The last chocolate.

Today was the last day in the decoration room. I'm not sure I'm ready to re-enter the kitchen tomorrow, though I am excited to be in the bread section again. It looks a little bit more complicated this time around but we get to make a lot of really cool things like focaccia and challah. So, that will be fun.

The other big thing happening this week is we are making our Christmas/Holiday/Winter-themed cake for the Festival of Trees cake auction this Thursday. Jean-Luc's demonstration today was how to cover a cake in fondant, which was exciting. Although cakes covered in fondant may not be my go-to method of cake decorating, I am glad that we are finally going to experiment with it. He then showed us a bunch of different decorations that he made out of various ingredients, mostly sugar and isomalt. He also made some snowflakes with royal icing using a stencil. We also have to have at least three marzipan figurines on our cake. He made adorable polar bears on a pressed sugar base. I have some ideas, but I'm not sure if I'll be able to execute them as well as it all looks in my head. I have some marzipan to practice with at home tonight. So, we'll see how that goes.

Jean-Luc's adorable polar bears

It didn't seem like we did that much today, but what we did do apparently took up a lot of time. We started by making nougatine to put on top of the Arabica chocolate. Nougatine is essentially a dry caramelization of sugar mixed with sliced almonds. This is then poured onto a sheet of parchment paper to cool. Once it cooled down, we crushed it into smaller pieces by rolling a rolling pin over it. After this was done, we were ready to start dipping our chocolate ganache. We used our dipping tools for the first time this semester and dipped the coffee-flavoured ganache pieces into a bowl of dark chocolate. Then we set them on a baking tray and sprinkled a bit of nougatine over it. It was relatively straightforward, it just took a LONG time. The chocolate needed to be melted and tempered and if we didn't work fast enough (which I didn't, obviously), we had to re-melt and re-temper it. Although it was pretty repetitive, it was still fun. And the chocolates looked so good and tasted delicious. I ran into Larry as I was taking my plated chocolates down to the cafeteria and he stopped me and asked what they were. He took a bite of one and said, "These are delicious. You made these, eh? You should be very proud." (First he said, "Nah, I don't like it," and almost put it back on the plate. Do all chefs have weird senses of humour?)

After the chocolate was done, we went on our break. When we came back, we cut up our pate de fruit into 36 pieces (smaller than the previous group) and then rolled them in sugar. Again, pretty straightforward. Then we put these on plates and sent them out to the cafeteria as well.

The last thing we did today was put our chocolate covered almonds in little bags tied up with ribbon. So adorable.

And that was pretty much it. We did a lot of cleaning today because there are always more cleaning duties at the end of the rotation. The one good thing about moving out of the chocolate room is that everything will no longer be covered in layers of chocolate. And I will have to wash significantly fewer marble slabs.

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Today's Recipes

Arabica
Nougatine
Pate a Fruit
Covered Almonds