Some more days

After much a due here is another post, i would start at the bottom and work your way up.

finished cake

finished baba with cream and fruit.

soaking baba in water sugar and rum

Cake glazed? Check.

Carrot cake

making Circle Diamond cookies.

making checkerboard diamond cookies.

finished pastasio Mousse cake

two colors of cookie dough

piping mousse into cake, chocolate orange.

The Last few Days

So for the most part the format of this blog will change. because we spend a lot of time assembling pastries from smaller things, most of which have been covered already, not a lot is new. so instead most of the content will be in the form of Photographs, followed by neat, and clever captions.

Joconde Biscuit seems to be a two toned Almond biscuit used on the sides of cakes, we made some orange and brown ones to signify the flavors of our cake. this is one made in a mold. brown cigarette batter goes in the mold first and settles to the bottom, then sets up in the freezer so when the joconde batter goes over it the two don not mix.

This is me adding some batter to form a biscuit. i had done the pattern by hand on a silicon mat and using a Comb instead of a mold.

Mini Pistachio Cakes

Strawberry Bagatelle - Fraisier. sometimes I don't know why thing get their names, for all i can tell Fraisier is the French word for strawberry, and bagatelle can mean something of little value or importance or a hundreds of year old table game. any ways when all these words come together it means a genoise cake with buttery mousse cream and exposed strawberries.

Chef Painting Strawberries with a Glaze

Green Joconde Biscuit for pistachio cakes.

This is.... well it's better you don't know.

this is a concord cake, it is layers of chocolate meringue piped in disks and dried, and chocolate mousse. after it sets up in the freezer or fridge it is lined with pieces of chocolate meringue that was piped into straight lines and dried. we topped this one with a ganache and Chantilly cream, along with some colored chocolate pieces.

Day Thirty Two

So tonight started with tempering chocolate, tempering is the process of using temperature to control the crystallization of the coco butter in the chocolate. Without proper crystallization chocolate is crumbly and dull, but with it chocolate is smooth, shiny and has a nice snap when you break it apart. We us a process called Tabling, in this process the chocolate is melted using a double boiler and brought to 50 Celsius, then some of the liquid chocolate is poured onto a marble slab and worked using a spatula and a scrape. This is done to bring the temperature down so when it is added back into the remaining chocolate it in turn brings its temp down. You are looking for something between 28 and 29. Then quickly heat it back up to 32 but not over, 32 is the working temperature and at this point the chocolate will set correctly.

What you need to know is that it is a big fat messy pain in the butt and I hate doing it, but it will be on my finale so I have to learn.

After that we made up some meringue and piped it out into discs, these went into the oven and were backed for something we are doing tomorrow. More news then.

Days Thirty and Thirty One

OK, sorry about the lack of updates but last week was a killer. this is what happened. made some cakes, tempored some chocolate, wrote a paper on chocolate, and maybe did some dancing when no one was looking. Have some pictures.

Super busy

Super busy, super tiered, super fly? i'll update in the morning i swear

Day Twenty Nine

So tonight was the beginning of a new semester, a semester at this school is about ten weeks. Now my class has moved over to the kitchen next to the one we were in and a new level one class started tonight. I am now considered level one advanced so la tee da. I found out I got a solid B on my Mid term, which is better then I thought. Also today we started our research projects. They are on chocolate, it’s history and fabrication. Chef took us to the library, that’s right my school has a library, and we started reading up. I checked out a book called the True History Of Chocolate.

After that we went back to the kitchen and started on some Mocha Genoise. You start by whipping together some egg, sugar, and inverted sugar in a kitchen aid bowl, but you do it by hand not with the kitchen aid. Then move the bowl over a pot of boiling water to create a double boiler where you continue to whisk it as it slowly heats up. When it gets to about 45 or 50 degrees and it is starting to ribbon, move it to the kitchen aid and let it whisk it the rest of the way. After a few minutes it should start to become thick and fluffy, and begin to cling to the whisk instead of sliding off, that is what you are looking for. Transfer it to a regular bowl and fold in the flour, and then some liquid instant coffee. That is the batter for your cake which gets baked in a small pan.

Then we worked on a mocha butter cream, which is basically and Italian meringue with butter, instant coffee syrup added as it cools. That is about what we did tonight.

Day Twenty Eight

Had mid terms, cooked alot of stuff i had made before, don't want to talk about it.