I have my cake and I eat it too!

I am officially 1/3 of the way through the program. This past Friday ended Pastry I and I start in Pastry II tomorrow where we will start with our breads II section.

2.15.08: Fruit Miroir
A cassis flavored mousse cake. This is one of my favorites so far. The mousse was very tart.

2.19.08: Carrot Cake
The carrots are made out of marzipan. I love the way the carrots look on this - very cartoony.

2.19.08: White & Dark Chocolate Mousse Cake
The inside has alternating layers of the white and dark chocolate mousse. I didn't slice this one open - I'm not a big fan of white chocolate.

2.20.08: Sacher Torte
This is supposedly a secret recipe that has been adapted from the Sacher hotel in Vienna. It's a very dense chocolate layer cake with apricot jam in between and on top. Then covered with a chocolate/fondant glaze. As you can see my partner, Janine, and I had some problems with air bubbles in our glaze.

2.20.08: Dobosh Cake
This cake consists of thin layers of sponge layered between chocolate buttercream. The top is a sponge layer that is covered with caramel and set on the rosettes for decoration.

2.21.08: Chocolate/Hazelnut Cake
Inside this cake are five layers of Chocolate sponge cake layered between a chocolate/hazelnut mousse.

2.21.08: Flourless Chocolate Cake, decorated with Chocolate Meringue "logs"
My friend Kathryn and I sat around at the end of class eating almost all the meringue off the cake... I felt sick to my stomach when I left school that day.
I left this cake in the freezer overnight so I could take it my friend Lauren's Friday night. The cake was stolen from the freezer!

This past week also ended our Cakes I section. For the exam we all had to make the same cake - a plain genoise (sponge) cake with buttercream frosting. We also had to practice our writing by writing Happy Birthday on the cake. I asked if I could write Congratulations or some variation of it because Friday night George and I were attending an engagement party for our friends Scott and Vanessa. When I asked the Chef this I forgot that during the grading portion of the practical the Chef's cut out a piece of cake to evaluate. Below is my cake: it's filled with a rasberry jam and the buttercream is flavored with vanilla. The almonds are caramelized to give them a sweet flavor.

Cakes, Part I

We started cakes this week and will continue with it next week. After that we will have completed "Pastry I" and will start with the "Pastry II" program the following week.
The cakes we've been making are labor intensive. We're learning the basics and building blocks for most cakes. We're in "Cakes I" now and there will be another section called "Cakes II" in a couple of weeks and we end the program working on a Wedding Cake.

We learned how to make Génoise which is the base cake for most wedding cakes. We also learned how to make different versions of buttercream.

1.12.08: Génoise Cake (sponge cake)
Three layers of sponge cake filled with buttercream. We soaked the cake with a simple syrup/rasberry liquor mixture.

1.13.08: Dacquoise au Café
Dacquoise is a nut flavored meringue. We stacked and filled discs of dacquoise with coffee flavored buttercream. It sounds and looks kind of weird but it's absolutely delicious. It's the right balance between sweet and salty, soft and crunchy.

2.13.108: Marjolaine
I wish I had taken a photo of a slice of this - there are 9 layers: (bottom up)
chocolate génoise cake on the bottom, chocolate ganache, dacquoise, Creme d'Or, dacquoise, Praline Buttercream, dacquoise, sweet whipped cream, dacquoise. Then a thin layer of praline buttercream covering the entire dessert. Then on top there's a layer of chocolate ganache, decorated with hazelnuts on top and ground hazelnuts lining the base.
A real pain in the a@@ to make!

2.13.08: Chocolate Ganache Cake
Three layers of chocolate sponge cake, soaked with a simple syrup/hazelnut liquor mixture. Filled with chocolate ganache and then covered again with chocolate ganache.

2.15.08: Charlotte Royale (aka "Brain cake" for obvious reasons)
This dessert is built upside down, chilled and then inverted for display. The jellyrolls are filled with an apricot jelly and the inside is a pistachio flavored Bavarian cream.

2.15.08: Charlotte Russe
A dessert invented by the famous French chef Marie Antoine Carême, who created it for the Russian Czar Alexander I (russe being the French word for "Russian"). It's a cold dessert of Bavarian cream, which we flavored with flambéed pears and a pear liquor, set in a mold lined with ladyfingers.

Yesterday in class was "Mousse" day. I'll have pictures of that next week.

quicky

A quick post with some pictures and descriptions from this week.

2.6.08: Brioches à Tête Parisiennes (Individual Brioche rolls)

2.6.08: Kugelhopf

2.6.08: Blueberry Muffins

2.6.08: Brioche Nanterre

2.7.08: Croissants

2.7.08: Pain au Chocolat

2.7.08: Unfinished Stollen

Finished Stollen

2.8.08: Brioche Tart (made with apricots)

2.8.08: Marzipan bees

2.8.08: Chef Christopher demonstrating how to decorate a Ruche (beehive)

My Ruche!
The inside is a brioche loaf, cut into layers and filled with pastry cream and a honey syrup. The loaf is then covered with meringue and the meringue is caramelized.

We also made Pannetone on Friday, but I forgot to take a picture of it.
We start our first section on Cakes tomorrow!

Viennoiserie

This week we started Viennoiserie. Viennoiserie is basically baked products similar to bread, but enriched so it's more like pastry. They are typically eaten at breakfast.

Our first day was really busy and really rushed. I haven't taken a lot of photos over the past two days, but here are some:

1.4.07: Sticky Buns
These buns are heaven on earth! They are baked upside down and then flipped while still warm. Covered with caramel and pecans. The buns themselves are spiraled with butter and brown sugar. I ate two while in class!

Kathryn & I chowing down... HEAVEN! (I could even hear the angels singing!)

1.5.07: Fruit Cake
Not so bad, but still - fruit cake is fruit cake... not very exciting.

1.5.07: Challah
On Monday we mixed the dough and braided it, but then let it rest overnight. We baked it today.

1.5.07: Danish
These are filled with almond cream, cinnamon sugar, chopped walnuts and rum soaked raisins. They're then glazed with an apricot napage. Some of the students put an icing on theirs, but it ran out by the time my Danishes came out of the oven.
I left the class with 8 and gave them all to Noel and his co-workers to enjoy. Apparently they were a hit so that made me really happy. I really need to stop bringing so many pastries home to P'ville with me!

Tomorrow is Mom's bday and we're baking Brioche and Blueberry Muffins!

Exam III - complete

This past week ended our unit on Puff Pastry. I actually really enjoyed this section, minus the baking.

On Thursday we made "speedy" Vol au Vents. We filled them with some savory fillings - Duxelle (a mushroom mixture), Scrambled Eggs and a Tomato sauce. It's nice to switch it up in class since we're always making and eating sweets.

1.31.08: Chef Christopher filling the speedy Vol au Vents with the different fillings

My plate... no, I didn't eat it all. There's a chive goat cheese under the tomato reduction so I ate that one.

1.31.08: Dartois aux Pommes
The Chef gave us some leeway to be creative and use different ingredients for the filling. My partner, Emily, and I added some figs, cinnamon and nutmeg to the apples.

As I stated in my last post, we had our Puff Pastry exam on Friday. I didn't study very much going into it. The Chef told us that it would mostly be on puff pastry, but that all our tests are cumulative and can include questions from day 1 of class.
Long story short, I left the written portion knowing I didn't get 100 and completed the practical portion not very happy with the way my items turned out. (Photo below)

Turns out I did better than I expected. I didn't get 100, but only got part of one questions wrong. Most of the questions are multiple parts so I only got off a couple of points from the written. And to my shock and welcomed surprised, the Chef loved my items. I was the last in the class to receive my critique from the Chef and he was very positive and encouraging. He told me that my Pithivier (the sun-looking item) was absolutely beautiful and professional quality work. He then went on to tell me a story of how one of his previous students actually went to the store during lunch on exam day and bought items to present to the Chefs as part of his own work!

George came to pick me up from Lisa's after school yesterday and we drove back to Philadelphia in a horrible rain storm. We then went to dinner with our good friends Stacey and Adam at Tangerine.

I'm driving back to Pleasantville tomorrow and will start reading up on our next unit in class - Veinnoiserie.