First, we rolled out our shortbread dough and cut out at least four different shapes with the Halloween themed cookie cutters (I chose two different kinds of pumpkins, a skull and crossbones, an adorable looking ghost, a tombstone, and Frankenstein). Once they were baked and cooled, we had to make royal icing, colour it, and ice all of our cookies by the end of the day. Tomorrow, we will pipe the final designs onto them. So, that should be interesting, considering my history of piping. My homework today was figuring out what designs I will do on the shapes that I ended up using. I may or may not have "broken" a few cookies because my dough yielded a lot and I just couldn't bare to ice anymore... [they also tasted really good].
After the first task, our group sort of split up again because we were all at different stages of what we had completed. I chose to make my tea biscuits next. I managed to do a bunch of things wrong for these: over-mixed the dough, rolled it out too thin, used the wrong size cookie cutter, and didn't make the biscuits tall enough. In the end, they turned out pretty good though, and got the okay from Jean-Luc. So, there's that.
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| I am definitely making these at home. |
Once my tea biscuits were in the oven, I also put my chocolate chip cookies from yesterday in as well. I don't know why, but making chocolate chip cookies always makes me nervous. I think it has something to do with the fact that they seem so simple, but I always worry that they will be overdone or underdone. When I took them out of the oven, I didn't even think they were done (because they were just so soft!). But, they were. And they were also so chewy. I may have even left them in the oven for just a little bit too long. I also need to get a little better at making equally sized cookies. Because some of them were just so massive that they melted into the ones all around them. Whoops. (Most of the pictures from today were taken in a rush... we're on a deadline, people!)
After the cookies and the tea biscuits were done, I opted for making the pastry cream. I actually really like making pastry cream now because we've done it so many times in class and I've done it a few times at home, without Jean-Luc's supervision (and it was actually good). So, I wasn't too worried about it. The biggest thing was really just calculating the amounts for everything (instead of 1 litre of milk, we used 700 ml). I have gotten so much better at the method for the pastry cream, which is why it's nice to have something that you do kind of repetitively throughout the course of the year. (Except I probably would never say that about piping chocolate. Or piping anything.)
Technically, the pastry cream was an extra task for today, but we are making German buttercream tomorrow, which uses pastry cream, so it was probably good to get it out of the way. The chocolate sponge was also "extra" but we're icing them tomorrow (with the German buttercream), so I was determined to get that done today too.
But, before I could do that, our group made royal icing for the shortbread cookies and iced our cookies. This was a priority for today, because we're piping them tomorrow first thing. We did them at the same time because royal icing dries out really fast, so it's important to use it up pretty quickly (we experienced this later). Icing the cookies was surprisingly frustrating, mostly because we underestimated how much of each colour we would need, so the colours kept running out. Then the icing kept drying out. Then we had to make more icing. But by the time you had finished using one colour, or mixing one colour, someone else would have used up the next colour you were going to use... it was not ideal. As a result, I think my cookies could probably have been iced better (technique, colour choices, colour brightness), but... you can only do so much, right? I think at this point I also thought it was 12:15 (and Jean-Luc said that we had to start cleaning up at 12:30 again), but it was actually 11:15. So, once I found out my brain was an hour ahead of everything else, I calmed down a little bit.
And then it was off the decorating room to work with the modeling chocolate. We each had to make one chocolate rose and three leaves. I like working with the modeling chocolate, but I think I would do a lot better not on a deadline. I definitely rushed through the leaves because I just wanted to move on to the next thing and finish my sponge before the day was over. Some people really have a knack for the roses, but I just can't get mine to look as good as theirs, no matter how much time I have. They were all set up in rows with everyone's names by them, so it was hard not to look at everyone else's [and inevitably compare it to your own].
And, finally, I could work on my chocolate sponge. I was nervous for this one as well, because when I made the vanilla sponge in the pastry section, I had to start again because I didn't fold the flour in well at all. This time, I may not have heated my eggs up enough, because they didn't whip quite until they were stiff. They were still a bit runny even after they had been whipping for at least 10 minutes. Possibly longer. But, I put the flour/cocoa powder in anyway. Jean-Luc recommended that if you can, it's good to get someone to pass you the flour (they hold up a piece of parchment paper with the sifted flour on it and slowly pour it in) so that you can fold it well. For some reason, I find this process weirdly difficult. I'm not sure why that is. It's also especially important with a sponge cake not to over-fold, because the only reason that the cake rises at all is because of the air that has been incorporated into it from whipping the eggs and sugar. The more you handle it, the more volume you lose in the cake. It is probably this thought that contributes to my sponge-related anxiety. Another member of the group said that Jean-Luc can tell if a sponge has been over-folded because the batter will fill less than half of the pan, so I was obviously checking for this when I poured my batter. It definitely didn't make it to halfway. So, that wasn't great. But, when it was done, it actually looked fine. After it had cooled a little, I removed it from the pan, and then let it cool even more before I wrapped it and put it in the fridge for tomorrow.
At this point, almost everyone else in the class had already gone home, except the people who either hadn't finished icing their shortbread cookies or people who were staying late to do extra things. I was sort of a combination of the two, because after my sponge was done, I had to catch up on they day of chocolate that I had missed a couple weeks ago. (Or was that just last week?)
First, I melted 1.5 kg (!) of dark chocolate and then tempered it. A process which, although fun, gets chocolate on everything. After it was tempered, Jean-Luc showed me how to pour it into the moulds. Once they had set, I softened some mango caramel ganache (I don't think it was the one that I made, but I did make it earlier in the chocolate section) and placed it in a piping bag. This was piped into the chocolate moulds. Then, I had to re-melt and re-temper the chocolate (fun times) and do another layer of chocolate in the moulds on top of the ganache. The moulds then went in the fridge to cool down a little. After about 10ish minutes (or the amount of time it took me to clean up my workstation and those giant marble slabs we use for tempering), it was time to see if the chocolates were ready. When Jean-Luc was showing me how to take them out, he prefaced it with, "If you did a good job, they'll come out easily, just like this..." [and then he flipped it over and tapped the moulds with the back of a palette knife. And the chocolates just fell right out. He said that I did a good job, but he may have forgotten that this was the first mould, which he pretty much did while demonstrating. But, who's counting? The second chocolate mould wasn't quite ready yet, so it went in the blast freezer for a few minutes before I tried to take them out again. I made seashells, which turned out awesome, and hearts with little hearts on top of them. The more intricate patterns don't turn out as nice, because the moulds are harder to get perfectly clean, so they're not quite as shiny. [Note to self: stick with the seashells.] I have a weird thing about fruit and chocolate, so I didn't actually love the mango-caramel-chocolate BUT now I know how to do this sort of thing with maybe a dark chocolate with a milk chocolate ganache inside. Or some other delicious not-fruit flavour.
Tomorrow, we each meet with Jean-Luc to find out our marks and where we stand in the course. I am a little nervous because it's pretty hard to tell how well you're doing in a program that's so practical. But I guess I'll see. I can sense that in general tomorrow is going to be a bit stressful because it's a lot of decorating and piping (first shortbread cookies, then decorating the cake with German buttercream, then chocolate Halloween decorations for the cake as well...). I just have to approach it with a positive attitude. And a lot of coffee.
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Today's Recipes
Shortbread Cookies
100 g margarine
300 g butter
8 g salt
300 g sugar
15 ml vanilla
2 eggs
25 ml milk
750 g flour
Royal Icing
500 g icing sugar
85 g egg whites
2 ml lemon juice
Tea Biscuits
125 g pastry flour
375 g flour
50 g sugar
7 g salt
200 g butter
20 g baking powder
1 egg
280 ml milk
Chocolate Chip Cookies
183 g butter
150 g sugar
150 g brown sugar
2.6 g salt
10 ml vanilla
2 eggs
300 g flour
5 g baking powder
266 g chocolate chunks
Pastry Cream
700 ml milk
175 g sugar
7 egg yolk
63 g cornstarch
pinch of vanilla
Modeling Chocolate
335g dark chocolate couverture
100 g glucose
25 g sugar
25 g water
Chocolate Sponge
5 eggs
155 g sugar
pinch of vanilla
140 g pastry flour
15 g cocoa powder
Mango Caramel Ganache
100 g sugar
25 g glucose
200 g mango puree
pinch of ground ginger
250 milk chocolate
50 g butter
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