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.