Peanut Toffee Brittle

This was nice. It's not my favorite thing and it's no where near as good as the peanut butter nougat we made during the same class. It has a fine flavor, but like most toffee was a bit too sweet for me. The nice thing was the texture...we used baking soda to make it porous, which makes it slightly easier on the teeth.

Peanut Butter Nougat

When I saw that we were supposed to make nougat in class today, I was not thrilled. I had flashbacks to the disastrous petit four class in Level 2 when my partner and I ruined one batch of traditional nougat and made a second batch that was only just barely soft enough to be edible. I really didn't want to start Level 3 (today was my first class in Level 3, the last level, by the way) by making nougat that could be used as a hammer. Happily, this nougat was significantly easier to make and absolutely delicious!

The texture was somewhere between nougat and fudge and it tasted like the filling of a peanut butter cup. Once we coated them in chocolate they were even better--I mean, what doesn't chocolate make better?!

Nougat without the chocolate coating--not terribly pretty,
but absolutely delicious!

Pastillage Cake Stand

My Rapunzel cake stand and favor boxes

First let me say, pastillage is easy enough to make but not easy to work with. We didn't really get practice time to work with pastillage before we had to start on the cake stand--the final project for Level 2--so it was very intimidating. I did't like going into an exam never having worked with the main material we had to use. Ah well. At least the class picked a really fun--albeit overly specific--topic: fairy tales that involve food. This narrowed it down to about ten stories to base our cakes off of. I picked Rapunzel, because I thought it leant itself nicely to a cake stand. I should point out that I picked Rapunzel not Rapunzel-as-portrayed-in-the-movie-Tangled, so it doesn't have quite the whimsy of a part wattle and daube tower with a shingled roof...instead it's a proper stone tower.

I figured the stand and the cake would be the tower, Rapunzel could have a 'window' in the tower to let her hair down out of, and the base of the tower would be the witch's vegetable garden (complete with marzipan vegetables, keep out signs, and a black cat) that Rapunzel's father steals from (yes, I know that the garden isn't really at the base of the tower...wouldn't be a very good hidden tower if anyone could just wander up to it, but you get the point.) We also had to make 'favor boxes' completely out of pastillage. I decided they they would have little marzipan radishes (admittedly I made them look a bit like turnips) as handles.

By the way, the cake isn't real cake...it's a styrofoam cake dummy. That gave us much more time to make the stand, plus it was easier to cover with fondant than a real cake.

I digress, to make the stone pattern and the writing on the pastillage keep out signs, I thinned gel food coloring with a bit of clear liquor (vodka is the best to use, but we didn't have that, so I ended up using framboise) and painted with it on the already molded and hardened pastillage tower and the covered cake. I made the vegetables, the cat, and Rapunzel (hair and all) out of marzipan that I colored some of the marzipan with gel food coloring mixed into the dough before I molded it and some with an airbrush after the shapes we already formed, depending on the colors and look I wanted. I stuck all the pastillage pieces together with melted isomalt--more on that another time. I also used it to glue the radish handles to the box lids and Rapunzel to her fondant window and the window to the tower. I attached the marzipan vegetables and cat to the base with a bit of green royal icing piped with a grass tip since they didn't need to be as securely fastened.

All in all, my tower could have been a bit more cylindrical and favor boxes could have come out smoother looking, but I'm really happy with how my marzipan work came out and I love how the whole thing ca

Another view

Sugar Paste Tulips

My red and white striped tulip

Oops, I forgot to show you these along with the other sugar paste flowers I made. I think the tulips came out lovely and quite realistic. You have to make each petal with a wire in it, just like we did for the rose leaves. Then you attach them to each other using floral tape. I've dabbled in flower arranging and have, on occasion, wired flowers for use in an arraignment or as a boutonniere; the procedure for using wired sugar paste petals or leaves is very similar to that for using wired flowers/petals/leaves in real flower arranging. A little petal dust can give realism to the outer edges of a rose and it can do the same for the center of a tulip. It gives depth to the center and also looks like a little pollen from the stamen got on the petals (which often happens in flowers like tulips).

These tulips look like parrot tulips in full bloom. But with a different cutter, you could easily make a standard tulip. I'm not sure how close you can gather the petals--because the sugar paste must be completely hardened before you can put the petals together--but you can probably get a flower that is more closed than the ones I made.

My white tulip

Sugar Paste Flowers, con't

All my sugar paste flowers!

We finished the flowers that we started last class. They came out amazingly well! Seriously, they look natural(ish) and beautiful. While they are time consuming and somewhat tedious to make, the final product more than makes up for the effort.

Before the petal dust.

After the petal dust--see how the
color is slightly varied and the edges
aren't bright white in the light.

What makes them especially realistic is the petal dust (a sort of eatable, colored powder that you brush on dry). This gives depth to the flowers and a more realistic color to the leaves.

I'm not thrilled with the rose leaves because we didn't have the right press, so they look a little strange. But I love the roses and I'm shocked at how life-like they look.

The finished roses

Calla lilies (a.k.a arum lilies)

Sugar Paste Flowers

I have a bone to pick with the FCI. Ron Ben Israel--the famous chef and cake designer--was supposed to teach us two lessons on sugar paste flowers (as the admissions officers were all to happy to tell me when I was considering applying), but apparently he doesn't teach the class any more. We were the first batch of students to not get him and no one really told us this until the unit started...so we all were expecting Ron Ben Israel and we just didn't get him. That said, the lesson was still really interesting and I learnt a ton. Actually, it was probably a lot more fun and relaxed than it would have been if we had all been trying to impress the chef.

We made three roses (a big one, a medium one, and a bud), rose leaves, tulip centers and petals (enough for two tulips), and calla lily centers. Next class we will finish putting the roses and tulips together and make the calla lilies. Sugar paste--also known as gum paste--is difficult to work with, but the results can be pretty darn amazing. I can't wait to finish the roses, which already look beautiful without their leaves, and put together the tulips, which look pretty interesting as just petals.

It's not easy to work with sugar paste, but then again it's not too hard. You have to be careful not to let it dry out too much as you are working with it...but on the other hand you do occasionally want it to dry a little. It's a hard balance to strike. But it's definitely worth it!

Nougatine Basket with Marzipan Fruit

We made nougatine baskets to hold our marzipan fruit. It's not the easiest thing to work with, but it looks pretty cool. Basically, nougatine is caramel with toasted sliced almonds in it. It's moldable when it's hot but hardens very brittle. The problem is, it doesn't stay hot enough to work with for very long. We used royal icing to decorate the baskets. I think the icing was too thick and dry and very difficult to work with. But that could be me; I'm not great at using royal icing. Regardless of my difficulties with the nougatine and royal icing, one it was filled with my marzipan fruit, it looked pretty darn good!

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).