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.
First tray!
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.
One giant marshmallow!
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.
Tray 2!
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.
My practical tray
Cigarettes.. Where fingertips burn
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!