Long time no see

I better start this blog of with an apology to my number one reader. Sorry Mum. It has indeed been a while since I last posted and there is much to catch up on, pictures to see etc, but I promise, I'm on it. So far in the story, we had reached the part where the mousse-y module came to an end and the chocolate work was about to begin, so lets start from there.

Two weeks ago, my week began and ended with these little delights:

Our lessons were spent making a variety of chocolates that could be used as nice petit fours, or scoffed in greedy handfuls, whichever tickles your fancy. We made: white chocolate truffles, filled with raspberry and Malibu ganache, dark chocolate truffles filled with milk chocolate and cointreau, caramel cups loaded with Baileys and, my favourite, the heavenly Malakoff. Although all the chocolates were delicious, the Malakoff stands out as a bit special, filled with sliced almonds, praline and pistachios. We worked as a team again to ensure we had bundles of chocolates to take home.

The only chocolates we had to make individually were these hand moulded gems which may just pop up in our superior exam next term.

The main challenge faced is making sure the chocolate is well tempered but also warm enough so that it doesn't set the instant you use it. One more tap and a bit less chocolate dripping off my fingers and I'd score myself well on these.

The next task of the lesson was to make a chocolate centre piece. School gave us some templates to choose from, or the option of bringing in out own. I opted for the latter, choosing to make a chocolate Totoro. For those of you unlucky enough not to have come across this guy, he is a cartoon character from a Studio Ghibli film. He is also very popular in the novelty baking world. A quick google image search for "totoro cake" will prove this. I've been quite keen to get on the totoro patisserie ladder for a while now, so this was the perfect opportunity.  I was quite pleased with the way his cute chocolatey expression turned out. 

All in all, despite having thoroughly stained aprons, this was a brilliant week resulting in enough goodies to share about with the masses. I even had excess chocolate left over to try take on the big boys at Lindt and make a chocolate Bunny, after all, Easters on its way

Last of the Mousses

Im not sure whether or not it was due to the particularly high sugar content of our cakes this week, but the spirits in the kitchen were high. These are the last two mousse-y cakes we are making before moving on to chocolate next week. Not only are they full of cream and chocolate, but fun to make and provide the best guilty pleasure when eaten. That licking-out-the mixing-bowl type guilt. I'm sure when you hear about them you'll understand why.

Cake number one is the poires au caramel religieuses. It consists of: a chocolate sponge that is sprinkled with nuts before baking, caramel poached pears, a rich chocolate mousse, a chocolate glaze and, lovingly piped, chocolate pear decoration. The mousse and pears are layered inside the nutty sponge case and the combination is a real winner. It looks a little something like this:

In order to make the chocolate pears for the top we had to temper not only dark, but white chocolate too. White chocolate is the hardest to temper because it is the lease pure chocolate and thus can be a bit tempremental. Having said that, I followed the chefs advice, showing my chocolate a bit of TLC and even whispering it a few sweet nothings, until it set with the required snap and shine. Generally I'm quite pleased with how the cake turned out. I kept my piping simple again: a tactic that seems to be working a bit better for me. The only qualm I have is that I forgot to give my chocolate pears a good taps before they set so they are mottled with pesky air pockets. Nevermind, another lesson to learnt. 

The second cake of the week, white chocolate and pistachio entrement, is the real sugar kick. Although I think the cake is reminiscent of a childrens party, it would probably be a nightmare to have at one, unless your preared for some seriously hyper kiddies. Not only is this cake made with a wonderful white chocolate mousse, but it has a hidden layer of red berry jelly  waiting inside. The posh twist that moves this away from the toddlers menu is the pistachio sponge and the tempered dark chocolate decoration. The cake is finished with a white chocolate glaze with dark chocolate marbling.

As you can see from the rather galactic finish on the chocolate, we got to play with a little bit of shimmer this week. Having pots of gold and silver glitter in the kitchen was a bit like being allowed to play with your Mum's make up when you were younger. Should I go for silver-violet or silver-pink? Decisions, decisions. Once the big choice was made, we brushed this onto an embrossed acetate sheet, poured over some tempered chocolate, and scored in the shapes we wanted. I had a slightly scary moment when I was removing my cake ring which caused the mousse to drag a bit but other than that it was smiles all round.

What I like best about this cake, apart from the taste, is that from the ouside it looks quite grown up and posh, but when it is sliced the inside has fun layers of green, white and red hiding under the surface. 

Now who wouldn't want to dip their fingers in those mixing bowls?

Trouble with Sabrina & Charlotte

Last week I promised to be better with my camera. The week before I swore to practise and improve my piping. Have I dont either of these things? Seemingly not. This weeks class followed the same pattern as the last two, learning one of our potential exam dishes and one other cake.

The exam dish this week was the Sabrina cake. This cake is taken from 1954 film, Sabrina, whereby a girl heads of to learn to bake in Paris, falling in love in the process. She also, apparently, has a particular penchant for strawberries. The cake therefore is a rolled sponge, filled with a strawberry mousse. It is topped with chocolate covered marzipan, piping, pistachios etc etc. This cake is apparently the one students dread the most for the exam, but strangely score highest on. Because the base of the cake is a spiral of sponge and mousse, when it is cut into it has lovely, (hopefully) even stripes running through it. Although I had, again, forgotten my camera in class, fortunately I had my phone to snap the chefs offering

The demo of this was okay. I was pleased to of tempured my chocolate on my first attempt. Heat to 45˚C, cool to 27˚C, warm to 31˚C by touch and hope it sets with a shine. However, I was not pleased when I swiftly ruined my beautifully tempered chocolate by holding my knife at the wrong angle when marking it and leaving a bit of a mess behind. Alas, C'est la vie. Other than that I'd say my efforts were average, passable for the exam, but not high scoring.

Next up was the return of the Charlotte. Some of you may remember from last term that I kind of fell for Charlotte so I was pleased to have her back in my life. This time we were making a chestnut (Marron) mousse encased in a sweet ladyfinger sponge. The idea is to pipe the sponge so that it holds its shape and  gives the outside of the cake a bit of class. The decoration for this cake is a marzipan scroll piped with "Marron" (not Moron/morron/momman). The cake is finished with a white chocolate border

I'm sure you'll be surprised to hear that it was the piping that the main problem of this Charlotte. Shockingly piping on the wibbly wobbly scroll was pretty much impossible and at the end of class we had many interesting versions of "Marron" across the class. I swiftly avoided the moron trap, instead piping something that the chef interpretted as a cry for my mother "Maman". Seeing this, he advised me to keep my border as simple as possible, I did and it turned out better.

Despite this, I do still have a soft spot for Charlotte, I might even ask her to spend Valentines with me.

Hungarian Hippos

Technology has not been on my side this week, or at least not on my mind.  My week began with the disappearance of my beloved iPhone putting me out of communitcation, never on time and a bit lost. This set me up nicely for forgetting to charge my camera meaning, I'm afraid, this blog is a bit sparse. I managed to use the last second of power to quickly snap my three offerings but couldn't take any of the chefs, nor attempt to get a decent picture. Nonetheless, on we plough.

This week we made the second potential exam dish - the Opera cake. This is layers of sponge, ganache and coffee buttercream. My taste buds have only just matured towards coffee and can be a bit hit and miss, but this cake really is delicious. Its topped with a lovely shiny glaze and, of course, piped with chocolate. This week I was surprisingly pleased with my piping. It was perhaps a bit  simplistic after seeing the chefs swirly border (which I'm sure you can imagine by now) but it was neat enough and my writing was at least legiable this time!

The next cake of the week was a traditional Hungarian cake called the Dobos which is a thin biscuit-y sponge layered with mountains of ganache. The stacked cake is cut at an angle in half, shaped into a triangle and covered in more ganache and a glaze. The cutting is quite tricky because of the different textures of the cake and the unusual angle. In demo I thought the cake was a tad dry so I gave it a good rum syrup soak and it seemed to go down alright.

The third cake of the week was a very pretty raspberry roulade that made me go over all girly and giggly whilst making it. It is what I think should be called hippopotamus pink and tastes light and fluffy like a raspberry cloud. What a delight!

As pretty as a...

I've got my camera fully charged and ready to go along with a new phone so next week I will be more on the ball.

Return of the Puff

First week back, no longer feeling like the babies of the school, it was time to begin Intermediate Patisserie (IP). Monday and Tuesday were spend in demos on more puff pastry recipes. Somehow the dreaded pastry we first tackled way back in week seven didnt seem quite so scary second time round. The first recipe of the term was for a gateau St Honore. This is a fairly technical dish as the recipe includes not only puff pastry, but our good old friend choux, as well as sugar work, creme diplomate and, of course, piping. Charmingly, this cake is named after the patron saint of bakers and pastry chefs. In demo, the chef finished the cake of with the classic spun sugar decoration and a bit of crystalised lavender.

On Tuesday we covered two more classic puff pastry dishes: pithiviers & mille-feuille. A pithivier is an enclosed puff pastry dish, filled with an almond creme. It is egg washed for shine and marked with a knife for general prettiness. There is an old french tradition (I am told) of baking this with a bean inside, and whoever gets the lucky slice au bean gets to be king for the day. To avoid the consequences of a demanding IP king, ours was baked beanless.

All pithiviers, great and small.

The final dish of demos was the mille-feuille; thin layers of puff pastry sandwiched with jam, cream and strawberries, traditionally finished with a layer of fondant icing with feathered chocolate. Im salvating just writing about it. Again, the chef made both a larger 'cake' and smaller individual sized slices. 

Really rather lovely looking

Moving on to wednesday and our first bake-a-thon of the term. Between the hours of 3 and 9 we were in the kitchen rolling, whisking, piping and slightly sweating to create the dishes above. The first half of the lesson was spend making the puff pastry and the St Honore. I was pleased to find my basic skills hadn't disappeared along with the snow in the winter holidays. Being back in the boulangie was great, although my spec right by the oven wasn't the best of calls. Nonetheless, here is cake #1 minus the spun sugar.

We then had a 15 minute break, during which I ate a pastrami sandwhich in all of three bites and downed half a litre of water. Fed and watered, I was ready for the next two treats. I was a bit apprehensive that the puff pastry might not have had enough time to rest, but everything went according to plan and overall I was pleased.

King for the day

Good enough to eat

I'm not going to lie, after six hours of baking I was well and truly ready for bed and didnt enjoy my mission across London laden with cake tins. Having said that it is definately a better reflection of real working life and it shoundn't be long till I'm hardened up to it. The dilemma of fitting the cakes into the fridge was solved by my hungry housemates who made sure they all slotted onto one plate nicely

In other news, I have a French speaking test tomorrow for evening classes so perhaps I'll be learning the lingo in no time. 

Catch up

The holidays are swiftly coming to an end, which for most people means the return of the daily duties of work or university, but for a lucky few it is a return to the teaching kitchens of pastry school. Monday is the greatly anticipated return to LCB with new recipes, new timetable and a whole set of beatifully cleaned whites just waiting to be covered in fresh chocolate stains. So before school begins, here is a quick catch up blog of things that may, or indeed may not, be of interest.

1. Books.

For Christmas I recieved two wonderful books that have kept me feeling both entertained and hungry. The first is The Flavour Thesaurus by Niki Segnit which discusses 99 key flavours, suggesting flavour pairings for each as well as recipe suggestions. The pairings range from very classical suggestions such as chocolate&orange or lamb&mint to the more adventurous like coffee&avocado. For anyone interested in foods, I can't recommend it highly enough. Not only is the book itself rather lovely, its content makes you want to hop up to rummage through your stock cupboards and bring new life to old recipes.

The second is a book from school called The Chocolate Bible. This is a pretty self explanatory cookbook that covers all things chocolate. I've only had chance to make a few of the recipes, some of which are variations of things I learned in the first term, but they have come out a real treat. I particularly enjoyed a recipe for an iced chocolate and apricot crumble. Definately a good addition to my cookbook collection, complete with saliva-inducing pictures. 

2. Two for One Wednesdays

My timetable this term has taken inspiration from Orange Wednesdays it would seem. Last term we followed a fairly regular routine of demos in the morning, baking in the afternoon. This term we have two days of only demos, followed by a double baking session on wednesdays - totting up to a 6 hour session. This results in two problems. Firstly is a purely logistical problem of how to transport my baked goods home. One girl can only handle so much tupperware. Secondly there is the task of giving this glorious day a suitable name. Answers on a postacard. In the mean time it shall be known to one and all as two cake wednesday (I'm sure we can do much better).

3. French

On another sidenote, my new years resolution this year is to not only take on French pâtisserie but also try and brush up on the language itself. Thus far this has meant scouring the internet for suitable evening classes, audiobooks and perhaps even a tandem partner. Ooh-la-la indeed.

The big bad basic exam

I've been a bit slack on the old blog front recently but what with the end of term and begining of Christmas I think I should be forgiven. Over the last few weeks we havent had all that much school, what with the exams looming. We did manage to fit in a rather fun lesson on truffles which took a somewhat childish turn towards chocolate face painting, well on my part at least. But with the exception of a quick spell as the chocolate cat I've been spending my time reading up on theory, learning recipes and, of course, baking.

The written exam went pretty well, somehow all the recipes stayed in my head and most of the technichal questions were easy enough. To be honest, there isnt all that much else to say about it. I got 90%.

The practical exam is a bit of a different tale. Much to my dismay, the recipe I pulled out the hat was the genoise. Strangely, although I had practised the sponge and made it well at home, it was still the one I felt the most unconfortable with because there is quite a lot of space for error. Space which I managed to squeeze myself into during my exam. I've ben putting off writing this for a while because, to be honest, I felt a bit disappointed in myself after the exam. Everything went okay, except my butercream. I didnt whisk my eggs enough and I knew as soon as I had done it that it had gone wrong. Other than that, I made my sponge and jam well, covered my cake in dodgy buttercream and left feeling a bit glum. Although after spending the rest of my morning drinking champagne and eating cheese with my classmates I felt a bit perkier. I got my results the next day and, as expected, most of my comments revolved around the buttercream. My mark, considering, was okay at 73.

Overall for the year I got 79.2 which is annoyingly close to the 80% merit boundary but we'll get there next time. Maybe.

The rest of my class had some really great results and we had a lovely time at graduation, firstly being a bit posh at the Dorchester and then spending the rest of the evening guzzling beer and cocktails in an american style diner in Angel. Good times indeed.

What an attractive bunch

Its been a really great term all round and has truly flown by. Quite looking forward to a couple of weeks  enjoying the countryside snow before heading back to it to face intermediate. 

A bad workman?

Im sat pondering that old phrase about a bad workman blaming his tools and begining to feel a bit sorry for the old chap. Perhaps this workman was infact a fellow LCB student trying to recreate his recipes at home? Well if he was, I for one feel sorry for him (and myself for that matter). At school we have an endless supply of bowls and pans of assorted sizes, top quality ingredients at our disposal, lovely pre-heated temperature controlled big ovens, blast chillers to cool things rapidly and blow torches to heat them up. In short we have everything that you need and more. At home I have this:

These

and a lot of this

Saying that, practise today didnt go too badly so perhaps I should stop complaining and keep baking. The exam is looming.

Friends and Fours

Without getting too soppy, this weeks blog is going to have to be a bit of a shout out to my fellow budding pastry chefs in group D. Since that momentous day when we met in the Boulangerie in the beginnings of October we have become quite a close knit group and they are certainly the cherry on the top of my LCB days. Anyway, enough of that for now, time to talk about the matter at hand: petit fours.  Petit four or ‘small oven’ are miniture treats served with your coffee at the end of a hefty meal, and should be no more than 2-bite sized. They can be quite a variety of things from meringues and biscuits to pastries, chocolates and fudges but the one thing they must be is small. I do quite like the idea of miniture food, mostly because it looks cute and so with a whole variety to cover I was looking forward to the lessons on the topic.

We began on Thursday with a demo that covered sables hollandais, meringue a l'amande and tuiles a l'orange. Sables biscuits are named so because of their sand-like texture, They are like a french shortbread and come in many varieties. The aim of our sable game was to make both a chocolate and a plain mix and use them together to make patterened biscuits. For the almond meringues we were shown three different ways of piping and finishing off the mixture and the tuille was an alternative to the plain batter we first covered way back in October. Because petit fours are so small, even low quantity recipes produce enough to feed the masses so there was more than enough to go round after class, all served up on a mirrored platter.

Tuiles

In class our task was to make the sables and meringues and if there was anytime we could make the tuiles as a class as an added bonus. The sables can be quite time consuming because there is alot of cutting and fiddly work to get the patterns and they need to be chilled inbetween layers, but the end result is satisfying enough to justify the time spent. At the end of class we found ourselves with a miraculous half an hour left to frantically make some tuilles. The result was a lot of mad dashes up and down the stairs to the stockroom to get the ingredients that hadnt been accounted for and alot of hands around one bowl zesting, mixing & piping. Without enough time to chill the batter it spread a fair amount across the tray in the oven and we ended up with what chef called 'road kill tuile'! Nothing a bit of artistic liscence and a bagette rack couldnt solve though. They were an added bonus not only because they make a tasty take home treat but also because we seemed to be the only group who managed to make them.

Selection of sables

Almond Meringues

Best roadkill I ever did see

On Friday it was time to be shown another multitude of sweet treats. Class covered two types of fudge, florentines, financiers and macarons. Macarons have, much like cupcakes, become very fashionable over the past few years with a lot of shops stocking all sorts of brightly coloured and different flavoured styles and so are potentially quite important for the budding pastry chef, but do require a bit of time to fully master. Heres the end platter from demo, my favourite were the financiers topped with fresh raspberries.

With alot to get done in class we worked together as a group in practical this week. I quite enjoyed it as it was a bit like being in a real kitchen. We each had to make our own macarons because that was where we were being marked but the rest was a group effort all round. The end results of everything were really good and dispite everyone being a bit tired and ill we worked well as a group. Anyway, before I start getting soppy again, here are the pictures

Petit Fours a la group D

Very bright macarons

We are heading into our last weeks of the first term, which has well and truly flown by. First exams start on Tuesday with our theory exam so a weekend of revision awaits me. So if anyone need to know egg coagulation temperatures in the near furture then I'm definately your gal..