Cake Me Away

November 19, 2016 Samantha van Gogh

Okay, moving forward onto the next blog. Playing catch up is pretty difficult, I must say. I've been so busy lately, it's hard to find time to sit down and write, but I have a few hours this morning, so my goal is to have you guys all caught up by the end of today. So, here we are at week 2 of cakes 1! This is the last week of cakes, at least for right now. The cake unit gets split into two, like I said in my last post. One more focused on baking and structure, while the other cake unit is more decorative. By the end of this week, I'll have brought 5 cakes home. That's an average of 1.67 cakes per day! Which, by the way, is an absurd amount of cake for 4 people to eat. But enough of my rambling, let's get going through what I did this week!

On Monday, the first thing that we got working on was the marjolaine. Last week when we made the bigger, rectangular sheets of meringue, this is what those guys were for. The marjolaine is a super complex, layered cake, with so many delicious fillings. I had never had anything quite like it! The nine layers go like this: chocolate genoise, chocolate ganache, meringue, creme d'or (which is like chocolate whipped cream), meringue, praline buttercream, meringue, stabilized whipped cream, meringue. Phew! Then that entire thing is set to hang out in the fridge until Wednesday so that the fillings set up nicely. There's still a lot to do to tackle this cake, but trust me, it'll be worth it when it's done!

From there, we got working on a flourless chocolate cake. I, for one, really enjoy flourless chocolate cake. It's nice and moist, dense, and delicious! I also really like chocolate lava flow cake, but that's another story entirely. This wasn't the only chocolate cake that we worked on on Monday night. We also put to use the rest of that sheet pan of chocolate genoise that we made last week. In addition to the rectangle that we cut out for the marjolaine, we cut out 3 circles for a chocolate ganache cake. This cake was pretty interesting because we built it inside of a cake ring. First we lined the ring with whipped chocolate ganache, then started to stack the cake inside of that ring. This way, once the cake was 100% set (we let it sit in the fridge until Wednesday, just like the marjolaine), we could slide the ring off, and we'd have a perfectly smooth cake exterior.

This chocolate ganache cake was just alternating layers of chocolate genoise and whipped chocolate ganache. If you didn't think that was enough chocolate, just wait until it gets finished on Wednesday; you'll be in for a real treat!

By this time, our flourless chocolate cake was out of the oven. While it was cooling, we got to candy some rose petals that would go on top of the chocolate ganache cake! Just a side note, roses are my absolute favorite flower, as cliche as it is. I was super excited about this because not only are rose petals really pretty and smell amazing, we got to take home the extra roses from class that we didn't candy. In order to candy the rose petals, all that we did was take the individual petals, brush the very lightly in egg white, and then tossed them in sugar. We let these guys sit in dry storage until Wednesday night (which if you can't tell, sitting until Wednesday night is a theme here).

Once our flourless chocolate cake had cooled and we had prepared our creme d'or, it was time for assembly. We cut all of those meringue logs that we made last week into shorter segments. It was sort of random and a matter of personal preference. Once the cake was iced, we stuck the logs all around the side, and then piled a bunch of them on top. That's a wrap on Monday!

On Wednesday, I took home 3 cakes: the marjolaine, a lemon chiffon, and a whipped chocolate ganache cake. All of which we started on Monday (I told you that there was a theme going on here). The first thing that we got started on was the marjolaine. Since this guy had been chilling in the fridge since Monday night, it was nice and firm. We had to trim the cake down so that the filling would be even all the way around. Everybody had a little bowl of cake scraps from trimming the cake. It was quite delicious, we all had a few nibbles ;) Once the marjolaine was trimmed, we had to crumb coat the entire thing with more of that praline buttercream. The goal was to get it as smooth as possible, since this cake, just like the whipped chocolate ganache cake, would get a nice layer of chocolate poured over the top as the outer-most icing.

While the crumb coat on the marjolaine was firming up in the fridge, it was time to unmold the chocolate ganache cake. Since the cake was adhered to the cake ring, we had to heat it up with a kitchen torch. This was a really delicate process because heating it too much would cause all the ganache to melt, but not heating it enough would cause the cake to break when pulling the ring off. Fortunately, no one had a melting cake incident, and all of the cake rings came off just fine.

Once the cake was out of the ring, we had the marjolaine and the ganache cake lined up, since those were both getting glazed with the same chocolate over the top. It was a little nerve racking to glaze them, to be honest. You didn't have much time to get all of the chocolate on there before it started to harden. Even worse, was that when you had to remove the excess chocolate off of the top, you had one shot at swiping the chocolate away before it solidified. Pretty scary, but I was able to get it done.

After those guys were both glazed, the chocolate ganache cake got cocoa nibs around the outside edge of the cake, whereas the marjolaine got some crushed candied hazelnuts. Then, we stuck the candied rose petals from Monday on top of the chocolate ganache cake, and did a nice little quilted pattern in the chocolate on the marjolaine. The last thing that we had to do on Wednesday was assemble our lemon chiffon cakes and do a bit of piping practice using different techniques.

We had baked the lemon chiffon cakes last Friday and just stored them in the freezer until Wednesday. We made a quick batch of lemon curd, which would serve as the filling for our lemon cake. Since we had so much leftover frosting from that giant batch last week, we were just able to use that to frost the cake. Much like the genoise, this cake was cut into 3 layers, soaked, and then stacked. For me, it was a little too lemon-y, but again, I'm not huge on the whole lemon thing.

For piping, we got to practice the basket weave, shells, and one of my personal favorite things, cornelli lace. This is that design on the top that sort of looks like a brain. I don't know why I like it so much, but I do. It's just on continuous line that is sort of random and never touches. It looks really pretty in white against a white cake. It's subtle, but so pretty. Just a side note, I remember making cupcakes years ago for halloween, and I used cornelli lace on the top of the cupcakes in red icing to try to get them to look like a brain. This was one of the first piping techniques that I ever really got into when I first started baking and decorating and whatnot. Pretty cool, I think.

Lemon chiffon cake with different piping techniques

After finishing that lemon cake, that was a wrap for Wednesday. The only thing left at the end of the week was a test. Fortunately, it's just the end of a unit, so it's just a short quiz and a practical. And so came Friday: test day. The tests always stress me out, and this one did in particular. It wasn't so much the written portion that I was concerned about, but moreso the baking part. Our genoise had to be split into 3 layers, and the cake that I made in class, I was only able to get two. I made the cake again at home, and was able to get 3 layers no problem, but Chef Jeanne did say that this is a very finicky cake, and it's not necessarily the same every time you do it, even if everything is done identically. I think this is what worried me the most. The only other thing that we had to present alongside the fully assembled and decorated cake was a marzipan plaque with "Happy Birthday!" written out on it in chocolate.

It was a pretty stressful evening, but when everything came to a close, I was done earlier than anticipated. I was worried that my cake wasn't going to be very good, but come grading time, I only received a few minor notes, which definitely made me feel better.

As of the end of this unit, I am officially 1/3 of the way through the program. Totally crazy!! From here, we go into breads, which is something that I've been looking forward to ever since I started this program. Which you'll all get to hear about soon!

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

Thanks for reading!

Cakes 1 to Know One

November 1, 2016 Samantha van Gogh

I'm slowly getting back on track with blogging at the end of the week (woo!), and as I said before, I'm going to try my best to keep it that way. After the puff pastry unit came to a close, now we're moving into cakes, which is super exciting. At ICC, there are two cake units, the first of which I started two weeks ago. The first unit focuses more on basic things like construction, crumb, frosting, etc., whereas the second cakes unit focuses more on decorations and the creative aspects of cakes.

Lemon pound cake with a lemon glaze. It's a lemon wonderland!

Marble cake, one of my personal favorites

We started off with pound cake and cupcakes, two of the most basic cake things. I always thought that pound cake was named as such because there was a pound of butter in it. Turns out, there's a pound of quite a few things in there (butter included!), but also sugar and flour. We made two types of pound cake that night, lemon and chocolate marble. I'm not usually a fan of lemon cake, but I've gotta say, this one was pretty delicious! Of the two, though, the chocolate marble was definitely my favorite. The chocolate marble cake was a high ratio cake, which meant that it had a very high ratio of sugar, when comapred to the other ingredients. It had a really nice, fine texture. I could've eaten that cake for days.

The other thing that we made that day was chocolate cupcakes with a chocolate frosting / glaze thing. These were also really tasty. I love a good cupcake, but I'm not too big on frosting, so these were perfect for me. They just had a nice thin layer of the chocolate glaze over the top, so the frosting was there, but it wasn't too overpowering.

On Wednesday, we made to types of Genoise cakes: one vanilla and one chocolate. These cakes are super finicky because they're basically held up with air. The cake only has 5 ingredients, and it starts by mixing an egg, sugar, and salt over heat, then once it hits a certain temperature, you beat it in a mixer until it's cooled down, and tripled in size. From there, you fold in sifted flour as gently as possible. Once that's all combined, you take a tiny bit of the batter, and "sacrifice" it - mixing it in with the butter, without any of the care we had with the folding. Then mix that little bit of sacrificial batter back in with the other batter, by gently folding it in. Then it's into the prepared pan and baked immediately. This is definitely not one of those cakes that you can let rest on the counter, because the longer it sits, the more it will deflate. The key with this cake is that it's tall enough to slice into 3 even layers after it's baked, so getting that height is really important.

We did the same thing with the chocolate variation, except rather than baking it in a cake pan, we baked it into a flat sheet pan, and we would end up cutting out the layers with a cake ring, almost like a giant cookie cutter.

After the cakes were both baked and we had dinner, we made a big ol' batch of pate a bombe buttercream. Like I said earlier, I'm not a huge frosting fan, but man this stuff is delicious! That is, in small quantities. Since there was so much butter in this frosting, it sort of left that butter feeling in your mouth. You know what I'm talking about? But if you had just a little bit, like dipped in a candied almond – which is how we all sampled it – it was mighty delicious.

Giant batch of buttercream, egg for scale

Once the frosting was made, we cut our cakes into layers, then soaked them with a combination of simple syrup and a liquor of our choice. I went with amaretto, because I thought that it would go great with the apricot jam that went in between each layer. The other option was orange liqueur, and I just thought that amaretto sounded a little bit better to me. Once the cakes were soaked and stacked, it was time to frost and finish them! This was a really lovely cake, and it sort of just absorbed the flavor of whatever you soaked it in. That plus the filling was a great combination.

On Friday we had a lot of recipes to do, but we only ended up taking one cake home. The rest were for cakes that we were going to assemble next week. We started off making the biscuit dacquoise, which was a meringue based cake, and had a similar feel to something that we did back during the tarts and pies unit. We piped the cake into two rings, and baked those off. While those guys were baking, we got working on our lemon chiffon cakes. Again, I'm not a huge lemon person, but this cake at least smelled pretty good. What I thought was interesting was that this cake needed to be cooled upside down. Normally, we always flip cakes over to cool them, but this was a pretty delicate cake, and we couldn't risk flipping it. But before we could start to cool it off, we had to bake it first.

After those were in the oven, we made two different kinds of meringues. The first kind we made into 4"x8" sheets, since those were going to be used in our marjolaine next week, and that's about the size of a finished cake. The other merginue was a chocolate variation. We whipped the batter up and piped off some chocolate meringue logs. These were just going to be saved until Monday. They were just for decorating one of our cakes, to go all around the outside. We had to bake all of the meringues for quite some time at a pretty low temperature, since they needed to be nice and dry.

Once we were back from dinner, it was time to assemble the cake that we made the biscuit dacquoise for. We made a nice coffee flavored buttercream, and piped a nice thick layer around the outside, making sure that it looked pretty. We leaned a new piping technique: the rope. It looks really nice and isn't too difficult. The thing that I had the hardest time with was keeping them nice and tight, so that the frosting would be able to support the weight of the cake on top. Once the pretty border was piped around the outside, we just sort of had to fill up the middle so it was the same height as the edge. From there, we just popped the top layer of cake on and dusted it with a little bit of powdered sugar. Just like that, the week was done!

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

Thanks for reading!

Pie, Pie, Pie – OH MY!

September 10, 2016 Samantha van Gogh

This is it! This week we finally got to dive into making pies. Pie is my absolute favorite dessert (all kinds, I don't really have a concrete favorite). I think if I could eat one dessert for the rest of my life, 100% it would be pie (just don't make me choose one!). Small side note: has anyone else seen that store Pieology? I legitimately thought that it was a pie store, I was so excited. There's this tiny place in Seattle called Pie that's ~amazing~, so I thought that it was reminiscent of that. Nope. Turns out it's pizza. I'm just a little bit bitter. LOL

But anyway! Onto this week. With Monday being a holiday, we had a short week this week, but with all of the stuff we managed to get done, it sure didn't feel like it! Wednesday was #PieDay, which was just beyond exciting, we had 4 pies on the roster: apple, lemon meringue, pumpkin, and caramel apple streusel. We only managed to get to 3 of the pies, but heck, who cares? That's still 3 pies in one day! It was a busy night, to say the least. We started off with rolling out and placing our pie crusts in the pans. Then, we got to add little decorative borders to them, if we wanted.

Making pie is one of my favorite things (hello upcoming holidays!), and decorating the crust is even more fun! It's like a little mini art project, sort of, and I love me a good art project. I think I was a little ambitious, but I also think that it paid off; I loved how my crusts turned out! I was braiding crust, cutting out leaves, cutting out triangles, the whole shebang!

Pumpkin, lemon meringue, caramel apple streusel, and apple pies // before & after!

The three pies that we did to completion on Wednesday were the apple, lemon meringue, and caramel apple streusel pies. We did do the first bake on the pumpkin pie crust, as well, but we ran out of time on Wednesday to get that one finished. We were given the different options for our quiz (which is on Monday!), and we got to draw numbers on Friday. Sad to think that the tarts and pies unit is coming to an end, but next week we get to start pate a choux, which I'm definitely looking forward to.

On Friday, we started off finishing up our pumpkin pies. On Wednesday, Chef Jeanne made a gigantic batch of pumpkin pie filling, so it was one less thing we had to do. After we had those setting up, we made two batches of dough. One, that we'd use to make our mini quiches, and the other for our test on Monday. On Friday, we made whole wheat crust for the first time. This crust was going to be used in our spinach and goat cheese quiches. After we made our crusts and got them chilling in the fridge, we had a 45 minute lecture on nutrition.

After our lecture was over, we had about 25 minutes left before dinner, so we blind baked our crusts for the quiches, and while those were baking, we got everything prepped out for the rest of the quiches. For the Lorraine, that was the egg custard mix, Gruyere, and bacon, whereas the other one, there was spinach, shallots, goat cheese, and the egg custard mix for that, too.

After dinner, we assembled our quiches and put them in the oven, then while those were baking for the second time, we whipped up a quick batch of chantilly creme to decorate our pumpkin pies with! Friday was definitely a more laid back night that I'm used to, but nearing the end of the unit, there really isn't that much to do. The quiches were pretty quick to assemble, at least I thought.

We had a little guessing game, too. After the quiches were finished, we had to guess which one was more nutritious. Almost everyone thought that it would be the spinach and goat cheese, however, we were wrong. Surprisingly enough, in term of calories, the quiche Lorraine was actually better for you. But really, the difference was so minute, it hardly makes an actual difference, at least I think.

After that we drew our numbers for the practical portion of our test on Monday. There were 4 possible combinations of a large tart and two tartelettes, and I was hoping that I would get either the one wth the chocolate ganache tarts or the one with quiche Lorraine, and lucky enough for me, I randomly picked the one with quiche Lorraine! More quiches for breakfast for me! Woohoo!

All we did the rest of the night was go over material that was going to be on the written portion of our quiz. It was a pretty low key night, and week, as a whole. Come Monday, after our test is over, we'll get started on the pate a choux unit!

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

Thanks for reading!

Very Busy Bakers!

September 3, 2016 Samantha van Gogh

This week in school, we found ourselves smack-dab in the middle of the pies and tarts unit, and I think this has been our busiest (and longest) week to date! I feel like I say that every week, so apologies if I do, but it's really hard to believe how hectic the days can be. This week, each person made 9 tarts! That's an average of 3 tarts a day, which is totally insane. I'm bringing so much food home, it's hard to believe that it all actually gets eaten.

The end of this week also marks my 4th week (aka, first whole month) in school, which is pretty exciting! It seems like time is just flying by -- I mean, one month gone, already. Last night, Chef Stephany said that she thought that the night classes go by so slow. Maybe I don't feel that way since I have no basis of comparison, but I really feel like I'm going to be finished with this program before I know it.

But all that aside, let's get into the baking this week! Monday started off with making some cherry compote and a brand new batch of almond cream. Remember how I described it as a small pillow last week? Well, this time around I actually managed to get a picture after it was all wrapped up! See? Pretty pillow-like, I think. This batch seemed a little smaller than the one that we made last week, but I could be totally wrong. We used a different method to make this one (using almond meal instead of almond paste), so that could be why... less voluminous.

From there, we went on to make our first meringue of the course. For Monday, both the tarts that we made were pretty much entirely based around meringue. We made a Galette Flamande, which is a thin layer of tart dough on the bottom, then that cherry compote we made is sandwiched between two layers of a meringue / almond cream mixture, then the top is sprinkled with almonds, and finally is dusted with powdered sugar. Our other tart of the night, the mixed nut tart, was the same meringue, except this time it was mixed with a combination of almond cream, almond flour, and hazelnut flour all spread over a very thin layer of raspberry preserves and sliced almonds. We had to whip our meringues to stiff peaks, so that it would stand up on end, like so.

The Galette Flamande was pretty before it even went into the oven, so I could only imagine what it was going to look like after that meringue had gotten a nice golden brown color on it. As expected, it was even prettier after it came out of the oven. It was so tasty, too! Chef Jeanne cut her tart into a bunch of little pieces so we could all try a bit, and what a treat that was.

When we moved onto the mixed nut tart, it was a pretty simple tart. This one sort of had a "brunch" vibe. Not overly sweet, and you probably wouldn't feel too guilty about eating a big chunk of it for breakfast. Just from looking at it, you'd never know that it had a really beautiful layer of raspberry and almonds on the inside. But I guess the saying stands, never judge a book (or a tart, in this case), by it's cover!

The last thing that we did on Monday night was make a new tart dough that we would be using on Wednesday, and that was a pretty quick, easy thing to do. By now, we're all pros when it comes to making dough. This dough in particular was a sablée, and much like the cookie dough we made back in week one, it had a very sandy texture, hence the name (sablée means "sandy" in French).

Wednesday definitely was the busiest day this week -- so much so, that we didn't even leave the classroom until 11:50, which is almost an hour later than we're supposed to be finished. Since we had so much to do, I didn't get a chance to snap too many pictures, but I was able to get a few.

The first thing that we got started with on Wednesday evening was making our candied lemon peels for our lemon curd tartelettes. We made sure to get this going first, because according to our recipe, it had to cook in the syrup for up to two hours, which is almost half the time that we have in the kitchen each day. To get going on that, we peeled our lemons, removed as much of the pith as we could, blanched them 2-3 times, julienne'd them, put them in simple syrup, and cooked them over low heat for a little over an hour. After all that was said and done, we strained them from the remaining syrup, and rolled the lemon peels in sugar to give them that "candied" look. I thought that they sort of looked like Sour S'ghetti, which is one of my favorite candies. The lemon syrup that was remaining after we strained them could make something really delicious, I'm sure, I'm just not really sure what. Maybe it would be good in a cocktail or something, I dunno.

After we had our lemon peels simmering, we went on to making the caramel for our caramel nut tart! I've made caramel a handful of times at home, but it never sets up as much as I'd like (or need) it to, so maybe this will be my journey down the path of being able to successfully make caramels at home! Caramel is such a temperamental thing too, and it can go wrong so, so quickly. Fortunately, I didn't have to remake mine, and it went smoothly the first time, but it wasn't such for everyone. Chef Jeanne said that she wasn't even 100% sure why some of the caramels we're working right, they're just that temperamental of a thing. But when all was said and done, we mixed walnuts into the caramel (hence caramel nut tart). This gave it sort of a sweet / salty vibe. I decided to add an extra pinch of salt to my caramel, for a more enhanced flavor. I have to say, I think I made the right call. I realized after the fact that I didn't actually take a picture of the tart when it was finished, but I did get a picture before I put the almond cream on top. It has a nice thick layer of caramel, countered with a thin layer of almond cream. Very tasty, indeed!

Caramel nut tart, before the almond cream layer was put on top

After those tarts were in the oven and baking we went on to make our lemon curd for the tartelettes. I have to say, I'm not usually one to like lemon-y flavored things, but this lemon curd was actually pretty delicious! We did a blind bake on the shells, since the filling doesn't get cooked again, so once the lemon curd was finished, we could just pour it into the shells so they could set in the freezer. The coolest part about the lemon curd was probably using the gelatin sheets. Whenever I've baked in the past with gelatin, I've just used the little pouches of Knox gelatin that you can buy at the store. I'd never seen a gelatin sheet (or heard of one, to be perfectly honest) before, so I was pretty excited to give them a try! You bloom the sheets, just as you would with any other gelatin, and then just stir them into your mix (lemon curd, in our case). I didn't think that they were going to dissolve, at first. They almost felt like rubber. But sure enough, with a little bit of stirring, they disappeared.

Lemon curd tarts, before we torched the meringue.

After the lemon curd was setting in the fridge, we made our Swiss Meringue. We started this just a little bit after 11:00pm, and we all thought that we'd be done by 11:10, 11:15 at the latest. The meringue took a little longer than expected to come together, and we all must've gotten caught up in the piping and torching of our meringues, because like I said, we didn't get out until 11:50! A late night, but well worth it, I think. It was pretty fun torching the meringue and watching it go from this pristine white fluff, to a nicely browned color.

On Wednesday, we also made two doughs that we would use on Friday: the Linzer dough and a chocolate sablée. The Linzer dough was SO MUCH WORK. We had to hard boil eggs, let them cool, peel them, and sift the hard boiled egg yolks. Yes, I did say sift. We basically had to smash the egg yolks through a sifter so they were a egg yolk-y flour type thing. It was super strange. Tasty dough, though. It was a lot of work, but well worth it.

On Friday, we had a lot less intricate work to do, so it was going to be a nice way to end the week. We made two tarts, the Linzer and then a chocolate ganache tart. I was most excited about the Linzer tart, probably just due to the lattice top. It's one of those things that reminds me of pie, and I LOVE pie. It's my absolute favorite dessert, and it's what we'll be getting into next Wednesday when we come back for class (we have Labor Day off).

After spreading a thin layer of almond cream along the bottom of the tart shell, and then topping it off with raspberry compote, it was time to start the lattice! Before I get into that, interestingly enough, when we made the raspberry compote, one of the main ingredients in it was apple compote. We made the same apple compote as we did when we made the apple tart, and then added raspberries, pectin, and sugar. We cooked this mixture until it was nice and thick, and used an immersion blender to get the last of the apple chunks out. That's one thing that I really need to get. I've been meaning to buy one for awhile, and I think they're just super useful. Plus, I can get it in Candy Apple Red, which is my dedicated small kitchen appliance color ;) But ANYWAY, back to the compote. You'd have absolutely no idea that there were apples in this mix. It tastes amazing, and just like raspberry jam would. It's amazing!! When we poured it out to cool, I sort of thought it looked like a big 'ol pile of fake blood, which was pretty funny. Assembling the tart was pretty easy, then we just stuck them in the oven to bake and went off to dinner!

When we came back from dinner, we assembled the chocolate ganache tart. That just sounds good thinking about it... who doesn't like chocolate?? This was like chocolate overload, too, because it was chocolate ganache in a chocolate crust. My table partner had some little gold flecks that he let me borrow to top my tart off which, so it was a lil' extra fancy! He and I were the first ones finished with our ganache and getting our tart in the fridge to set, so we helped Chef Stephany made a bunch of tiny cornets for the class to use to decorate our ganache tarts with white chocolate.

Pie dough, prepped and ready to go for next week!

The very last thing that we did on Friday was make our pie dough (!!!!). Like I said, I love pie! I'm so excited that we get to get started on that next week. We're going to be making 4 pies on Wednesday, which is totally crazy! Granted, they're 6" pies, so they're smaller than your regular pie would be, but that's still a ton of pie! Oh my gosh, I can't wait. I'm getting toward the end of the tarts and pies unit, so our test is coming up pretty quick. I know for sure that we have the Tarte Bourdaloue as one of the items on our practical, but I'm sure that there will be something else. We just don't know what yet. After this unit, I think that we move into Pate A Choux.

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

Thanks for reading!

School Has TART Me A Lot!

August 27, 2016 Samantha van Gogh

Please excuse the lame pun, but I had to! It's been a full-blown tart week!! This week in school has been crazy busy, but I think that it's been my favorite week to date! Like I said in my last post, I'm a sucker for pies (and tarts) and that's what we've been doing all week! Our unit on pies and tarts is 10 days long -- double the length of the cookies unit. I can't wait to see what we get into next week, because this week has been filled with so many delicious sweet (and savory) treats!

Monday we ended up taking home two tarts, one sweet and one savory. There was a LOT to do to get those tarts completed, though. Thankfully, we made plenty of dough last Friday so that was one less thing that we had to do. All we needed to do was get it rolled out and in the tart ring. I've never made a tart in a tart ring prior to school. I usually make pies, but I've made a tart on a couple occasions, however I've only used those pans with the fluted sides and the removable bottom. I have to say, a tart ring is a million times easier, at least I think! Our first step for our first tart of the week was to roll out our dough. Rolling dough out into a circle is harder than I imagined. Whenever I've made pies or tarts in the past, I always end up with an "amoeba shape." You know, those funky, misshaped blobs. Yeah, my dough always looked like that, but it's never really presented an issue. In school they want us to try for a circle, and by the end of this week, I have a much better handle on it, but it wasn't easy the first time. Once our dough was rolled out, put in the ring, and stuck in the fridge to chill, it was time to poach our pears for the Tarte Bourdaloue!

After our poaching liquid was made -- which consisted of wine, water, sugar, and a vanilla bean, we plopped in our pears and made a cartouche, and just let them sit in the liquid for awhile. This way, they had time to absorb all those delicious flavors! While the pears were poaching, we put together our onion tart. To be honest, I wasn't sure how I felt about this one. I'm not a big fan of tomatoes or blue cheese, but I gave it a try. Definitely wasn't bad, but personally, I couldn't eat more than a slice or two.

Not that it tasted bad, but it just wasn't my thing. Since this was a free-form tart, rather than one that we make in the rings, Chef Jeanne was joking that if it wasn't perfect, we'll just say it's "rustic." Pretty funny, and it's true, I think. Everything is "rustic" nowadays. We formed our tart shell by hand, then layered in all the ingredients -- caramelized onions, chopped walnuts, tomatoes, and blue cheese.

We took our dinner break, and when we came back, it was time to get our Tarte Bourdaloue finished! We pulled our tart rings out, and leveled them so there wouldn't be any excess dough, and made almond cream in the mixer to lay on the bottom of the tart shell. This was an utterly comical experience. We made a HUGE batch of almond cream, so much so that when all was said and done (and wrapped in plastic wrap), you could've mistaken it for a small pillow. Since the method we used to make almond cream required almond paste, it and there was just so much if it, it just barely fit in the mixer. There were definitely times that my partner and I had to hold our hands up to the sides of the bowl to keep it from spilling out.

This tart is was probably my favorite one we made this week. Not only was it pretty, but it tasted so good! I love pears, and this just took them to the next level. Chef Jeanne said that this one is going to be on our test at the end of the unit, so I'll definitely be making it again at home to get some more practice.

On Wednesday, it was even more busy! Hard to believe, really, but we made four tarts each! Granted, two of them were lil' baby tarts, but still! The first thing that we did, after rolling out our dough, of course, was make pastry cream! While we were making the pastry cream, we did blind baking on our tart shells. This meant that we baked them first, without filling, just to get the structure set, then we can either continue to bake at a later time with a filling (like the almond cream layer on the big fruit tart), or just fill as is (like the banana cream and small fruit tarts).

This was the first of 3 types of custard that we'll make over the course of the program. There's stirred, baked, and starch-based. The pastry cream that we were making on Wednesday was a starch-based custard, because it had pastry cream powder to bind it together. Even Chef Jeanne said she wasn't 100% sure what was in it, but when it's cooled, it's almost like a piece of rubber, it's really strange, honestly. I was able to get a close up picture of it, and you can just see the little vanilla bean seeds suspended in it, which I thought was really cool. We used this cream in two different ways on Wednesday night: just by itself on the fruit tarts, then in a banana cream tart, we folded the pastry cream together with some unsweetened whipped cream (which was whipped by hand!), for a slightly lighter texture.

After the fruit tart was all assembled, we brushed it with a nappage (apricot glaze) so it was nice and shiny! Then from there, we assembled our banana cream tarts! Now, I'm not the biggest fan of cream pies and tarts, in general. There's only been one banana cream pie I've ever liked, and it was one that I made in a class at Sur La Table (recipe here, for those interested), so I had pretty high hopes for the one we were making in class. Like I said before, for the "cream" part of this pie, we mixed our jelly-like pastry cream with some unsweetened whipped cream to get a nice, light creamy texture, then we folded in our bananas, and then topped it with sweetened whipped cream. Phew, that's a lot of cream. When all was said and done, it was delicious. I actually loved it, and it's something that I would totally make again. That's now two banana cream pies / tarts that I really enjoy! Woohoo!

Moving onto Friday, it was a little more hectic than anything, not super busy, per se. When we first got into class at 6, we went in and took our ServSafe Manager's exam. We've been leading up to this test pretty much since our first week here. We had some sort of lecture almost every day on the topics. Some days we were a little pressed for time, so we also have a book that we were given on the first day to study from. I think that I passed, at least I hope. It was 90 questions, and we had two hours to finish it. We only need to get a 70% to pass, and every practice test I took, I got at least an 85%, so I think I'll be okay. We get our results in a couple of weeks, via email.

After the test though, we had lost two hours of time, which when you only have 5 hours to work with, that's a huge chunk! We got right into prepping for our recipe for the day, which was supposed to be a Tarte Alsacienne, which is basically a custard apple tart sort of thing. The problem was, there were only 7 apples, when we needed 28. Whoops. There was a mix up of some kind, but instead of making one of those tarts per person, instead, one person per team made a Tarte Alsacienne (with either apples or pears, since we were short on the apples) and the other person made a Quiche Lorraine because Chef Stephany found a ton of bacon and gruyere in the store room that no one had labelled for anything. We make do with what we have! We'll make the quiche again, on day 9 of the tarts and pies unit, but that's totally fine by me :) I love quiche, so there were no complaints here!

I worked on the pear version of the Tarte Alsacienne while my partner worked on the Quiche Lorraine. I tried to grab two plump, evenly shaped pears. I remember from the Tart Bourdaloue, that it's a little more difficult to make things pretty if you have wonky shaped pears. Fortunately, I was able to find two really nice, similarly shaped pears, that were just beautiful. After they were peeled, cored, and sliced into wedges, we caramelized them in a pan, then we got to flambé them!! Yes, FLAMBÉ! Fire! I've never flambé'd anything before, so this was super exciting for me.

Now, you might be thinking, how the heck do you flambé with an induction stove? You get creative, that's how. It was a two step process of pouring our brandy over our fruit, then hitting it with a torch instantly. My partner was the one doing this, so I was able to get a picture, which was really neat. Once our pan was like, we had to yell FLAMBÉ! It was pretty cool, I've gotta say. Everyone ended up chiming in every time somebody's pan was lit on fire, which was a lot of fun!

After that, we spread the fruit into a pan to cool off, and we made two custards: one for the fruit tart and one for the quiche. After that, it was a pretty quick process of getting them in the oven. Arrange your fruit / bacon and cheese on the bottom of the tart shell, pour the custard over the top, and pop it in the oven. We baked them until there was no wiggle or jiggle in the custard, and that was it! Since we weren't able to each take home our own tart, we split them in half, and we each got half a Tarte Alsacienne (with pears) and half of a Quiche Lorraine. I had a piece of the quiche for breakfast this morning, and it was quite tasty!

And that's a wrap on this week! We made up a quick batch of dough to use next week, and we got cleaned up, and were able to head home a couple minutes early!

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

Thanks for reading!