Review Day

Traditional Croissants

Today we had our final exam review day. We pulled out all our dough and baked a number of different items that may show up on our final exams. We made danish, croissants, pain au chocolate, brioche a tete (well actually just the dough and the chef demoed making the rolls), and a tarte bourdaloue. Happily, these are some of my favorite things we've made the whole course, so I'm very happy we got to make them again.

Front row: pinwheels with cream cheese filling;
back row: packages with raspberry jam and almond filling.

I had some fun practicing making different shaped danish with different fillings. I personally liked the cream cheese filling and cinnamon streusel topping. Shape-wise I like the little packages (and I finally got them to look right) but I think the pinwheels are my favorite--they look nice and are very easy to make.

First row: ham and cheese;
second and third rows: almond;
fourth and fifth rows: plain.

We also got to play around with flavors for our croissants. I made plain, ham and cheese, and almond. Traditionally plain croissants are curved, giving them their crescent shape, while filled croissants are not. I was going to put slivered almonds on top of the almond ones after I egg washed them before I put them in the oven, but unfortunately I forgot, so they just had the almond filling.

We learnt a new way to cut pain au chocolate, which made the process much quicker but keep them looking lovely as always.

The tarte bourdaloue was excellent as always. We used canned pear halves rather than poached pears which was significantly easier and didn't really impact the final product. I do think the pears shriveled up a bit more than the poached ones when we baked the tarts; the taste was the same though, so I suppose a slight aesthetic difference isn't too big of a deal.