Student Diary: Advanced Pastry Arts, Day 15

Last week was our final. There were 40 questions, and it looks like I did okay!

Julie,

You got 40/40 on the final! Excellent job! Your
overall percentage in the class was 103%. You did an
outstanding job in this class, Julie. I think you
have the makings to be a first-rate pastry chef. It
was a pleasure having you in my class, and I wish you
the best of luck in the future.

Scott

PS Please feel free to e-mail me pictures of cakes and
things you make!

Woot! Project photo recap after the jump ...



Project 1: Wedding Cake



Adapted into a round cake


Project 2: Spa Desserts



Project 3: Filled Chocolate Box





Project 4: Chocolate Plated



Project 5: Undersea Sugar Scape



Project 6: Sugar Bowl and Blown Sugar





Project 7: Pastillage Friandise (small plate for little desserts)



Project 8: Tiered Wedding Cake in Fondant





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Student Diary: Advanced Pastry Arts, Day 14

Our final class project was tiered fondant wedding cakes. I tried to photograph everyone's cake, but I missed a few. I took photos of my finished cake at home because I was too slow to get it done in class. Lots of images!




Classmates' cakes:










(This was one of my favorites, and I told its baker that it's the kind of cake I'd want at my own wedding. It reminds me of my pastillage friandise.)






(This cake's baker was a trouper--his friend accidentally drove off with all of his decorations, so he just decorated from scratch.)





My team for this project really rocked it, if I do say so myself. Here are my two teammates' cakes:


Elegant and simple, just like my partner!


He called it The Sea of Chocolate! It was so awesomely tall and beautiful!

And this was mine, which doesn't look anything like a traditional wedding cake, using Colette Peters' stained glass method for the bottom tier, painting the top tier, and topping it off with pieces I made with sugar:






I couldn't finish in class, so this is what Chef had to photograph. I was determined to get it home and get at least a little more work done before calling it.


There were a few mishaps with bumped-off gel patches on the way home, but the cake survived mostly intact. I wasn't sure if I should put the sugar bowl "moon" on top.


Then I wasn't sure if I should put the LED under the moon.




I like it!


The next day, after some sleep, I finished it more by filling in the bottom of the bottom tier and darkening the colors of the top tier.



Tonight's my final and last class!
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Daring Bakers, April: Cheesecake Pops

It's that time of the month again ... meaning it's Daring Bakers time! Every month, hundreds of Daring Bakers are assigned a baking project by that month's host, and we have all month to bake it. At the end of the month, on the assigned day, we post our final product! This month, Elle and Deborah assigned cheesecake pops! At least a few had to be covered with straight chocolate, but we could also use whatever other "roll-ins" we wanted. I made a small, simple, straight-forward batch--just enough to make a couple handfuls of flavors.



These were pretty yummy! The cheesecake had an almost flan-like flavor. Between the snappy chocolate coating and the crumbly coatings, one had to be careful with eating these, though most held together pretty well. It's either the kind of dessert you have to eat while standing over the sink or with your plate right under your chin with your face jutted forward over it, or fed to you decadently while reclining in the tub or on a chaise lounge. Woot!


My flavors were chocolate sprinkles, honey apricot, ginger cookie, muddy buddy (peanut butter, chocolate ganache, vanilla, butter, and powdered sugar), chocolate peanut butter, peanut butter with chocolate sprinkles, almond, blue sugar, and dark chocolate.






A recurring problem with this recipe amongst the DBers was that the cheesecake didn't seem to want to set up within the prescribed bake time. That was frustrating to read, since I'm a stickler about published recipes being well tested. I halved my recipe, and I had to cook it the full time to get it to set well enough to have workable cheesecake--we had to be able to scoop it up into balls, or at least form it into balls with our hands. I was able to use spoons to form "quenelles." Although the recipe called for shortening, I decided to just use tempered chocolate, melting it, then letting it cool to body temperature, which also resulted in a thicker chocolate for dipping. Tempered chocolate will give you that bon bon "snap," and it will still set up quickly, especially since they're going straight into the fridge after dipping. I was really happy with the result, and really happy that I got to avoid having to buy shortening. The non-chocolate-dipped pops (honey apricot and peanut butter chocolate)

I combined all the crumblies left after coating to make a "special of the day."


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Today is a good day to eat out!

I should've mentioned this earlier, but I goofed it:

Today is a great day to eat out! Certain restaurants all over North America are donating a percentage of today's take toward AIDS/HIV service organizations! Click on the image and scroll down to see if your city is participating and which of your local establishments are donating. Today, I'm eating takeout from the delicious Acacia Cafe, which is donating 100% of todays sales! Read more!

Student Diary: Advanced Pastry Arts, Day 13

Can I actually build it? Well, I dunno. No. I dunno. Maybe. No. If I had more time to play with the sugar, maybe, but there's a lot to do. Last week, we masked the cakes we'd baked the previous week, made rolled fondant (not nearly as painful as when we had to make it in Classical Desserts), and covered our cakes. I hate to say it, but ... the Wilton stuff is better. Bought stuff is better, with all its funky additives that keep it flexible and soft. Handmade stuff was prone to drying out quickly and cracking (at least, the stuff we made in CD and this class was) while covering our cakes, especially my base cake, which was a monster.


Masking went well, but afterward, I took my team's prep dishes to the wash station to wash them. When I came back, my two cakes were gone, and one of my teammates told me that our third teammate had taken our cakes to the cooler to store them. Next thing I know, I look up and see him carrying a full sheet pan with two chewed-up cakes on it. At first, I thought he was joking. This was, after all, the same guy who'd sent me an e-mail advising me to study for the quiz when there was no quiz--we'd taken it last week, and I'd forgotten. He wasn't joking, though--that really was a handprint in my large base cake, complete with deeply sunk finger holes, and my small top cake really was somehow upside down on its cake board. It turns out the top cake had taken a total header, falling on the floor, frosted side down. Coincidentally, I'd made my team members wipe a dab of frosting on their cake boards to make sure their cakes wouldn't slid around while frosting. Unfortunately, a dab of frosting can't help a cake defy gravity. More accurately, I needed a dab on the bottom of the cakeboard to stick it to the sheet pan. Anyway, my teammate did a bang-up job remasking the large cake, paying special attention to fill the finger holes, and I found an extra cake in the walk-in to mask.

I spent a lot of time tonight doing some sugar work. Tips: you can remelt cooled sugar in an oven set to 300 and rework it if you don't have a heat lamp; digital thermometers with alarms are really handy; you can scrub cooled dribbles of sugar off your flat top stove; silicone mats work just as well as the more expensive silpats when working with sugar; you really don't need a lot of food coloring to dye sugar; rubber gloves are awesome, though try to find a pair without grippy texturing ... unless you want to make imprints on dragonfly wings; attach wings as soon as possible to cake assembly, or they'll snap off, the brittle bastards.

Tomorrow after work, I'll be cutting pillars, making royal icing, dying piping gel, coloring/rolling/cutting/shaping fondant, trying to see if I can paint fondant (high-alcohol extract and powdered food dye), making a clear sugar dome (time willing--I already have a black one), making fondant walls to go around my cake pillars, making fondant lilies. If I get through half that list, I'll be very happy. I'll have to separate what I have to do tomorrow from what I might be able to do just before class starts if I can get into the kitchen early (read: if I can sneak past Chef B's French Cuisine Class and find some counter place--hopefully they won't be doing their final; when I took the class, we made an awesome five-course meal, and it was consuming ... in a completely awesome way). Read more!

Mini Book Review: America's Best Lost Recipes from America's Test Kitchen

One of my friends gave me a nifty cookbook to celebrate the winter holidays:



And so far, I’ve made two recipes from it.


This was the first, and it’s now a favorite. You can find the recipe for Waukau here. As that writeup mentions, it’s like a cross between a clafouti and a popover. Maybe it’s like a Dutch baby, only with berries instead of apples. The writeup mentions that clafouti are vaguely skin-like, and I thought the same thing about popovers. What makes Waukau stand out is it’s wonderful "crust"—soft and slightly chewy, with a wonderfully crisped crust. Oh my yum. I used frozen raspberries because that’s all I had on hand, and it made for a delicious syrup for the pancake.




I also made the Wacky Cake. The recipe is easy enough to find. The book guesses that its lack of eggs and butter stems from war-time rationing. Not surprisingly, it tastes like cake made without butter or eggs—pretty flat and bland, although it did rise well and have a decent texture. In short, it tastes like box mix, and not the kind with pudding powder, either. On the plus side, it’s vegan! (My friend Mario makes a delicious vegan chocolate cake, but that’s his private recipe. Darnit.)





Overall, it's a fun book! A lot of the recipes are accompanied by photos, and most of them have a story dilineating the recipes history, whether it's cultural, familial, or creative and charming. In true ATK style, any "tricky" maneuvers are accompanied with instructional photos and/or editor's notes.

Update, 5/03/08--It's better with fresh berries, for sure.



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Moussaka

I've had this in a couple of Greek restaurants, and have loved it totally each time. Last year, it was my birthday lunch when I went to My Big Fat Greek Restaurant.









Basically, I used a recipe from the Food Network Web site. It's not as custard creamy as other moussaka dishes I've had, but it's pretty dang tasty, and I'd make it again! Oh man--just writing about it and loading photos up makes me wish I had a dish of it right now. I think this is a dish that would make an eggplant hater into a lover, and aside from the bechamel sauce/custard ... it's healthy. It's pretty easy to make, too, though some might be put off by the multiple steps (prep the eggplant, make the sauce, assemble the dish). It's worth it!
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