The morning began with a demonstration. Jean-Luc emphasized that when(/if) you have your own bakery, it's important not to throw things out if you can still use them for other things. I think he said something like, "When you throw it in the garbage, it can't make you any money." He explained one way to use up leftover sweet dough; once a batch has been used a few times, it will become dry and difficult to use for tart shells. But it makes excellent little raspberry jam cookies called trois frères (three brothers, for the round ones with three circles cut out of the top) or lunettes (glasses, for the oval ones with two circles). For the trois frères, Jean-Luc explained, cut out two large circles of dough. In one, cut out three smaller ones arranged in a triangle. Then bake. Once cooled, add raspberry jam to the inside (J-L added some frozen raspberries to the existing jam for a boost of flavour and to decrease the sweetness; this mixture is brought to a boil before it is spread on the cookies). The second cookie (with the cutouts) is placed on top and dredged with icing sugar so that the cookie is no longer visible and the jam is barely visible. Then the circles are filled in with jam. And there you go. I didn't take a picture, which I am currently regretting; if I could find one on the internet that looked anything like what Jean-Luc made this morning, I'd post it here. But, no sucj luck. Maybe we will get to make these with all of the leftover sweet dough we'll have at the end of this section.
The rest of the day for our group mostly consisted of decorating, which is where the frustration started (and didn't stop). We covered our chocolate sponge from yesterday in more buttercream and then worked on smoothing out the top and the edges. Once this was done, we had to take our large bread knife and move it in a continuous wave along the top to create a pattern in the buttercream. Then with our decorating comb, we combed around the sides. It sounds easy enough now, but the more you work with buttercream, the warmer it gets, so if you have to keep starting over with a design, it just gets harder and harder to do as the buttercream gets softer and softer. Once the cakes were adequately smoothed and patterned, they went back in the fridge to cool them down for the next phase.
While those were chilling, we took out our tart shells and our frangipane cream from yesterday. We softened up the cream, placed it in a piping bag, filled our tart shells about three-quarters, then put them in the oven. After they had come out of the oven and spent a bit of a time in the blast freezer, it was time to start piping. We added our lemon cream [that smelled so delicious and lemony] from yesterday into a piping bag and piped little pearls all around the edges of our tarts. I think the less I thought about it, the better my pearls were. I should really take that as a sign. Once the edges were pearled, we covered the top in a thinnish layer of lemon cream. After this, we took a stab at a "modern-style" fruit arrangement instead of the "classical-style" we attempted in the first week. The modern-style is about placing the fruit "randomly" and experimenting with shape and height and levels. I generally prefer this to the classical-style, but I didn't really start to get how to experiment with height until halfway through and once you drop the fruit onto the lemon cream, it stays there. The minute hand movements are not my forte... I may need to start doing hand exercises to strengthen my fine motor skills. Once the fruit was arranged we added a light coating of apricot glaze, a cape gooseberry [which we seem to put on most things], and really cool-looking chocolate triangles that the decoration group made. Because my fingers were so shaky and clammy, I kept breaking the paper-thin chocolate triangles while attempting to place them securely onto my cake. There was a lot of swearing involved. I initially wrote sweating. That too.
After we came back from break, we were ready to do Phase 2 of the chocolate sponge. More like Phase 54. This is where I really started to lose it. When I took the buttercream out of the fridge this time and heated it up, I heated it up a little too much so it wouldn't pipe properly and sort of just seeped everywhere. Jean-Luc recommended that I put it on ice for 10-20 seconds to cool it down, but it just took forever and I kept falling further and further behind. Eventually, Jean-Luc came back over and coaxed me off of the hypothetical ledge I was standing on while he supervised my attempt to pipe around the edges of the cake. At some point in the day he asked, "Feeling a little frustrated today?" I just stared at him. Once the piping was done, the cake went back in the fridge. I may have almost dropped the cakestand at least twice.
After the buttercream drama, we wrapped up the day with a lemon pie filling. This seemed easy enough. Until while I was waiting for the mixture to come to a boil on the stove, it suddenly started to thicken and burn without ever appearing to come to a boil... what? It turned out fine and didn't taste like burning which is probably key. It was actually pretty good [aside from the congealed burnt stuff that stuck to the pot]. Also, the KitchenAid has a juicer attachment which is basically the coolest thing ever and you can just juice all of the lemons you want and it is amazing. I really need to get one of these.
My last task of the day was finally, finally finishing my cake. The last step was using these awesome brass almost antique (circa 1985) chocolate moulds to create chocolate flowers to place on top of the cake. Jean-Luc's mother gave them to him as a present when he graduated from pastry school. They were awesome. I expected the process to be super hard, because everyone said it was, but it might have actually been the easiest part of the day.
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| Not too bad for my first time, I guess. |
Tomorrow we have First Aid training so we won't actually be baking anything. Our last day in the pastry section will actually be next Tuesday (not sure what happens to the next section that gets shortened a day) where we'll finish our vanilla sponges and probably make a lemon meringue pie. Aside from the fact that I don't love that I have to get my First Aid certification for the millionth time, I am sort of glad that we have a break from baking. I need the weekend to re-focus and re-energize and remind myself that I am taking this course to learn, not to be awesome at everything right away...
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Today's Recipes
Frangipane Tart with Lemon Cream and Fresh Fruit
Sweet Dough
400 g flour
200 g sugar
4 g baking powder
200 g butter
2 eggs
Frangipane Cream
125 g butter
125 g sugar
2 egg
125 g ground almonds
25 g flour
10 ml rum
10 ml vanilla extract
Lemon Cream
150 g egg
180 g sugar
120 ml lemon juice
1 lemon zest
1 gelatin leaf
225 g butter
Apricot Glaze
[Still waiting for a recipe for this one.]
Chocolate Sponge Cake with German Buttercream
Chocolate Sponge Cake
5 eggs
155 g sugar
pinch of vanilla powder
140 g pastry flour
15 g cocoa powder
German Buttercream
500 g butter
15 ml vanilla extract
750 g pastry cream
Pastry Cream
1 L milk
250 g sugar
10 egg yolks
90 g cornstarch
pinch of vanilla
Light Syrup
500 ml water
250 g sugar
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