Chocolat, Schokolade, Chocolate!!

February 5, 2017 Samantha van Gogh

I made it through my midterms! Let's just take a minute to celebrate that! You know what else that means? I'm officially in the second half of my program! (woo!) This is so crazy to think about. They say that time flies when you're having fun, and boy they (whoever "they" are), couldn't be more right! I am and have been loving every minute of school, and I can't wait to get started on things that feel a little more unfamiliar for me. Again, not that I didn't totally love the first half, I did, don't get me wrong, but I've made cakes and pies and whatnot before. The bread and petits fours units both really opened up my eyes to some things that were totally different than anything that I'd ever made before.

Now here we are, in the chocolate unit! I've never, ever worked with chocolate in this sense, other than like, melting it, mixing it with peanut butter, and letting it re-harden to create a bark type dealio.

On our very first day in the chocolate unit, we got an intro to the new kitchen -- oh yeah, did I mention? I've moved into the second kitchen, which is super exciting! Chef Jeanne was supposed to transition to Chef Stacy's (our instructor for the second half) assistant, much like what Chef Stacy was doing for us in the tail end of the first half, but Chef Stacy was on vacation, then she had a really severe allergic reaction, then she was really sick (we all felt so bad for her, the poor woman), so instead Chef Jeanne was our instructor for the chocolate unit, too. This wasn't really an issue; we all love Chef Jeanne, we've really bonded with her as a class and she's been with us since the very beginning, but Chef Jeanne didn't have a new class starting in the first level for about a month, so it wasn't that much of a problem.

So anyway, after our introduction into kitchen 2, we got right into a PowerPoint and video about tempering chocolate. We talked about the different methods of tempering, how chocolate is produced, why we temper chocolate... pretty much anything you would want to know about chocolate, we covered in this video and presentation. From there, we got to do a mini chocolate tasting! We tasted everything from cocoa powder, cocoa nibs, and 100% chocolate, all the way down to 100% cocoa butter (which just sort of tasted like lotion, if anyone is curious. I don't recommend it).

After all that was over, we got right into tempering! I was really excited about this, because this is something that I'd never done before, and was really excited to try. The first tempering method that we tried was the tabling method. This is where you heat your chocolate up over a double boiler to a certain temperature (depending on which type of chocolate you're using), then pour about 1/3 of it out onto a table with a marble slab, and move it around to cool it down, scrape it back the bowl to gradually lower the temperature of the chocolate, then we heat it briefly to bring it back up. If you're thinking that it sounds like a huge mess, you're totally right. This was a mess, there was chocolate everywhere. All of my pristine white chef clothes were covered in chocolate almost every night in this unit. Fortunately, tabling wasn't the only method we could use, otherwise, I think I probably would've had to buy new aprons and things.

That was just about all that we did in class that first day, was practice tempering using both the table and ice bath method. Of the two methods, I much preferred the ice bath method, but there was still one method that we were going to learn come next class: seeding.

Coming into class that next day, I was really excited to learn the seeding method, as we were promised it was easier and quicker, and slightly less messy. And I have to say, now that I'd done all three methods, holy moly guys, why was I even playing with those other two tempering methods?? Seeding is much easier, faster, and virtually foolproof! After we learned how to seed with milk and white chocolate, we got to making our first chocolate product: a chocolate cake with chocolate leaves! The cake was pretty self explanatory, very similar to one of the other cakes that we did in the cake unit. The real hero of this cake was the chocolate leaves. How we made these was super cool. We had some lemon leaves that my teacher had ordered for the day, and we made sure that they were nice and dry (because chocolate and water are a HUGE no no), and then just spread our tempered chocolate onto the leaves and let them set. We had to make a pattern too, now that I think about it, so we had to do the pattern first before the final coat of "background" chocolate.

After we got our leaves set, we got to do another chocolate tasting, this time, with store bought chocolate! Chef Jeanne had told us each to bring in one candy bar... between my whole class (there are only 10 of us) we must've had almost 30 different types of chocolate... whoops. LOL It was interesting to taste how the different store bought chocolates all compared to one another, especially ones that were the same percentage.

On the third day in the unit, we got to make some chocolate orange truffles! this was the first actual chocolate product that we made that wasn't just tempered chocolate by itself. The truffles were being made in preparation for our chocolate boxes; something that just sounded so daunting when the unit started, and even was up until we actually finished them. I remembered seeing other class' chocolate boxes on display just thinking that there is no way I'd be able to do that, but somehow, I did. We made the walls, and Chef Jeanne showed us a few different techniques for how to pattern them. I went with a geometric sort of design. We made our designs on acetate so that once they set and released, the pieces would be super duper shiny.

My chocolate box pieces, waiting to be assembled

On the fourth day we finished our truffles and left them aside for when we finished our boxes. The most exciting thing that we got to that night was begin to assemble our boxes. I ended up with enough pieces for two boxes, so I took my "bad" (read: unfinished) box home, and left my nicer one at school to leave on display. Most of our time that night was spent assembling and finishing the truffles, but toward the end of the night we got to talk about the chocolate candy stand, which was our first showpiece assignment. It was ungraded, just to give us a little bit of an introduction into making showpieces, but this task seemed even MORE daunting than that dang box, which we hadn't even fully finished yet.

After the long weekend (we had Monday off for a holiday), we finally got to finish our chocolate boxes, chocolate bows, and we made all the candies that our chocolate candy stands would eventually hold. I think that we made 4 different types of candies, plus the leftover truffles that we had for the boxes. Each team ended up with an entire sheet tray full of truffles, carres, chocolate covered nuts, rochers, etc. We had to make sure that we had sketches prepared for the candy stand, and have them drawn to scale, just so we had something to go off of when we began construction. Chef Jeanne looked over all of them to make sure that they were doable, and once they'd passed inspection, we came in on the 6th day of the unit to start our two days worth of candy stand creation.

Aaaand the good box, bow and all! (Shoutout to my pretty handwriting LOL)

The next two days were sort of a blur, tempering, molding, forming, retempering, etc. But remember when I said that I'd loved every day? That first day of candy stand construction, man I left class with such a disappointed and discouraged feeling, I've got to tell you. I felt defeated, like there was no way that I was going to make this thing happen. It had rained really heavily all day, and the morning class had been using the oven all day, so the kitchen was more humid than normal, the AC wasn't really on, and no one (this was not a problem limited to myself) could get any chocolate to temper to save their lives. I think at the end of the night, my original plan was to have fully molded all of my pieces so I could just focus on assembly during day 2. How nice that would've been. I think at the end of that first day, I had a chocolate duck and a chocolate cloud, and a poorly tempered wall. I had so much more at one point, but I think since there was just so much moisture in the air, nothing was setting at all. It was super super frustrating, but when it all comes down to it, I've only had one really bad day the entire time, so I knew that it was a fluke, and that is wasn't my fault. Chef Jeanne said that chocolate is super temperamental too, so some days, everything will work perfect, and other days are just off. So I had an off day, I brush it off and move on, and that's all I can do!

My completed candy stand! 100% chocolate

Day 2 of candy stand, I have to say, went 1000 times better. I got all my pieces molded, and assembly was relatively simple. I had to rush through it a little but, but hey, I made it happen. Everyone in my class did such an amazing job with their chocolate candy stands, especially after all of us had had such a terrible day the day before.

On our last day in the chocolate unit, we had a test, of course. We made a chocolate cake, then had to make tempered chocolate tiles using two different types of chocolate, and make a tempered chocolate bow, much like the one that we did on our chocolate boxes. This whole night was a bit of a blur too, to be totally honest. Things were taking a lot longer than usual, and everyone finished a couple minutes late, myself included. But at the end of the night, we got our third and final book, and we would get into individual desserts starting next class!

Stay tuned for my next blog, and if you want more frequent updates, you can check out my Instagram.

Thanks for reading!

P.S. And with that, I'm caught up on all of my blog posts! I'll do one last big unit update at the end of individual desserts 1 (which I'll be done with on Wednesday), but then I'm hopefully going to go back to writing weekly! Thanks for your patience :)

Midterm Madness

February 5, 2017 Samantha van Gogh

My oh my! How is my midterm here already?? I can't believe that I'm already half way done. My midterm days have been totally crazy, and I can't wait to tell you about them! There probably won't be too many pictures on this post, since I was so crazy busy all three days, I didn't really have an opportunity to pull out my phone and snap photos.

My midterms were laid out over the course of three days, and the first two days were our "production" days, and the third day was the "mystery" day. I'll get into explaining that after I get through these first two days.

Midterms were right around Christmas time (Dec 23rd was the 1st day), so I got to wear my Santa hat :)

At the beginning of the first day we got right into making our two kinds of dough. There were two potential options for this day: either puff pastry and croissant dough, or puff pastry and danish dough. I ended up with the latter, and while it was okay, I really would've preferred croissants. It wasn't that I had anything against danishes or whatever, that's not the problem at all! I love danishes, they so delicious! The problem was that I hardly remembered making danish dough at all, and this was how the other 4 people in my class who got danishes felt. We rushed through danish day so quickly, that the whole thing was sort of a blur, whereas we spent a lot of time on croissants, and had croissants on a test, so there was just a lot more time that we could have practiced those guys. But, that aside, I had no other options than to just make it work.

I started off with my puff pastry dough, just because I knew what I had to do there. We had the choice of making whatever type of dough we wanted (classic, inverse, or quick). I chose classic, because that was my favorite, but with any type of laminated dough, you need to let it rest in the fridge before you continue to fold it too much, otherwise it creates too much gluten and then your dough is going to end up being super super dough. So while that was resting, I moved on to the dreaded danish dough. (dun dun dun)

I followed along with the recipe that I had, but the problem was, that the steps in the procedure were so vague, whereas in the croissant recipe, the instructions were so precise. For example, in the croissant recipe, it would tell you to roll the dough to a 12" X 12" square and to place the butter block in the middle and then fold the two pieces of dough in half to the middle. For the danish recipe it said "roll dough per Chef's instructions. Place butter block per Chef's instructions." Wow, thanks guys, super helpful. Everybody in my class that had danishes sort of had discussed what we all vaguely remembered, so that's exactly what we did. Folded in the butter block, did the turns, let it rest, and repeat until all the turns were in. The dough felt right, but it was so hard to say since no one really had any kind of solid idea of what we were supposed to be doing.

After this first production day, we had a week off for Christmas, so all of our doughs got to live in the freezer until we came back a week later.

Upon our return, day two of production was lots of shaping and lots of baking. But before we could even start on that, we had to take our written test. I had studied so much for this stinkin' test, I was so worried about it. When I sat down to take it, however, 75% of the things that I studied weren't even on there. So, do I have a lot of knowledge about the stuff now, yes, but did I need to spend all that time stressing out and studying and making an almost 40 page study guide? No. (and yes you did read that correctly; almost 40 hand written pages of notes. Oye vey.) From my doughs, I had to make palmiers, cheesy straws, and vols aux vents (all puff pastry), and bear claws and snails (danishes). I made the vols aux vents first, since part of that thing had to be rolled to 1/4" thick, whereas everything else was 1/8" thick. I cut out my 8 little circles, then rolled the remainder of my dough to 1/8". The next thing I did was cut out a square for the palmiers and got that shaped. Even though we were making the palmiers that day, they didn't have to get baked off until the third day, so I just made the little sugary dough log and let that guy hang out in the fridge until the next class so it had lots of time to get all gooey and delicious! The last thing I did was the cheesy straws, because I had to let those sit in the fridge for at least half an hour before I could bake them. Now, it was onto forming the danishes.

You might be thinking, oh no, how are you gonna form danishes if you didn't remember? But not to fear, forming the danishes wasn't the problem, everyone remembers that part of danish night very vividly (of course). The issue more just stemmed from making the actual dough. So, I just had to hope that my dough was good enough and that I did it correctly and that my danishes would turn out like they were supposed to. I had to make bear claws and snails, so I did the bear claws first, since those also had an almond filling (which I needed to make), whereas the snails were just filled with jam. Once the filling was made, I cut my little squares out, filled them, and folded them over, and cut the "toes" of the bear claw. Easy, peasy, lemon squeezy. Onto the snails! Those had a little bit of cinnamon sugar in between two 1" strips of dough. It was stretched out a teeny bit, then rolled into a nice little spiral. Both of those had to proof for about 45 minutes, so I threw those in the proof box just before dinner, and got to take a break and had an opportunity to sit down and breath for a minute.

After dinner, I pretty much just was working on baking my danishes, since I had baked all of the puff pastry stuff long prior. Fortunately I was keeping a close eye on the oven, because when we made danishes in class way back when, they took the full 35 minutes that our recipes said, and usually with people opening and closing the ovens, things take much longer to bake, but both of my danishes were finished in 20, maybe 25 minutes. I just had to pull them out of the oven for fear of them burning! I coated both danishes with their respective glazes, and while that was cooling, I made the final icing for the bear claw. I drizzled that on top, and bam! I was done! Just had to wait for grading.

And now we're come to day 3, which was by far the most stressful of days. Today was "mystery day," so not only did we not know what we were making until we showed up to class that day, we couldn't have any recipes with us, either. The only sheet of paper we were allowed was the itinerary that we wrote in class that day, and the sheet of paper passed out to us with our directions. I really felt like I lucked out when it came to baking on the third day, because I ended up with a mixed nut tart, spritz cookies, writing 'Happy Birthday!' in chocolate on a marzipan plaque, piping 3 rosettes of chantilly, and making 3 strawberry fans. Plus, baking the palmiers I made on day 2. This may sound like a lot, and it was, don't get me wrong, but I had made the tart on my tart test way back when, and the spritz cookies were pretty simple, honestly. I don't know how I got so lucky, because everything was passed out totally randomly, and everyone had something entirely different. But hey, I'll take it! It was a pretty hectic night just because there was so much going on, but I finished everything on time and all was well with the world.

And with that, I'm officially done with my first HALF of culinary school!! So hard to believe how quickly I've gotten here. I'm off to kitchen 2, where I'll start working on chocolate, sugar, plating, a wedding cake, and so much more!

Stay tuned for my next blog, and if you want more frequent updates, you can check out my Instagram.

Thanks for reading!

(Petits) Fours To Be Reckoned With

February 5, 2017 Samantha van Gogh

Hello again friends! Every blog post I write I'm getting a teeny bit closer to being caught up here. This will at least be my last blog about the first half of my school (aside from the minor post about midterms, of course).

So here we are in the petits fours unit. This unit was making about a million tiny things, and even though we did a lot every day, we held on to everything in dry storage until we had accumulated enough stuff to "tray up," or in other words, make a pretty little tray of petit fours that you might see at a hotel or a a fancy brunch or something.

I think for this post I'll talk in terms of the trays, since it's hard to remember what exactly we did on each day, since there were so many things going on. We did three trays in this unit: two just throughout the unit, and one for the practical. The first tray was on the 3rd day, after we had accumulated 8 different petits fours. On this first tray, we had marshmallows, florentines, financiers, salted caramel chocolate thing (this was sort of like a fancy Tootsie Roll), pate de fruit, pan aux raisin, cat tongues (which were like fake Milanos), and mini madelines. The goal of the tray is to have different colors, shapes, textures, and flavors, and that's how you should organize your tray. On this tray in particular, I would have a hard time picking a favorite. I think if I had to choose a top 3, it would be the marshmallows, the financiers, and the pate de fruit.

The marshmallows we made in a mixer and then spread the whole big sticky mixture onto a sheet tray, and dusted it with a combination of powdered sugar and corn starch. I don't know if any of you know this, but I have a HUGE aversion to corn starch. It just like, freaks me out, I absolutely HATE touching it. That and cotton balls (weird, I know). Fortunately, for petits fours (and any other plated dessert, really), we need to use gloves for serving, since it's something that we have to actually handle that will get eaten. So I didn't really have to touch the corn starch, which was a plus in my book. We had a plethora of different cookie cutters available to us, so I picked a cute little star shape. Even though I'm not a huge fan of marshmallows, I just couldn't get over how cute these were. It just made me happy cutting them out. I even took some home and plopped them in hot cocoa -- delicious!

For the financiers, we got to brown butter for the first time. And browning the butter gave the financiers such a rich buttery flavor, it was just so delicious. It's easiest to see when your brown butter is done when you're making it with a white spatula, since the little brown specks show up nicely against the bright, white spatula. The batter for these was super duper runny; so much so, that if you didn't pinch the piping bag closed in between filling the molds, it would just flow out like water. These guys didn't take very long to bake at all, since they were so tiny, maybe 7 minutes? And they browned really quickly, so you had to keep a close eye on them. What's even more, you had to take them out of the molds immediately, so that they didn't continue to steam.

Just poured pate de fruit, waiting to set...

The last thing I mention, the pate de fruit, oh my goodness, how delicious were these! They were like little fruit gel squares (my partner and I chose passionfruit), and oh man, they were great. You had to keep a close eye on the temperature while you were cooking them, because the range was 222*F-225*F, and if your thermometer was off, even by a degree or two, either your pate de fruit won't set up or it will set up too much and be too firm. Fortunately, ours worked out perfectly! We had to let them sit in the ring for awhile before we could cut them into nice little squares. It was pretty nerve racking removing the ring, just because you really don't know until the ring is off and you start to cut if you cooked it correctly. Once the ring was off and they were cut, we rolled them in a combination of sugar and citric acid, more sugar will make them sweeter, and more citric acid will make them more sour.

The next tray that we put together was after 3 or 4 days worth of baking, and we were doing some more complex petits fours for this one. On this tray, we made meringue cups with fruit filling, Sarah Bernhardt cookies, l'opera cake, chestnut barquettes, and macarons with a pistachio ganache. My favorite thing was the l'opera cake, hands down. It sort of reminded me of the marjolaine cake that we made. It was so many little layers, but the entire thing was only like an inch high. It had a layer of chocolate, a layer of jaconde cake, a layer of chocolate ganache, a layer of soaked jaconde, a layer of buttercream, one more layer of jaconde, a teeny bit more buttercream, and them a final layer of chocolate glaze. This had to sit in fridge overnight so it could fully solidify, so that when we cut it the buttercream wouldn't squish out or anything. Once we cut them into nice little squares, we got to use gold leaf for the first time! It made these little desserts feel super duper fancy, I've gotta say.

I also really liked the chestnut barquettes. The name is supposed to indicate that it looks like a boat, and I would say that it did. it was a little bit of dough filled with an even smaller bit of almond cream, then baked. From there, we made a chestnut cream and had to mound it on top and hand shape it into the half oval looking dome thing. I know that's super specific, but I can't think of a better way to describe it. We had to shape it so both sides were super smooth and had a very defined, straight center divide.

Of all the things that were on that tray, the worst had to be those macarons. Which, for me, was really surprising. I've made macarons at home a million times, and they've turned out beautifully! But I don't know if it was this recipe or the ovens or what, because only a few people in my class ended up with really nice macarons. Naturally, this made me a bit nervous for my test coming up, because I knew that macarons would be on there. It may have just been the ovens, however, because they just weren't cooking properly. Fortunately, the night before the test, I made a bunch of macaron shells at home just to practice (using the school's recipe), and they turned out beautifully. I knew that they could work on the test, it was just a matter of whether or not they actually would.

Now for the last tray: the practical tray. As suspected, I had to make macarons. I also had to make pate de fruit, cigarettes, and financiers. Since I've talked about the other three things already, lets chat about what a big pain the butt those cigarettes were. Once you made the batter (which wasn't difficult at all), you had to chill it for half an hour, otherwise it would just be too thin and wouldn't hold its shape. Then, you stencil it out into a 3" X 4" rectangle, somewhere between 1/8" and 1/16" thin, and then bake it for about 5 minutes, just until it starts to get a little bit of color. You want it to be golden brown, but not too dark. Now here comes the tricky part! As soon as you take them out of the oven, you have to roll them by hand (yes, while they're still piping hot), into that little tube shape around a wooden dowel. Unfortunately for us, the only wooden dowels that we had were exactly 4" long, so that lead to a lot of burnt fingertips. That's what our teachers said too, that this was an exercise in getting our fingers used to being burnt like that LOL who would've thought? If you cooked them for too long, they would be too fragile to bend at all, and not long enough they would just be underdone.

When we presented our tray, we had to have exactly 12 macarons, 12 cigarettes, 12 pate de fruit, and 12 financiers. I had a pretty difficult time figuring out an arrangement that looked good, mostly due to those dang cigarettes. They were just such an odd shape compared to everything else, that it sort of threw off my tray. And in addition to the other rules I mentioned earlier about organizing your tray, you also can't have something in a corner alone by itself unless you have that same thing in a larger bunch on the tray somewhere else. Even though I had a hard time, I eventually made it work and presented for grading.

I'm now almost done with the first half, and the only thing that is separating me from the second half of my schooling is the three days worth of midterms that I have coming up, starting with my very next class. So technically I have 4 days worth of consecutive testing, if you count that last petits fours practical.

Stay tuned for my next blog, and if you want more frequent updates, you can check out my Instagram.

Thanks for reading!

Peace of Cake

February 5, 2017 Samantha van Gogh

Woo hoo! We’re slowly catching up on this. After this cake blog, I have one more unit, then a slight thing on my midterms (YIKES!!), then we’ll be back on track.

Going into the second cake unit, I knew that we’d be sort of going over similar techniques that we learned in the cakes 1 unit, and that we’d be building on those skills. That very first day we got right into it, starting work on two cakes: the Fraisier cake and the black forest cake.

While I thought that both of these would be pretty simple, I was wrong. One thing that I learned in this unit is that there are so many cakes that look like they’re so simple in construction, but they actually have a million little components. While the black forest and fraisier were not these cakes, they both definitely had a lot going on. Everyone knows and loves black forest cake, and what’s not to? Chocolate cake, whipped cream, and cherries? Yes please! The fraisier was unlike any cake that I’d ever eaten before, but it was genoise sponge (we all remember that from way back when in cakes 1), orange cream mousseline, and strawberries. It was a seemingly simple cake, but there was a lot of flavors happening in there. That was also the first time that we got to use acetate, which is something that I would grow very fond of.

The next class, my partner was out sick, but I worked extra hard so she would have cake to bring home with her! Turns out, she didn’t want it, so I just ended up with two of each, which isn’t bad at all! :)

We made two different charlotte cakes that day, a charlotte russe and a charlotte royale. Personally, I preferred the russe over the royal, but they were both delicious!! The charlotte royale had a base of biscuit jaconde, which is a super thin little cake that is so incredibly versatile. So we baked that into one big sheet pan, and once it was cool, spread jam on it, and rolled it into a log. That’s what sort of gives this cake a brain-type look. We cut little 1/4” wide rolls, and arranged them all inside of a plastic wrapped lined bowl. We had to pack them in as tightly as we could, since the filling (bavarian cream) was super liquidy. Clearly, I didn’t pack them quite tight enough, since I had a little bit of cream leaking out at the seams, but that didn’t make it taste any less delicious!

The other charlotte cake wasn’t quite as technical, and for that one, we baked lady fingers, packed the in nice and right inside a cake ring, and filled the whole thing up with this insanely yummy raspberry fruit mousse. These cakes were both done over the course of two days so the mousse had time to fully set up in the fridge, so on day two they were both topped with a little bit of chantilly creme, and just like that, two more cakes were done!

Just a side note, I’m sure that you’re thinking, “gosh, this sure seems like a lot of cake, I mean, what, 4 in 2 classes?” Yes, you are 100% correct. I think I ended up doing the average for the number of cakes we made versus the number of days in the unit, and it was an average of like, 2.something cakes per day, not including times when my partner didn’t want to take her cakes home. I mean, that’s insane! So, so, SO much cake. My friends, family, and coworkers were very appreciative, as I’m sure you can imagine!

After we finished these two cakes, we started working on our first entremet (“on-TRA-may”). Entremets are a fancy kind of mousse cake, and there are a few requirements for them. I believe that it has to contain at least one mousse, contain at least one prefaced component, has to use one of the internal things as decoration and… there are more, but I’m trying to remember this all from ages ago, so please forgive me. I can envision the page in my textbook with this info, but I’m writing this blog post from the sky, so I do not have it with me. LOL

This particular entremet, which would become the first of two, had a pistachio fueillitine base, pistachio mousse, a raspberry fruit gelee thing suspended in more of the pistachios mousse, with fresh raspberries. There also may have been a pistachio ganache inside on top of the base? This was one of those cakes with a million little components, though this was definitely the simpler of the two. The other entremet that we made was a tropical entremet, and it had a pate a cornet / biscuit jaconde combo around the outside (that’s what the pink thing border thing is), then the inside was a coconut cake base soaked in passion fruit syrup, chocolate caramel mousse, pineapple compote, and a passion fruit bavarian cream, I believe. It sounds sort of weird, but it was actually pretty tasty. I was a little bit thrown off by the chocolate caramel thing, but it was okay once you had a bite of the whole thing.

The next class we made two more mousse cakes, one was fruit mousse and the other was a black and white mousse cake. That black and white one was particularly cool because when you cut into it, the mousse looked like a checkerboard. I wish that I had a picture of it, but you’ll just have to take my word for it!

The fruit mousse used that same biscuit jaconde with the jam that the brain cake (aka, charlotte royale) used, except this time, instead of rolling the cake into a log, we cut it into 2” strips and stacked it with layers of jam in the middle. We cut them into smaller vertical pieces and lined them end-up inside of a cake ring, which is how we achieved that vertical look. This cake had the most delicious cassis mousse, and was topped with cassis glaze. The raspberry mousse cake was definitely my favorite of the unit up until now.

The black and white mousse cake had that same pate a cornet / biscuit jaconde combo I mentioned on the tropical entremet, except the inside was piped with alternating circles of chocolate and vanilla mousse, alternating as the layers went up in order to get that checkerboard look.

As the unit was slowly drawing to a close, and closer to Thanksgiving, we started doing a some more intricate things like working with fondant and marzipan and shaped cakes, but before we got there, we made a carrot cake, a sachertorte, and a buche de noel, perfect in time for the holiday. My partner and I accidentally dropped our baked (but pre frosted) carrot cakes on the floor — whoops! — and even though my teacher didn’t think that we would have enough time to get them remade, we buckled down and sure enough, we did! Carrot cake is my mom’s absolute favorite thing, so there’s no way I *wasn’t* taking one home.

I think the buche de noel was by far the most fun cake to make in the unit. I mean, it’s so cute, how can you not love it? To make things even better, it was also delicious! Chocolate cake with chocolate cremeux. frosted with chocolate buttercream and meringue mushrooms, yummy! This was another one of those nights where we weren’t sure that we’d be able to get it done, but my class is definitely super motivated, so we were able to get it done just in the nick of time!

My class' gift box cakes! Mine is the pink one in the front :)

We sort of had an ease into working with fondant, which is something that we’ll do more of once we get into the third cake unit, which is when we do the wedding cake. Our first time using it, we used a 50/50 mixture of fondant and marzipan. I think that this made it easier to use, though I’m not really sure. I’ve used fondant at home before, but it’s always been for simple things, nothing like the gift box cake that we made. Covering a round cake is one thing, but man, a square?? This is something that I’d never done before, and I didn’t think it would be too bad, but man I was wrong. Since we had to fold the fondant over to make it look like a present, it was hard to get the seams really clean and even. Thankfully, the little bow helped some, but it was definitely still a challenge.

Though, I have to say, the cake inside of that present cake was soo yummy. I know that the focus was more on the outside, but how can you ignore a devil’s food cake with raspberry cream?? You can’t, it’s as simple as that.

The last cake that we made before our practical was the kugelhopf, which, based on the name alone, was a German cake, I believe. It was a yeasted cake, too, which sort of brought us back to the bread unit a little bit. It was a pretty simple cake with no frosting, rum raisins, and just a little bit of powdered sugar, but the real hero of this guy is the mold. I mean, how can you not love that?? This cake really was more like a bread, and I would not put it past myself to cut a slice, toast it, and have it for breakfast with some butter.

Now, the last thing to go before we get into the next unit was the midterm. You may have noticed that I didn’t really talk about the sachertorte that I mentioned earlier, and there’s a reason why. That’s the cake that I had to make for my practical! There were a few different options, as this one was a lottery, but I really feel like I lucked out. Of all the options (which I believe were the sachertorte, buche de noel, the fraisier, and black forest), I think I drew the easiest one. On top of that, it’s a pretty tasty cake, at least I think. I know that Chef Jeanne said that a lot of people aren’t a huge fan, since the only thing on this cake other than the cake itself, it soaking syrup, apricot jam, and a chocolate glaze. In addition to making that cake, I had to pipe a border of buttercream shells on a cake board.

With that, I'm closing in on being caught up with my blogs. Stay tuned for my next blog, and if you want more frequent updates, you can check out my Instagram.

Thanks for reading!

I Loaf You

February 5, 2017 Samantha van Gogh

I'd like to start this off with a little apology. I've been really busy as of late, and have not had time to blog (obviously). Between work and school, I had just about zero free time, but I feel bad, because I keep hearing that everyone is missing my blogs! In order to get caught up a little bit quicker, I'm going to do a catch-up blog post by unit, just until I get to where I am now. Once that's done, I'll get back into the habit of blogging every week! Anywho, you don't want to hear about how I can't keep on top of my blogs (at least, I doubt it), but rather, let's get into what I've been up to in school lately!

So way back when, after the first cake unit was over, we moved into the unit that I think that I was most looking forward to. *Drumroll please* BREAD! Oh my gosh. I cannot express to you how excited I was for this unit to start. As Chef Jeanne put it, the bread unit feels like the most "useful" unit in the program, meaning that so many of the things that we make in class are extremely indulgent and more of a "every once and awhile" treat, but bread is one of those things that you can just use whenever. Dinner rolls, sandwich bread, toast, you name it!

After a quick lecture on the different types of leavening and the 14 steps of breadmaking, we got right into it! The first thing that we made was two different types of muffins: lemon poppy seed and blueberry crumble. I love a good muffin, really I do! I think that I actually prefer them to cupcakes, since I'm not huge on the whole frosting thing (aside from a select few types). The muffin is like the best thing: it's acceptable to eat for breakfast (unlike a cupcake) and it got rid of all the frosting that sits on top of it's super sweet cousin.

From here, we went on to make bagels, which I think is what I was most looking forward to (for that night, at least). I've only ever made bagels once, and that was at work forever and a half ago, and even then, I didn't get to do them from start to finish, it was just more of a shaping thing.

From the big ball of bagel dough -- from which, my partner and I created bagel man -- we split it into 12 even pieces. They started off as little rectangles, but eventually, they would become our nice, round bagels. Once they had some time to rest, we rolled them out into fatter little logs, and made them bagel shaped by rolling the two ends of the dough together to bind it. Times 12 and bam, we've got a whole tray of bagels! We didn't have time to bake them on that first night, so we stuck them in the fridge until the next class.

Once our bagels were back in the fridge, we went on to make Irish Soda Bread. This was a pretty basic bread dough, I think. We just sort of mixed everything up and ta-da, we had bread! This was a very hefty dough, I must say. It didn't take all that long to bake, so once that was in the oven, we got to make scones. I love scones -- they're one of my favorite things. I felt like I was saying that a lot during this unit. Bread is just so much fun, and like I said before, there are just so many different things that you can do with the products. We made cranberry orange scones, and after they were all baked and cooled, my partner and I decided to melt a little bit of white chocolate and drizzle that over the top. Delicious!

Goodness, what else did we make in this unit that was notable? Really, the better question is what wasn't?! The next class (after we topped and baked our bagels), the first thing that we made was Pan De Mie. The simpler version of this though? White bread. Yup, we made a basic, bogus loaf of white bread. Not that I have anything against white bread, of course, but it was probably the most average thing that we made in the unit. I did, however, hear that it made some delicious toast!

On that same night we also made english muffins and focaccia. Now, I LOVE focaccia bread, and similar to the bagels, I've made it once before at -- yep, you guessed it -- work. I couldn't decide what flavor of bread I wanted to do, so I sectioned my focaccia off into 3 sections, and did some plain with just olive oil and rosemary, some with that, plus kalamata olives, and then the last section was that same oil and rosemary mix, but topped with fresh tomatoes. Focaccia bread is probably one of the easiest things that we did, but MAN, did that thing take forever. This unit has a lot of just standing around (I use this loosely, because we were doing other stuff while we were waiting, but when you have all of your breads proofing, there's not much you can do other than wait!), and the focaccia bread was no exception. That bread was in the proof box for 3.5 hours in total, I believe. Plus, it had half an hour of baking time. So worth it, but it was definitely a long road getting there.

We made a couple different types of doughs that were used for multiple things. First there was the orange cinnamon swirl bread, which sounds tasty by itself, right? You would be perfectly happy with that, until you hear that we made pecan sticky buns out of that same dough. These were so incredible. It's everything that you want a fancy Cinnabon to be, I swear! When we flipped these guys out of the pans (because similar to the store bought monkey bread, the yummy sauce is on the bottom), it was just a big ol' mess of cinnamon, sugar, deliciousness! On this same day we finished baking our harvest grain bread, which is basically just a seeded bread full of all sorts of different things: chia seeds, pumpkin seeds, salt, pepper, sesame seeds, poppy seeds, etc.

Another dough that we made that was multi-use was the brioche dough. Again, we made two different things out of this, a brioche loaf bread, and then little single-serve brioche rolls. Brioche has always been one of my favorite types of breads; it's so delicious and tender. These guys were pretty straight forward, but shaping the little individual rolls were a little bit difficult. Maybe difficult isn't the right word, but they're definitely a funky shape. The class before the brioche, we also made kaiser rolls, milk bread rolls, and challah bread. Of the three, it was really hard to pick one favorite! Kaiser rolls always make a delicious sandwich, milk bread is the most delicious, buttery dinner roll that you've ever eaten, and where to even start with that challah bread?? Who would think that egg bread would be any good. Whoever had that idea, it sure was a good one. What I really liked about the challah bread was that when you cut it into slices, it sort of looked like a cloud, which made me really happy.

Now we came to the end all, be all of breads: croissants! We made so many kinds of croissants... chocolate, plain, raisin, and all SO delicious! Making croissants was so much fun! There were so many steps in getting the dough together, between properly folding together the dough block and butter block, to the turns and all that fun stuff. Once we got all of our turns in our dough and it had gone through its first proofing stage, it was time to shape!! The plain croissants were shaped just like you see in movies or on TV. Make the little triangle, and roll it all up into a cute little rolled log thingey. Then we took that shape, and curved it around so that you got that classic croissant shape. For the chocolate croissants, we started those with a rectangle, and sort of rolled it into thirds. Rather than just using a chocolate bar cut into pieces, I found out that they actually make little sticks of chocolate, that are kind of like chocolate chips. I had no idea that these existed, but they really did make a lot of sense. The last kind of croissant that we made was the raisin croissant. For this one we used one big sheet of dough, spread some pastry cream on it, then sprinkled that with raisins. Rolled it up into a log and then cut it into slices, much like a log cookie.

After we had shaped all of the croissants, we had to let them do their final proof before we baked them. Once they had baked, our teacher suggested that we all try one, since everybody should try a freshly baked croissant at some point in their lives. Once I got home and they had cooled a little bit, I cut one open and couldn't believe how beautiful they were on the inside. This means just one thing: that I made the dough correctly, woo hoo! I had a nice spiral going on, a "spiderweb" effect, which is how Chef Jeanne referred to it. I definitely enjoyed making these, and plan to make more in the future!

The last three things that we made in the bread unit were panettone, stollen, and danishes. The panettone and stollen were both pretty straightforward breads, and the danishes were pretty similar to the croissants, at least in terms of the dough creation process. The danishes were filled with a wide variety of fillings: cream cheese, jam, pastry cream, almond paste, fruit... All were delicious! I think if I had to pick a favorite, it would probably be the pastry cream filled ones. I've come to find that pastry cream is one of the most delicious things we make in culinary school (at least up until now), and that it goes with just about everything.

My perfect practical for the bread unit!

The very last thing that we had to do before we moved onto the next unit (cakes 2!), was the practical. I had to make plain croissants, chocolate croissants, brioche rolls, and scones. I had a feeling that it went really well, and once I got my test papers back, my feeling was correct, and I ended up getting 100%!

And with that, there's a big ol' update on the bread unit! The next blog post is going to cover all of the second cake unit, so stay tuned for that!

As always, if you want more frequent updates, you can check out my Instagram.

Thanks for reading!