Marzipan Fruit, con't

We airbrushed our marzipan fruit today! It's a little tedious because you have to do many thin layers of color and each time you change a color in the airbrush you have to clean it out with cleaner then water--it takes quite a while. But overall, it's fun and the effect is beautiful. I did the oranges and helped with the peaches and figs. My favorites are:

the orange--I think it looks amazingly realistic

the fig--the transformation from white thing that looked
like a clove of garlic to a beautifully colored fig 
with just an airbrush and some patience was impressive

the cherries--the stem is so cool

Marzipan Fruit

We spent a much of a class shaping marzipan fruit. I thought it would be exceedingly dull, but it wasn't--it was actually quite a bit of fun. We learnt how to make all sorts of fruit and got to try our hand at different figurines (whatever struck our fancy). I made:

A pineapple

A banana

A fig

A strawberry

A peach 

A pea pod

A peach

A bunch of grapes

Cherries (the stem is a scraped and dried vanilla bean
split into three 'branches')

An orange

An apple (the stem is a star anise)

A pear (the stem and the star in the bottom--that you can't
see in this photo--are star anise)

Blueberries

A cat

A snail

Aren't these wonderful?! We are going to airbrush them next class so that they are the proper colors.

Cold Green Apple Charlotte with Red Currant Sorbet

I think that this is my least favorite plated dessert. I'm not a big fan of cold charlottes to start and this did nothing to persuade me to change my mind. The bavarian cream was a bit lumpy--that's not quite the right word, maybe grainy works better--due to the slightly odd texture of the green apple puree we used as a base. The red currant sorbet was a bit unimpressive. That's not to say it wasn't good, it was, but it just wasn't as good as other things we've made in this unit. The red currant coulis was nice but the clear vanilla sauce was a bit grainy--to match the bavarian, I guess. The lady fingers on the outside of the charlotte were nice, but we've made them before, so they aren't anything new or all that impressive. The best part was the apple chip, which I could eat a ton of and be incredibly happy. They fool you into thinking you are eating something healthy (they are apple after all), but they are really crisp sugary slices of goodness that only vaguely resemble the apple them came from. Oh gosh they are nice!

Hot Apple Charlotte

This was the most amazing thing! The butter caramel sauce was nice and the vanilla ice cream was delicious, but that was nothing compared to the charlotte. These individual size charlottes are made with heavily buttered white bread around the outside and are filled with a buttery, chunky apple compote. When you bake them the butter basically fries the bread. Holy cow they were good! By the decoration on top is isomalt, a type of beet sugar, that has been melted and drizzled onto a silpat to make a pretty spiral.

Manjari Chocolate Tart with Coconut Ice Cream

Oh yum! The bittersweet chocolate custard--manjari chocolate is a somewhat acidic, bitter, dark chocolate that is mellowed out here by the addition of, among other things, sugar--in a chocolate tart shell was great on its own (seriously--I brought home some extras, so I know they were really good without all the fancy plating!) The coconut ice cream was very nice, as were the coconut creme anglaise, the chocolate sauce, and the raspberry coulis. All together they were wonderful.

Lemon Tart with Mixed Berry Sorbet

This was okay. The mixed berry sorbet was very nice, the crystalized basil leaf was good, and the basil crème anglaise and berry coulis decoration was beautiful and tasty. The problem was the lemon tart. It wasn't bad, it just wasn't great. I loved the lemon tartlets we made in Level I so much that these just didn't thrill me. I thought that they were a bit too sweet and a wee bit bland...definitely not enough lemon flavor. I really liked the crust, which was a sweet tart dough with lemon zest mixed into it, on its own (as a cookie). I think that the sweet crust, however, coupled with the sweet baked custard filling was just too much; it needed some tartness or at least something a bit savory (like a pâte brisée crust) to cut the sweet. I think that the sorbet and basil were there to add the tart and savory elements, but they just didn't cut it, in my opinion. Ah well, it was still nice and very attractive.

Banana Macadamia Financier

Meh. I dislike bananas enough to not like this much at all. The financier that the bananas are baked into was nice and I think I'll have to try it without the bananas. The brown butter sauce was nice, but nearly impossible to make. The macadamia tuiles were amazing (albeit the strange man shape was a bit odd.) This is plated with vanilla ice cream, but it's meant to be done with chocolate, which I'd imagine is very nice.

Pineapple Tart Tatin

This was nice. My puff pastry disk (that is under the baked pineapple with caramel) was pretty much perfect (the best I've ever made it!) The pineapple was a little under baked, I think, but it was still nice. The caramel swirl on top was pretty, the pineapple caramel sauce was nice, and the pate a bric cup with ice cream and a pineapple chip was an excellent complement to the wart tart tatin.

Kiwi and Milk Marmalade Mille Feuille

This is my favorite plated dessert so far. It is two disks of puff pastry with milk marmalade (a sweet almost custard made of condensed milk, evaporated milk, and coconut milk that's thick like a light buttercream) between them and on top, a scoop of delicious lemon frozen yogurt, kiwi coulis--a coulis, as it turns out, is a quasi-sauce that is made without heat--pieces of kiwi, and a tuile with a slice of kiwi baked into it. The sweetness of the milk marmalade, the crispy-ness of the puff pastry, and the slight zing of lemon and kiwi worked so well together. Yum! And isn't it pretty?!

Spinach Jalousie

This wasn't quite as much a plated dessert as it was a plated appetizer or perhaps a light main course. It was a spinach, onion, and mushroom jalousie served warm with chive béchamel and fresh chives. Yum! A jalousie, by the way, is basically a puff pastry tart that is typically filled with stripes of almond cream and raspberry jam--we made that version a while ago. Savory versions are quite common too, apparently, as the puff pastry lends itself to both sweet and savory fillings equally well.

Pineapple and Hazelnut Tart

We served this pineapple and hazelnut tart (baked on a puff pastry crust) with hazelnut ice cream, hazelnut creme anglaise, caramelized hazelnuts, and a pineapple chip. I've never been a huge pineapple fan. It's not that I disliked it, I just never really enjoyed it. It turns out that that's because I've always eaten plain old pineapple. I actually like it baked on a tart or made into a chip. I think I just prefer it when the acid is a little bit neutralized. I love hazelnuts--did you know that they are actually a seed not a nut?--and puff pastry, so even if I hadn't come to a realization that I like pineapple, I think I still would have liked the dessert. I do have one complaint though, I felt like the pineapple and buttery puff pastry completely overwhelmed the hazelnut cream on the tart. Still, as I've mentioned, this was a very nice dessert!

Chocolate Crepes

These chocolate crepes, like the orange ones, were filled and served warm. Instead of orange pastry cream, they were filled with chocolate ganache. They were topped with sauteed pears, chocolate sauce, blueberry sorbet, and fresh blueberries. I'm not a huge blueberry fan, but even I have to say that the blueberry was really nice with the pear and chocolate. I admit that I could leave off all the toppings and just eat the filled crepes as is. Yum!

Orange Crepes

Sorry the picture isn't very good.

These orange crepes were filled with orange pastry cream, topped with orange segments, orange butter caramel sauce, and orange ice cream. All were very yummy. The crepes were incredible! They are not easy to make (though they aren't that hard, I think I just need practice).

Chocolate Marquise with Cranberry Swirl Ice Cream, and Cranberry Compote

This was really nice. The chocolate marquise disks were incredibly good...sort of a frozen chocolate mousse (but much more complicated to make). The mint creme anglaise and chocolate sauce complimented it perfectly. I'm not sure I liked the cranberry swirl ice cream and cranberry compote with it though. I think that might be a reflection on the cranberries we used, which were a bit bitter, rather than the idea of cranberry with it. Regardless of the taste, it looked really nice with the cranberry compote and the cranberry swirl ice cream.

Creme Caramel and "Yummy" Tuiles

Yum, indeed.

Yesterday we also finished our crèmes caramels. These are kind of like flan...I'm not a huge fan of either. That said, these were nice. We served them with orange and strawberry salad, which was delicious, and tuiles. My partner and I made the tuiles. The chef thought it would be nice to make orange tuiles with chocolate "yum"s written on them. It was not easy to write with the batter and tuiles have to be baked in tiny batches so that you have time to curl them before they harden. But in the end I think they looked pretty great.

Classic Creme Brulee, part 2

Today we finished the crèmes brulées by coating the top of the baked custard with sugar and heating it with a blowtorch. They were amazing! They perfectly crispy on top and cool and creamy inside. Yum!

We served them on top of doilies (as is customary, apparently) and put some raspberries and a sprig of mint on top of them. We served them with shortbread squares. That is atypical...in fact, crèmes brulées are almost never served with cookies of any sort. But the cookies are one of the learning objectives, so the chef decided that we should plate them with the crèmes brulées.

Creme Brulee, part 1

Unfinished, cooked creme brulees.

We started plated desserts today. The unit is a little strange because each team makes some element of a dessert that we will then plate like in a restaurant, so not everyone makes everything, like we usually do. Still it's kind of fun, because it's good practice for working in a restaurant and we get to eat everything we plate. Or at least that's what the chef said...today's class was just preparing different crème caramels and crèmes brulées which we will plate next class. I can't wait!

Reine de Saba (a.k.a. part two of the Chocolate I exam)

Part of our exam was to make a Reine de Saba (or Queen of Sheba) cake and decorate with with tiles made from the chocolate we used for the box. My cake collapsed a bit more than I would have liked. But it tasted wonderful--like a dense, fudgy, chocolate brownie--and I think the glaze looked really pretty and the tiles looked nice (albeit a little too thick).

Chocolate "Brick" a.k.a. Chocolate I Exam

This was a surprise for our chocolate exam. We had to make a closed box, or as I call it a hollow brick, of chocolate. Each side had to have two types of tempered chocolate and it couldn't just be piped on after. We also had to include our initials. Since my initials are MW, I had a lot of fun with them and used a "w" for both--upside-down for the "m," clearly-- so that it had rotational symmetry. I'm not thrilled by mine. The chocolate hardened so fast that it curled too much to quickly for me to put a board on top. That made it really hard to glue everything together and I ended up smudging my dark chocolate "glue" all over the white chocolate stripes. Still it came out pretty well, I think.

Part of the test was to see whether they could stack, like bricks.
The chef called it the wall of fame.

Chocolate Candy Stand

We had two days to make a showpiece out of chocolate to hold the candies we made the class before. It's not easy to do. Aside from the fact that tempering is tedious, the chocolate has to be cut at exactly the right time, kept under a board to harden (so it doesn't curl), and glued together with more tempered chocolate at exactly the right temperature. Plus it melts if you handle it too much, which makes it difficult to assemble. I'm a bit annoyed about how sloppy my butterflies came out, but then again, I'm not great at piping, so I suppose I should be happy with how well they came out. I really like how the flowers looked and the shape of the stand worked so nicely. I think the best part is that the bowl worked so well; it held plenty of candy, didn't tip or wobble, and was sturdy enough not to crack when the candy was piled in.

A close up of the bowl, butterflies and flowers.

Chocolates

Clockwise from top: Rochees, chocolate covered sugared
almonds (in cocoa and powdered sugar), and carees.

Yum, yum, we made chocolate candy! We made three types: orange and almond rochees, chocolate covered sugared almonds, and chocolate carres. The first are little piles of lightly toasted, sugared, slivered almonds and pieces of candied orange peel that have been rolled in tempered milk chocolate. The second are whole almonds, with a coating of cooked (but not quite caramelized) sugar, coated with tempered dark chocolate, and then rolled in cocoa powder or powdered sugar. The carres are a layer of feuilletine (wheat crisps, almost like crumbled wafer cookies) with praline paste and chocolate, sandwiched between thin layers of tempered dark chocolate. All three were amazing! I think the carres were my favorite, but then again I loved the rochees--the orange and milk chocolate was a great combination--and the sugared almonds were incredible on their own, let alone once the chocolate was added.