Swanning Around

Yesterday was the last day of our pastry lessons, finishing off the collection nicely with choux pastry. Choux is the stuff used for eclairs, profiteroles and other tasty cream filled delights. And so that is what the chef showed us. In demo we were shown how to make the pastry itself, unlike the others this one is made on the stove to a gloopy consistency and then piped into the various shapes and sizes. Once the pastry is cooked it is filled, normally with large quantities of oh-so-naughty cream and other assorted treats. Here are some examples from chef, take note of the particularly gorgeous swan with a glint in his eye who stole my heart.

True love

In class we had to make the choux swans and the eclairs. This was a particularly daunting class because these are one of our potential exam dishes and this was a first attempt at them. The choux swans need to be piped evenly and their delicate necks need to be just that, any thing fatter and it becomes more of a choux goose. Although in class I found the techniques fine, time for this recipe is tight. There is alot to do and I'm sure those kitchens are in some kind of time warp, an hour easily passes in what feels like 15 minutes. As a result the end of class was a bit stressy as everyone tried to get the finishing touches to their pieces, we had swans to construct, fruit to arange, cream and chocolate to pipe and a sense of elegance to maintain (or at least attempt). In the mad dash to finish a few of my swans ended up with slightly bog eyed or backwards facing, but they were okay. Slightly terrified of having this in the exam though.

Poor backwards swan

For some reason yesterdays class was a bit stressful and on the tube home I was a bit distracted and missed my stop. I was shattered and feeling slightly bitter towards my swans when a strange thing happened. A woman next to me made me open my tupperware to see what was inside and spent the next 2 minutes delighting over my swans. Suffice to say this made my day. However, once her stream of compliments ended she spent the rest of the tube journey singing quite loudly so my ego wasnt too inflated.