The demonstration today was how to make choux paste, which is the base for cream puffs, eclairs, croquembouche, profiteroles, churros, and many other things which I am not really familiar with (e.g. Paris-brest, religieuse). Jean-Luc showed us how to make it and how to pipe different shapes for different things. A few people in the class have already made it because they were required for a few of the items in the chocolate buffet. The recipe is in one of our new packages, but I don't remember what section it's actually in. [Side note: the new recipes in a lot of the sections are awesome... so far, around the classroom there has been focaccia that smells and tastes delicious, carrot cake with cream cheese icing (and orange and green carrots along the edges!), New York style and chocolate cheesecakes, oatmeal cranberry cookies, banana bread, sourdough, and a lot of other really yummy things.]
Today we started off making the financier, which was sort of a weird cake to make. The four of us got 50% of the cakes bang on and then for two of them, the egg whites weren't quite folded into the mixture well enough so there were weird egg white patches in the cake. In our defense, the two people who made them before last week made them well, and the two of us that hadn't made them yet made the not-great-but-still-mostly-okay cakes.
After those were done, we made the mixture for sesame wafers. It was probably the simplest thing we've done so far. Put everything but the sesame seeds in a pot, heat it up, and then mix in the sesame seeds. Then we stored it in the fridge and after at least an hour, took them out, mixed it a little to ensure everything was blended, and then rolled them into little balls and pressed down the tops. Once baked, the sesame wafers were golden brown, thin, and crispy.
At some point we made the mixture for crème brûlée; half the group made vanilla and the other half made chocolate, so that we'd have two flavours for Tuesday. Once the mixture was made, we put it in an airtight container and refrigerated it so it would be good to use for next week. Thank you, Jean-Luc, for giving me a recipe that I sort of actually know how to make... the best part about cooking this in class is that you pass everything through a chinois at the end, so there is no worry about little cooked egg pieces getting into your final product. Also, when we were making it, we didn't heat the liquid up to a boil, which is what I had been doing when I made it at home. So there you go.
There was also a point where we caramelized the pineapples, which consisted of peeling and slicing the pineapple, adding some butter to a frying pan and letting it get hot, adding the pineapple and waiting for it to "seize", then adding the sugar and letting the fruit get a nice caramel colour. Yum. [Except I have a thing with warm fruit... but Jean-Luc kept eating the pieces, so I'm sure it was actually delicious. It tasted better cold though, which is how it was served.] These went in the fridge until we were going to use them later.
We also made sugar spirals which was mostly difficult because the sugar is really hot, so you have to wear oven mitts while also trying to control the cornet piping. Trying to pipe while wearing oven mitts is pretty challenging, in case you've never tried it before. But so necessary because you can feel the heat of the sugar through the oven mitts. (I also got hot sugar on my finger and it hurt A LOT.) We caramelized our decoration syrup and then filled at least three large cornets each with it and then placed these in the oven, waiting til the sugar was liquidy enough to work with. Once they were warm enough, you took one cornet at a time out of the oven (we had to keep stopping mid-spiral to warm them up) and try to pipe a spiral with the hope that the sugar wouldn't cool down too quickly on you. Overall, I think we did okay. The heat in the kitchen and in the service kitchen was making the sugar stick to the parchment paper though so we had a lot of spiral casualties in the process of trying to plate the desserts.
The chocolate pate plating was exactly the same as yesterday, so the only new things we had to do for that were make some whipped cream and cut up some more fruit. Jean-Luc didn't show it to us again because he expected us to remember it from yesterday. So it's a good thing we all took pictures...
I actually plated a few desserts in the restaurant today, mostly plates of parfait, but I was okay with that, because I think it was actually the easier thing to plate. It didn't require any expert piping skill, which I was pretty happy about. I really like the plating we have done so far in this section. The pate is definitely my favourite, but I also loved the strudel from yesterday and the parfait from today. The sugar spirals, even though they were hard to make, really added to the plating. The students in the restaurant kitchen waiting to take out the desserts looked really impressed when we were bringing them out (even though some of the sugar spirals weren't quite "parfait"...). So, that's a good sign.
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Today's Recipes
Grand Marnier Parfait
Financier
Sesame Wafer
Anglaise Sauce
Chocolate Pate
Raspberry Coulis
Crème Brûlée
Chocolate Crème Brûlée
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