Adieu, Pâte À Choux! — Desserts for Days

I know I'm slacking a little bit with the Saturday thing for the past two weeks, but believe me, I'm trying my best! Sometimes the weekend is just a little busier than expected, but rest assured, I'm determined to be back on the Saturday schedule as of next week!

This week in school was a lot of fun, and not only did we do our usual baking, but we got to make our first display piece! That was pretty exciting and pretty cool, but I'll get to that in a little bit.

Starting out on Monday, we had two things on the agenda: the St. Honoré cake and one of my most favorite things, gougéres! We started with the cake, and we rolled out and docked the dough for our base. Feels like it's been quite some time since we made a tart dough, even though its really only been a week. After that was finished and chilling in the fridge, we made a batch of pâte à choux, and split it in two. Some of it would go toward the completion of the St. Honoré cake, and the rest would be going toward the gougéres.

We took care of the gougéres first, and oh my gosh, they're so good. They're just little cheese puffs, but I cannot get over how tasty they are. I like to refer to them as the fanciest cheese its that you'll ever have. They're just cheesy and spicy and oh so yummy! We mixed gruyere and parmesan with cayenne pepper, paprika, and a little black pepper, then mixed that all into the actual pâte à choux. Then we piped it, and sprinkled more cheese on top, and baked them.

While those were in the oven, we finished piping everything that we needed for the St. Honoré cake, which included some more plain puffs, and then some rings of choux around that piece of dough we rolled out earlier. While those guys were all in the oven, we made a batch of caramel that we'd be dipping those plain puffs in to adhere them to the base of the cake. After everything was baked, all we really had left to do on Monday night was assemble the cake, since the cheese puffs are sort of a one and done thing. The filling for the cake is pastry cream mixed with a meringue, which makes it nice and light. There's even a special piping tip (the St. Honoré tip) that we used to pipe it on top.

On Wednesday, we spent the whole night working on one thing, our croquembouche! A croquembouche is a very traditional Italian wedding cake, but we were making little ones in class, since we didn't have the capacity to make something so ginormous. We started the night off again making pâte à choux, and piping what felt like a million puffs. In reality, I think that I only ended up with about 60, but still, that's a lot of puffs! While the puffs were baking, we made more caramel, which we would use for two things: one, to decorate our puffs, and two, to hold our croquembouche together.

Chef Jeanne told us that we should pick a theme of sorts, and being the basic gal that I am, of course I went with a fall vibe. With our leftover choux that we didn't pipe into puffs, we made little decorations. I made a pumpkin, the word fall, some little leaves, and tiny hearts.

Side note, I'm also trying to learn calligraphy, so what better way to practice than with pâte à choux! Turns out, dough isn't as easy to write with as frosting or chocolate is. You can't say that I didn't try.

But anyway! Onto decorating the puffs. After they were dipped in caramel, we dipped the puff into a variety of toppings while the caramel was still tacky. I used a combination of cocoa nibs, shredded coconut that's dyed orange, pearl sugar that's dyed red, and ground pistachios. After they were all dipped, decorated, and dried, it was time for assembly! One by one, we dipped the puffs in more caramel, and stacked them all on top of each other until it came to a point. The last thing we had to do was just plop our little decorations on, and ta da! A lil' baby croquembouche!

Going into Friday it was a pretty big day. I don't really have any pictures because we had a written test and then our practical exam for pâte à choux. This written test was a little bit different than our last two, because rather than just being tested for the end of the unit, we've reached the end of the first level! Our tests are usually 15 minutes, and this one was an hour. It was a lot of information to remember, but I think on the whole, I did pretty well. I have pretty bad test-taking anxiety, so I was a little more stressed out than I'd like to admit. But, after that was all said and done it was into the kitchen and we got to baking.

We had to present 3 things for our test: 3 chocolate eclairs, 3 coffee eclairs, and one Paris-Breast. All things that we made at the very beginning of the unit. We have to write up an itinerary for each test, so we have some kind of a plan to follow, and I followed mine almost to a tee. I was finished only 8 minutes after I had planned to be done, and that put me being finished just over 20 minutes before the grading deadline. Other than our half hour break for dinner in the middle, everything is sort of a blur during the actual test. Lots of running around, baking, taking things out, chilling stuff, whipping, etc. There's just so much going on at once. The itinerary definitely helps, because you have something else other than a plan in your head to check in with, something that you know you won't miss a step for.

Once grading was over for me, I just sort of hung out and got everything cleaned up and ready to go. I was the first one to be graded, so I had a lot of extra time on my hands to decompress.

As this week ended, so did a few things. Not only am I finished with the Pâte À Choux unit, but I'm officially finished with level 1! Starting on Monday, I'll be into level 2 starting with Pâte Feuilletée.

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

Thanks for reading!