First we made a mixed berry topping for our cheesecakes, which was basically heat up frozen berries, sugar, and water; add corn starch and water; fold in mixed fresh berries; place in the blast freezer to cool. After that, we made some sweetened whipped cream to do a crumb layer on our caramel cakes. The tricky thing about icing cakes with whipped cream, is the more you try to fix and smooth out imperfections, the softer it gets, making it super hard to fix anything. Sigh. After we were "done" we put the cakes back in the freezer.
Then, we got our cheesecakes and made more whipped cream (we went through a lot of whipped cream today) and made rosettes around the edges and filled the centre with our mixed berry topping. There were a lot of cakes because we each made two and then there were two extras that someone had forgotten about. So. Many. Rosettes.
Next, we got our caramel cakes out again and did a final layer of whipped cream, a border of rosettes, and craquelin squares around the bottom edges. I wasn't super happy with my rosettes but I was rushing and our whipped cream was a little on the soft side and everyone around us was already ready for the test / on break. Normally, the cakes would have crazy hazelnut topping on them, but we didn't have time, so we are going to learn to do them next semester. The hazelnuts are on big toothpicks and then dipped in sugar and then left at the edge of the table so the sugar drips off and then once it hardens, you're left with hazelnuts with a thin strand of sugar sticking up from it and those are spread around the top of the cake. It's pretty cool. But the cakes still looked good without them. I managed to make the top of at least one of mine pretty smooth, which at that point, was good enough for me.
After this, we basically cleared off our table and got ready for the test. It wasn't AS bad as I thought it would be and there were only a few moments where I felt super rushed. I made a couple of the best cornets I've ever made and I think that helped, especially since they were bigger than mine normally are, which prevented me from having to fill up another one eight billion times. I think overall I was pretty happy with my designs. Funnily enough, in the last five minutes, I decided to redo a couple of the designs I'd done already and they turned out better than when I was going a lot slower. I had eleven good ones in the end so I left the eleventh on the tray... just in case. One of the really hard designs to get that actually ended up okay got smudged when a draft of wind (inside?!) blew it into another strip. CHOCOLATE IS THE WORST. But it was over and that was enough. The feeling of placing my tray on the rack with all of the other completed trays was like no other feeling [I tried my best not to look at anyone else's designs to compare mine to theirs, especially not the ones that were face up in the garbage that looked way better than mine but were ones that other people threw out because their other ones were better...what? Uh...]
After the test, we did a MASSIVE clean-up of basically everything in the kitchen. It literally went from 11 a.m. until almost 12:30. It was intense. And then we gathered for a few last announcements (our marks will be posted on Wednesday; Jean-Luc will be in next week for people who want to practice stuff for the skills competition; try not to forget everything you have learned this semester; etc). I think Jean-Luc finished the semester by saying something like, "Great semester guys. I really enjoyed it. Now get the hell out of here."
And that was that.
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Today's Recipes
New York Style Cheesecake
Mixed Berry Topping
Chocolate Hazelnut Cake
Craquelin
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