Okay, let me start off by saying that I know I've been slacking off a little bit with the whole weekly blogging thing. I've been really busy this week and haven't exactly had a minute to sit down and get this taken care of. But, rest assured, I will get back on top of it. I really want to make sure that I stay in the habit of blogging every week. Not only for you guys reading it, but for me too! I think that once I'm out of school, this will be an awesome thing to look back on.
But anyway, with my excuses for not posting last week out of the way, let me tell you about it! Monday night was a particularly busy night -- heck, I feel like I say that about every night, but I swear, we had a lot to do (moreso than usual), even if it may not seem like it. The very first thing that we did was get our pears poaching for the caged pears. This was something that I was really excited about making for two reasons: one, pears are one of my favorite fruits, and two, when I audited at ICC back in April, this was the night that the other pastry class was in. I think that's kind of cool, that I got to relive that day, but from the other side of the workbench. Little reminiscing for me, that's all.
Poaching some pears
Apple turnovers, just ready to go in the oven!
After the pears were in the poaching liquid, we just let them sit there for awhile. The next thing that we had to do was bake off our apple turnovers that were leftover from Friday. This was a pretty quick process, as all we had to do was egg wash them and then very slightly score the tops, just so they had a nice little design on the top.
The next thing that we did was quick, which was start our palmiers. We rolled the dough in a TON of sugar, then rolled it up, wrapped it in plastic, and stuck the little log in the fridge for Wednesday. This gives all the sugar time to absorb the moisture in the dough and caramelize a little bit.
Look at all that sugar in the palmiers
Before we baked the conversations
From there, we went into making our conversations, all the while our pears were still poaching, soaking up all of those delicious flavors. The conversations are sort of like tarts, except they're made with puff pastry instead of tart dough. Then they're filling with almond cream, have more puff on top, then they're topped with royal icing, then baked. Sort of a weird little dessert, but they're not as funky as they sound.
Conversations
Once those were in the oven, our pears got pulled out of the poaching liquid to cool off, and then we got to assembling our caged pears, which was probably my favorite thing of the night. Other than the puff and pear, the only other thing in this was a teeny tiny dollop of almond cream. Like, maybe a tablespoon. We got to use the lattice cutter for the first time, which is a super cool tool. Definitely on my list of things to buy. You have to press pretty hard when you're using it to make sure that the dough is cut all the way through, but then you just pull it apart and like magic, you have a lattice! It's so cool, like I can't get over it. We ran out of time to bake those, though, so those got hotel wrapped and saved for Wednesday.
Caged pears
On Wednesday, I went home with SO MANY THINGS. I had palmiers, a pineapple dartois, the caged pears, AND a napoleon. Fortunately, two of the things that we were making were already ready to go in the oven, so it wasn't too crazy. After we put our caged pears in the oven, the first thing that we did was get going on the pineapple compote for the dartois. I thought that it was pretty cool that we got to use tropical fruits, just because it's not something that you see too often. Plus, pineapple is legitimately my favorite fruit, so that was super exciting.
Palmiers, all nice and caramel-y
The pineapple chunks had to cook for a really long time to cook out all of the liquid. They were mixed with bourbon too, which smelled really good. While that was all baking we cut our palmiers from the log we left in the fridge on Monday.
Wednesday night's baking
Pineapple, anyone?
Since our dough was already made, we just cut out the squares that we needed to make the dartois. We got to use the lattice cutter again, which is still so cool. The pineapples got mixed with a cream cheese filling before we assembled the whole thing, so it was a little creamy, a little tropical, all kinds of delicious. We stuck that bad boy in the oven to bake, and then we got going on the most difficult thing of the night, the napoleon.
For the napoleon, we baked off one giant sheet of puff pastry in sort of a weird way. We put our big sheet of puff pastry in between two sheet pans and baked it just like that. Since the napoleon needed big, flat sheets, after it was out of the oven we just smushed it down so it was nice and flat and all the layers of dough are all compressed. Once it was out of the oven, we cut it into three pieces while it was still warm, that way we knew we'd get a nice, clean line.
The Napoleon from Wednesday!
We went to dinner while everything was cooling off, and when we came back our main focus was assembling the napoleon. We already made our pastry cream earlier in the week so it was pretty quick to get the napoleon assembled. It was alternating layers of cream and puff, cream and puff. The very top piece of puff was glazed with icing fondant, then as fast as we could - because the icing fondant dries SO quickly - draw lines of chocolate across the top, then using a skewer, make a nice little chevron pattern. Like I said, this stuff dries SO fast, it's insane. My partner and I thought that we were moving pretty quickly, and even still by the time we got to the last few chevrons the icing fondant was already starting to harden.
The last thing we had to do on Wednesday was make puff for our test that was on Friday. This is something that we sort of worked on throughout the night, and we finished right on time. We drew our lottery for our test (I got the napoleon, palmiers, and vols au vents).
On Friday, the only thing that we really did was our test. We had a 15 minute quiz, then after that, the kitchen was ours. According to the itinerary that I wrote out, I was planning to be done about 10 minutes before grading was due to start (which was at 9:30pm), but for some reason or another, I was totally finished before dinner. Honestly this was pretty nice, because I had less to worry about. I had one of the more difficult combinations, at least I think. I barely had enough puff pastry to get everything done, which was definitely nerve racking.
My final presentation for my puff pastry test
Stay tuned for my next blog (which I'm going to go write right now), and if you want more frequent updates, you can check out my Instagram.
Thanks for reading!