"It's never a disaster."

It is exhilarating, intimidating, exciting, and exhausting to be surrounded by the amount of talent that is in the pastry lab on a daily basis. I am constantly impressed by the ideas everyone has and the creative ways in which they express them. When we have projects, like baking for the Christmas Buffet, where we really get to do whatever we want, you really see so many different strengths in the classroom -- I think it's so cool.

So, today was the second Christmas Buffet, so it was the other half of the class's moment of glory. The day felt really intense, but we got it all done and everything looked delicious in the end. It was getting there that felt really crazy and also the cleaning up afterwards. The overall serving and standing at the dessert tables wasn't too bad and the people who I ended up serving were all really friendly and appreciative and complimentary. So that was really nice.

But I'm getting a little ahead of myself. I got to the lab around 7 a.m. because I wanted to get a bit of an early start. The first thing I did was crush the almond nougatine into smaller pieces with my rolling pin. Then I warmed up my salted caramel from yesterday so I could fill my tart. After I poured it in and swirled it around a bit to get it relatively even, I put it back in the fridge to chill.

Then, I decided to work on the royal icing snowflakes. Before I got started with the royal icing, I helped a group member cover her cake in the most amazing blue fondant. Seriously, the colour was beautiful. She missed the fondant cakes for the Festival of Trees, so she made the most adorable Charlie Brown and Snoopy lemon chiffon cake for the buffet. It was delicious and awesome.

I made a few cornets and mixed a little water into the royal icing til I got the right consistency and I tried piping a few snowflakes... and basically thought, "Oh, I am better at this in my head than I am in real life." So, five attempted "snowflakes" in, I crumbled up the piece of parchment paper, threw out the cornet, put the royal icing back in the fridge, and decided that these decorations were not the best use of my time.

With that decision behind me, I went back to my tart, which I think was my favourite dessert that I made for the buffet. It was actually surprisingly simple but I really liked the flavour pairings and I didn't have to pipe anything either. The next step for the tart was just heating up the chocolate ganache a little and then pouring it into the tart on top of the caramel. Before the ganache set, I sprinkled the nougatine pieces over it and then put it in the fridge. It felt nice to be completely done one of my three desserts.

Unfortunately, the cakes weren't as easy as the tart... alas. Maybe if I ever open a bakery, I should only do tarts. I think this could work. Totally. One of my main problems with cakes is that I am apparently awful at making Swiss buttercream. Seriously. I can't seem to get the right texture. The only time that the texture was actually right was when someone else from my group was helping me with it. I just don't know what I keep doing wrong. The other problem was that without the royal icing snowflakes, I had to come up with a new idea for my peppermint cake and I didn't have a solid idea for my chai cake either. So, this is pretty much when the stress started.

I tried to make a batch of Swiss buttercream and failed miserably so I made another batch. It could have been that I tried to add eggnog to the first batch, but I think I just did it really wrong. The second batch wasn't quite right but it was still tasty, so I went with it. The peppermint cake already had a crumb coat on it, so I just did a final layer of icing and then put it in the blast freezer so it could harden before I did anymore. For some reason, I did the top layer white instead of red (er... pink) so you could see the red through the white... I don't know why I did this, but I think it was because I just didn't want to colour any more icing. Or because I thought the white would completely cover it. Or I was going for a marble effect. We'll go with that last one. Yeah.

After this was the moment of truth... time to see if my chai mousse had set. I took it out of the fridge and immediately took it out of the cake ring (it slid right out!) and removed the acetate. The mousse was set (!) but a little soft, so I put it in the blast freezer just while I was making more buttercream. Ugh, so much buttercream. At first I thought that I could just do an icing sugar and butter buttercream, but someone else did that and Jean-Luc told us he didn't like the taste of it and we should use the skills we've learned and the buttercreams we know how to make now taste so much better. (The key phrase there is "know how to make"...) So, I made another batch of Swiss buttercream (sigh). This time, I had someone helping me, so it turned out okay. We had to stop and heat it up again at one point (I don't understand!) but then it was a good texture for spreading. I just needed to do a crumb coat on my mousse cake and then get it back in the freezer. I was trying to be very careful while icing it, because it seemed like it would be a delicate cake. I didn't want the mousse to start seeping out or anything.

As I was doing this, I was also trying to figure out what the heck I was going to do on my peppermint cake. I decided to try a piping technique that I found while browsing the Internet last night that, of course, I'd never tried before. Because, what did I have to lose at that point, really? So, I used some red food colouring and made half of my buttercream red and left the other half white. Then, I piped dots of buttercream around the edge of the cake and used my palette knife to smush them down a little. Then I piped a smaller circle slightly overlapping the smushed parts of the first circle and smushed those down as well. It sort of looks like petals. I did alternating red and white ones and it ended up looking pretty cool. Not bad for a first attempt. The bottom of the cake looked a little sad though, so I wanted to pipe just a border of dots. That didn't really work because the buttercream was way too runny for that. So, I had to use the buttercream I had done for my other cake, which was a slightly different colour (for some reason) than the other white... so, the bottom of the cake continued to look a little sad. I didn't even pipe these... another group member did it for me, because my attempts were failing. BUT the pattern on top of the cake turned out well... so... there you go.

The last thing I had to do was figure out my chai cake and what I was doing to decorate it. I put the final buttercream icing on top, and then someone else at my table was using whipped cream to make rosettes on their cake and I wish I had done a whipped cream coating instead of a buttercream... but she had some left, so I decided to just use that for rosettes to pipe around the top edge of the cake. I initially wanted to do maybe a caramel sauce or something in the centre, then I thought I could sprinkle something (nougatine?) in it, and then I decided that since I had it anyway, I could just pour some chocolate ganache in the middle. I was going to sprinkle nougatine on top of that, but I had already given it away to someone else to sprinkle on top of a cheesecake. So, I decided to use the ganache skills we learned for our banana cake and make a wave pattern in the ganache. It wasn't as great as the one in the banana cake, because the ganache had already kind of set and I kept getting whipped cream in the ganache and ganache in the whipped cream. But, it turned out okay. I opted out of doing a bottom border on this cake because I just wanted to be done and I was out of whipped cream. What might have been better is if I had done the chocolate ganache on the peppermint cake and something else -- maybe the caramel -- on my chai cake, but that's okay. Some decisions are made for you. [Based on what ingredients you have left.]

Once everything was done, we transferred our creations onto a variety of serving dishes, including slabs of slate, mirrors, glass plates, regular plates, upside down trays, and a bunch of other things. Moving fragile cakes all over the place is not my favourite. I blame the doilies. I only put one under one of my cakes. We had a cheesecake casualty, but Jean-Luc saved the day and magically averted disaster. He also said, "It's never a disaster; things can always be fixed," which I will have to keep in mind more often. After all of our stuff for the buffet was on serving dishes and ready to go, we checked to make sure that everything on our tables was in place and changed into clean uniforms. [Even though I feel like coming out of the kitchen covered in chocolate and buttercream is way more authentic...]

Everything ready to go!

At around 11:30, the buffet guests started walking into the restaurant, and once people had been seated, we started bringing our desserts in and setting them up on the tables. There were a lot of desserts. Once the desserts were set up on the table, our groups split in half and half of us from each group stayed at the buffet for the first shift and the rest of us went back to the kitchen to clean up. The more we could clean up now, the less we had to do after the buffet was over. We also took breaks to look through the windows into the restaurant (the most awkwardly placed windows) and see if our desserts were getting eaten. The cakes that didn't have any slices taken or the trays that didn't have cookies taken were definitely blows to our respective egos. But at the end of the buffet, I don't think there was anything that hadn't been touched at all.

Eventually, the rest of us went out to take our turn at serving. It consisted of a lot of repeating what each dessert was, so I'm glad we went over that before we started serving everyone. If I were at this buffet, I would be totally overwhelmed and not know what to choose at all. I would probably just eat a cookie and leave it at that. There was so much to choose from and the plates were very small. Some people had two plates; some people came back for seconds; and some people just took tiny pieces of a select number of things.

Our group's table. [All of these photos are blurry.]

And again.

A very weirdly lit picture of the other group's table.

And again.

Awesome Charlie Brown & Snoopy Cake. [I did not make this, but I love it.]

It was really great when people came back for seconds or to tell us how good something was... I was secretly worried that everything I made tasted awful. So, I'm glad it didn't. One of the gentlemen came back for seconds of the salted caramel and chocolate tart because it was "perfect" and one woman said, "I just couldn't get past your cakes. You should be very proud." And countless people told all of us as they were leaving how much they enjoyed everything and how great it all looked.

Once we were done, we took everything back to the kitchen and did a speed transferring into containers and washing dishes, because we had very little time to get out of the lab before the second year's got there and to salvage anything that we wanted to keep. The cookies were good to keep for the evening service and my peppermint cake (which only had one slice cut out of it, sadly) would be served in the evening as well. But other than that, the leftovers either had to be taken or thrown out. Someone got a giant stack of styrofoam containers for everyone and we all just went for it. I ended up taking the last slice of a delicious lime chiffon pie and about a quarter of my chai cake. After looking at dessert all afternoon, I couldn't really think about eating much of it.

After it was all over, I felt like I could have had five litres of water and we were all totally exhausted. But I have to say, I think everyone did a really good job. Our group today and the group yesterday made some awesome looking desserts. There may have been some cracked cakes and curdled buttercream along the way, but in the end, we pulled through and it all came together!

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Today's Recipes

Salted Caramel and Chocolate Tart
Chocolate Sponge with Peppermint Buttercream 
Vanilla Sponge with Chai Mousse