Pastry School Recap | Units 10/13/15 Plated Desserts

Something about plated desserts feels classy and elite to me. If I were to feel like a true pastry chef, I feel like I would have to master the art of these. However, I doubt I would ever work in the pastry kitchen of a restaurant. So, our dessert menu project from pastry school will have to suffice for life experience.

We had three units of individual plated desserts. Three! That is a lot, and I think most of us were a little sick of them by the end. I could fill pages of this blog with photos of visually stunning dessert plates, but I'll stick with the ones I concocted for our dessert menu project, for which I created my imaginary dessert restaurant, Spiked, featuring cocktail-inspired desserts.

(Disclaimer: Again, neither this restaurant nor the URL is real.)

From my menu, the chef selected the Margarita and the Rum & Coke for actual presentation and taste-testing. 

The Rum & Coke was intended to be a glass full of brown sugar rum ice cream sandwich cubes, coated or sprinkled with chocolate pop rocks, with a side of sour cherry compote and cherry cola sorbet. Unfortunately, the classroom fridge and freezer blew out the night before presentation, which melted everyone's ice cream. So in a pinch, I remade the rum ice cream and scooped it into the cup, sprinkled with chocolate pop rocks, and inserted a chocolate tuile straw for decor. Tastewise, it was still a success!

The Margarita was my favorite, and is also the concept that inspired my recent eggnog bombe. This dessert is a citrus tequila mousse bombe with Grand Marnier crème brûlée and a lime cookie. On the side is an orange tequila sauce, lime cookie crumbs, crème anglaise and a candied lime.

 Please excuse the iPhone photos! That's all I had available in class.

Pastry School Recap | Units 9/12 - Chocolate

As my classmates know, I have a love-hate relationship with chocolate. I think it's an admirable art form, and when tempered properly (i.e. heated and cooled in a precise way so as to cause the melted chocolate to recrystallize in a particular state that has shine, snap, smoothness and strength . . . don't even get me started on my fascination with the physical chemistry of it all), chocolate is amazingly versatile. It's great as a standalone confection, as a flavoring for other desserts, and as an architectural building block and design element.

But man, chocolate can be finicky when the kitchen is warm or humid, and messy without commercial kitchen equipment (my biggest complaint really). Writing this post reminds me of some frustrating chocolate structure-making, so let's just get on with the photo recap without further ado:

A few highlights from Units 9 & 12 of pastry school:

Chocolate Candy Stand: The class theme was comics and cartoons. I picked Garfield, a childhood favorite of mine :) 

 Chocolate Boxes & Bows: Learning to build with chocolate!

 Queen of Sheba Cake:

Caramels and Toffee: Did not enjoy the process of covering these in chocolate, but sure loved eating them.

 Assorted Bonbons:

 Two-Tiered Chocolate Cake: Hand-painted these chocolate cylinder wraps with colored cocoa butter

 Chocolate Project: With a limited amount of chocolate, we had to create a structure. Our theme was SF, and I picked the Palace of Fine Arts. I wasn't quite able to execute to 100% of my original design but was excited about what I was able to pull off!

Pastry School Recap | Unit 5/8 - Cakes

Cakes were my main interest prior to pastry school, and probably still are the basis of what I like to present as my "craft". The amount of time and labor that go into them sometimes make other quicker pastries more attractive. However, I will always have a respect for and fascination with cakes.

I made this salted caramel mousse cake earlier this year for my new niece Madelyn. Although the cake is not listed on the website for Extraordinary Desserts (my favorite cake shop), it is the Versailles cake featured on the cover of Karen Krasne's Extraordinary Cakes recipe book.

The cake is made with almond joconde sponge, soaked with some rum simple syrup, and layered with drizzled salted caramel and salted caramel mousse. The outside is pressed with praline (caramelized pistachios and almonds).

Then the top is coated with a gelatinized salted caramel.

Finally, salted caramel macaron halves (homemade!) are pressed against the sides and decorated with a ribbon (not necessary to hold on the maracons, but definitely helpful for stable transportation). Et voilà!

I wasn't thinking clearly about the occasion when I used a spiked simple syrup when assembling this cake for a newborn baby . . . but at least the adults got to enjoy.

A few of my favorite cakes from Units 5 & 8 of pastry school:

Special Occasions cake for midterm: passion fruit bavarian cream filling with fondant decorations, dedicated to my parents' 35th anniversary

(This is what my parents consider "posing with the cake"):

Lemon Chiffon Cake:

Marzipan Peach Cake:

Fraisier Victoria: sponge cake, creme mousseline, fresh strawberries

Flourless Chocolate Cake: with chocolate hazelnut mousse and chocolate meringues

(Here's the inside):

Chocolate mousse cake: the outside is a decorative biscuit d'amandes cake wrap

Charlotte Royale: a dome of jelly rolls with pistachio mousse filling!

Unit Exam: genoise cake with buttercream and toasted almonds

Pastry School Recap | Unit 7 - Petits Fours (Happy Valentine's Day!)

Happy Valentine's Day! To celebrate, I made some white chocolate and raspberry macarons. The white shells were a little more successful than the pink ones, which I over-deflated a bit, but both should be yummy to share with friends on a trip to Carmel this weekend.

To be honest, the hype and reverence around French macarons make me a little less excited about making them. That is probably why this is the first time I've made them at home (outside of class). However, I do think they are delicious treats, and no doubt big money-makers for bakeries (I almost always grab one when I'm at a Bouchon Bakery)!

Conceptually, petits fours are the most interesting to me. I love the idea of shrinking down desserts, and although it may be too labor-intensive, I could imagine having a bakery specializing in innovative petits fours. The French translation of petits fours is "small ovens" and the term refers to bite-sized desserts. The two dessert types are glacé (glazed, such as the ones you see in Swiss Colony catalogs), and sec (dry, such as macarons, meringues and biscuits). I believe there is also the savory type, salé (salted), for appetizers.

Some examples of petits fours from Unit 7:

Hazelnut Financiers:

 Pâtes de fruits: raspberry and passion fruit jellies

Sablés: swirl cookies

 Unit Exam: fruit jellies, Russian tea cakes, passion fruit barquettes, lemon-raspberry sandwich cookies, raspberry macarons, cat's tongues, nougat, madeleines

Pastry School Recap | Unit 4 & 6 - Viennoiserie & Bread

Croissants!

Croissants were probably the highlight for most of us in class from our viennoiserie unit. And while there were some interesting items from the bread unit, croissants are so awesome that they were my highlight from the bread unit too.

Viennoiserie, or "things of Vienna", are baked goods made from yeast-leavened dough that is generally enriched (i.e. has milk, butter and/or eggs added). Some key examples use laminated doughs such as croissants and danishes. Also included in this category are pain au chocolat, brioche, and viennois.

Given my love of croissants, I made some variations on them as part of my revisit to this unit. Here, I have plain croissants, almond croissants (almond cream filling and sliced almonds on top), green tea croissants (almond cream flavored with matcha green tea powder) and purple yam croissants (almond cream flavored with purple yam and black soy powder). The green tea flavor is a bit too muted, but the color was pretty and I think more matcha powder could address this. The purple yam flavor reminded me of the pastries from Asian bakeries.

This was my first attempt at making croissants (or anything yeast-leavened) at home, and I'm relieved I was able to proof and raise the dough (using Instant Yeast) without melting out too much of the laminated butter.

Some tips: to first proof the détrempe dough, microwave a cup of water for about a minute and then use the residual heat and moisture in the microwave; for final proofing of the formed croissants, heat the oven to the lowest temperature setting with a bowl of water inside before shutting off and cooling to proofing range.

Some examples of viennoiserie and breads from Unit 4/6:

Spiced Pecan Sticky Bun: ooey gooey goodness

 Viennois: shaped like a baguette

Scones: 

 Beehive: brioche, pastry cream, meringue, honey syrup, marzipan bees (who eats this??)

 Danishes: almond cream, raspberry jelly, cream cheese

Focaccia: 

 Harvest Grain Bread: 

 Bagels: 

Pullman Loaf (Pain de mie): aka white bread

Unit Exam: cornbread, brioche, pain au chocolat, croissants