This section has been generally pretty "easy" because even though things have been pretty hard to do, we haven't had to do them particularly fast and it was okay if we messed them up too. It takes a lot of the pressure off. Also, we are in a completely separate room ("The Decoration Room") than everyone else, so it just seems calmer.
Jean-Luc finished off the pumpkin and chocolate cake today and it looked awesome. I wanted to take a picture, but it disappeared before I could. He added a glaze and pieces of chocolate coloured with cocoa butter and decorative chocolate swirls and isomalt circles. It looked awesome. And would probably taste really good too.
Then we went back to the decoration room and started softening up our modeling chocolate that, despite being out of the fridge overnight, was still really hard. After the chocolate was a workable consistency, Jean-Luc showed us how to make chocolate roses. First, we rolled out our chocolate with plastic rolling pins. Then we cut out ten little circles and flattened them out a little bit more, and then made the top half even thinner than the bottom half. Then we made a sort of cone shape out of a ball of chocolate.
A little bit up from the base, we pushed the chocolate so it went in and then out again at the base all the way around. The part above the indent was approximately the same size as our circles. These would be the petals. We pressed one petal onto the cone, making sure to push in at the base and to ensure it was covering the tip of the cone. The other petal went on the other side. Then we did a layer of three, pinching the petals slightly so they looked more realistic. Then we did a layer of five. If you wanted to, you could do 2-3-5-7-and keep going. We only did ten petals in total. Then, we cut the base off of the flower so all we had left was an awesome chocolate rose, without the weirdly shaped base. It was pretty cool. I think I thinned out my petals a little too much, because the tops of them started to dry and crack. But, overall, it was pretty fun. It felt like we were back in elementary school making things out of clay.
After we had each made at least three good flowers, we rolled out more chocolate and cut out leaves (freehand...awesome). Then we arranged two of our best flowers and three leaves on each of our pastry chefs from yesterday. Voila. (We've been filling plates like this with chocolates that we and other groups have made and then sending them to the cafeteria. The truffles sell for 75 cents each.)
Even though the roses only took us til about 10:30ish we were all sort of ready to go home for the day... but we weren't quite done yet. After a break, we came back and made a mango caramel ganache. (I didn't actually love the taste of this, but I also don't really like warm mango. So that could be why.)
The ganache had a bunch of different steps and the timing was pretty important, so you had to make sure that your mango puree was warm before you started to caramelize your sugar, and you also wanted your chocolate to be melted so that you could pour the rest of the mixture into the already-melted chocolate, rather than having to wait. First, we heated up our (frozen) mango puree, with a pinch of ginger added to it. Then we heated up glucose and sugar in a pot to caramelize it. Once the sugar was caramelized, we "deglazed" it by adding the hot mango mixture to the caramel mixture. (I don't really understand what "deglazing" is, but I'll have to research that this weekend.) We mixed the mango and sugar until smooth, and then were supposed to pass it through a chinois to get rid of any sugar lumps, but there was a bit of a miscommunication over when to pass the mixture through the chinois, so we all did it at different times or not at all (like me). After the mango and sugar was free of lumps (or just naturally smooth, like mine...), we added it into the chocolate and mixed it all together until blended. Then we added our butter and mixed it into the warm chocolate. It wasn't that hard to do, but managing your three pots at the same time gets a little difficult when there are also a bunch of other people using the stoves and then you spill just-boiled mango puree on your hands. That'll leave a scar. I'm not sure what we're going to do with it (e.g. whether we're filling chocolates with it or making chocolates out of it) but we'll find out next week. To be continued.
After that, we were done for the day and we got to clean up and leave SUPER early, which is always nice. The decorating section is kind of the opposite of the restaurant section in that in one you finish unexpectedly early and in the other one you have to stay surprisingly late. Next week we'll be onto the next section, our fifth of the five-week rotation: bread.
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Today's Recipes
Modeling Chocolate
335 g dark couverture chocolate
100 g glucose
25 g sugar
25 g water
Mango Caramel Ganache
100 g sugar
25 g glucose
200 g mango puree
1 g ground ginger
250 g milk chocolate
50 g butter
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