Well, the not-being-on-my-game-ness didn't wear off today. I don't think there has been a day yet this year where everyone in the class collectively was just having a bad day. A group of frustrated / irritable / anxious / stressed out / pissed off baking students does not make for successful pastry creations. Lots of mistakes today. For pretty much everyone. I don't know if it's that maybe everyone just didn't get enough sleep this week or something, but there was definitely something in the air today. It could be that we were all working on the detailed decoration stuff for whatever we baked, so no one was really creating new things, but just making annoying small things that involved melting and tempering chocolate or handling really really hot sugar while it burned into your hand. (I was doing the chocolate stuff, not the sugar stuff. I don't know which is better.)
The day started out relatively fine. We made a frangipane tart, which is a sweet dough crust and frangipane cream, baked in a fluted tart pan. The sweet dough was already made, so I rolled it out and placed it in the pan while my partner made the frangipane cream and then piped it in. Quick and relatively painless.
After this, we had to cut our marshmallow slab into whatever shape we wanted. We used a cookie cutter to make little circle marshmallows, mostly because we just wanted to do something easy. Once we had cut them out, we dusted them in an icing sugar / corn starch mixture and packed them up for Sunday's event. We had a ton of extra marshmallow stuff left over, which is inevitable when you are using a circle cookie cutter. We didn't really want to throw it out, but we weren't sure what to do with it either. Eventually, we dusted this in icing sugar and corn starch too and put them in a bag and Jean-Luc said that we could use them to bake something next week (e.g. Rocky Road Brownies). This was the opposite of the marshmallow experience we had yesterday. As in, this was actually easy and fun.
And... it went downhill from there.
First we had to make some chocolate decorations for our little NY Style Cheesecakes that we made yesterday. So, that meant melting and tempering chocolate -- our favourite. Once the chocolate was tempered, we had to spread it in a thin layer onto two sheets of acetate with a pink cocoa butter heart design on them. After the chocolate started to set, we used a heart cookie cutter and a circle cookie cutter to cut out chocolate hearts and circles. Then we put them in the blast freezer for a bit. Once we took them out, we separated the shapes, placed them on a baking tray, and set them aside until we finish off the actual cheesecakes. The finished cheesecakes will have a bit of lemon cream, and be topped with the little chocolate shapes we made today and berries. Adorable.
At the cutting out the chocolate part, Jean-Luc came by and gave us the sketchiest look I have seen so far this year (and not as a joke this time). I think he was sincerely disappointed in us. The chocolate wasn't tempered enough, so it wasn't setting evenly, which was messing up our ability to cut out the shapes and have them still look nice. And the layer of chocolate spread on the acetate sheets were too thick and uneven, which was impeding the setting process and just generally screwing everything up. That said, the sheet with the circles on it had a more even layer of chocolate and the circles were easier to cut out and remove once they had hardened, so we salvaged more of those than the hearts. Jean-Luc said the circles actually looked good. Phew.
After the cheesecake decorating disaster, we moved onto making the decorations for our pumpkin cake which also required melting and tempering chocolate, much to our chagrin. (Mostly mine, because I ended up tempering the chocolate fairly often. Chocolate. Everywhere.) While the chocolate was melting, I made cool-looking rings out of isomalt, which is a form of sugar that looks like little hail pellets. I mixed the isomalt with a little bit of gold dust (!) and then put it in a savarin mould, which happens to be the same pan we used for cheesecakes yesterday [except yesterday I thought Jean-Luc was saying "savanna mould" which didn't make any sense to me]. Then they were baked for about 10 minutes, until the isomalt had completely melted. You are left with these clear (gold-tinted, in this case) rings that can be used for decoration. They look really cool. So, a brief break from chocolate work was nice. It didn't last long though. (I am going to be really happy when this fundraiser is over. Just saying.)
We were making the decorations that Jean-Luc demonstrated when he did the pumpkin milk chocolate cake over a series of days before Thanksgiving. This included a large flat piece of chocolate with yellow and orange streaks in it, done by brushing a piece of acetate with yellow cocoa butter, orange cocoa butter, a little bit of yellow colouring, and then spreading the chocolate over it and then letting it harden. When the cocoa butter was brushed on, there was a little too much yellow and not enough orange, so our chocolate is pretty much streaked all yellow. It still looks cool, but more orange would've been better. Also, I did a not ideal job of spreading out the chocolate smoothly (but at least I wasn't in charge of the brushing the colour AND spreading out the chocolate and messing up BOTH). Then, we had to make chocolate swirls. We cut out strips of acetate, spread the chocolate over it, and then used a chocolate comb and combed it through the chocolate. This was placed on a baking tray and after it had set for a few seconds, we twisted the acetate into a swirl and let the chocolate harden like that. It was kind of awkward to work with because it was hard to make the chocolate stay where you wanted it to while it was setting. I think overall they will look okay, but for now, they are still on the strips of acetate until we actually put them on our cake.
As I reflect on the day, it doesn't seem as bad as it actually felt at the time. But I guess that comes with any sort of reflecting / hindsight. No one in the class was feeling it today. Maybe because Mercury is in retrograde, but that's just me... Tomorrow is Friday though and I think we all need a weekend. The only problem with that is a bunch of us (me included) are coming in on Saturday too. Sigh.
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Today's Recipes
New York Style Cheesecake
Frangipane Tart
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