidays).

The written portion wasn't too bad. The Chef had prepped us well as to what to know and study.
But the practical... oh the practical... I think a lot of people were thrown off because we had to 1/2 all the recipe's and it's a lot harder to work with such small portions. For the nut tart, I could not get my almond cream to work for the life of me! It took me three times, and even then I wasn't completely confident with my product. I must've wasted at LEAST 12 eggs. (the chefs would kill me if they read this).

From 1:30-2:30 Chef Christopher and Chef Laurie called up individuals to their table (tablecloth and all) to review our products and rate us on overall appearance, product, taste, etc. and to let us know how we did on the written portion.

In the end everything worked out and I did well. I'm happy to have the first exam over and to now know what to expect going forward. (I might add that our next exam in next Tuesday).

We ended the day by baking off some Bourbon-Pecan Cookies that we made the dough for on on Friday and by glazing some brownies we had baked on Friday as well.
It was a LONG LONG day. I came home, poured myself a large glass of wine and am going to just relax for the night... tomorrow we make eclairs!

Sorry for the late start!

Hi everyone! As you all know, or should know by now, I started the Classic Pastry Arts program at the French Culinary Institute last month. I moved back to Pleasantville from Philly right before orientation on Dec 18th. My first day of class was Friday, Dec 21st, which was weird, but they probably just need to get the days in. With the holidays we didn't have a full week of class until this past week. The program runs for six months and my anticipated graduation date is June 18th.

It's been kind of rough adjusting to being on a new schedule. Most of you know I haven't worked since returning from our travels in July and now I'm up at 5 AM every morning to catch the Metro-North into the city! Classes are Mon-Fri from 8:00-2:30, and we're on our feet all day... which is another huge adjustment. So far I'm really enjoying the experience and looking forward to the rest of the program. The hardest thing will be living apart from George for the duration of the program.

We just completed our first section on Tarts and Cookies and our first exam is on Monday. Below are some pictures of what I've made so far (I only started taking photos this past week):

1.8.08: Lemon Tartlettes

1.9.08: Chocolate Bavarian Tart

1.9.08: Chocolate Ganache Tart

1.10.08: Mini Tarte Tatin - not the nicest looking creation, but they tasted really good!

1.10.08: Caramel-Nut Tart

1.11.08: Linzer Torte

We also made some mini Quiche Lorraine yesterday, but I forgot to take a picture of them. But again I'll add that they were scrumptious!

My lucky parent's get to try everything I've made. Although, I think I'll stop bringing everything home because I end up eating a little bit of everything when I get home from school even though I'd already tried everything while at school. I must also add that there hasn't been much that I haven't enjoyed. It's a recipe for disaster - it could end up being like freshman 15 all over again!

So the plan is to keep a photo journal of my day to day creations and to just let everyone know how things are going daily. Now I'm off to study for my exam!