Time to take a deep breath, I've made it through week two. It's been a very busy week, that's for sure. I can hardly believe that I've only been in school two weeks -- I've learned (and baked) so much, it seems like I've been in school for longer. And to think, this is only the beginning!
The three cookies we baked on Monday
This week started off with a very busy Monday, we baked 4 different types of cookies (and made icing for one of them). I think 5 recipes in a day is the most that we've tackled thus far. Now, granted, we didn't actually make 5 recipes from start to finish. Instead, we baked made the Gingersnaps from last week (1), did the second baking on the biscotti (2), and rolled out our leftover lunette dough for the sugar cookies (3). We did, however, make brownies from start to (almost) finish (4) on Monday and learn how to make royal icing (5!).
Mise'd out brownie ingredients
For the brownies, we started off mise-ing all of our ingredients: flour, eggs, butter, sugar, the usual things. But most importantly, we have the chocolate! These particular brownies had two different types of chocolate, trusty old chocolate chips in addition to pistoles, which are what's in that larger round bowl next to my smiley face spatula. They're nicer quality chocolate than your regular chocolate chip, and they melt very nicely, which is what we were doing with them. They're also considerably more expensive than chocolate chips, according to Chef Jeanne. I've never purchased them so I'll have to take her word for it. That means no sneaking an extra one in to taste ;) I can say, at the very least, they smelled delicious! We melted the chocolate over our induction burners, which are pretty nifty tools, if you ask me. They're nice because there's no open flame, and unless you have a pan on there, even if you have the heat on high (which on the numerical scale is 20), they won't get hot. But as soon as the pan is on there, they heat up pretty quickly.
Y U M -- fudgey brownies ready to be baked!
Once our brownies were prepared, we poured them out into a sheet pan and baked them. The kitchen smelled SO. GOOD. I'm a sucker for brownies, and even though we didn't get to taste these guys until Wednesday, I can tell you that man, they were amazing. Nice and moist, fudgey; everything that a brownie should be!
Sometimes, baking can be a whole task in and of itself, and it's not as easy as you might think. In terms of baking, we do it in table groups: the first two tables, the second two, and the last three (since the 7th table only has one person working on it at a time, at least is the case for our class). This results in 4 people (or 5, on occasion) in charge of baking everything for the evening. This particular night was my turn. The brownies were a particularly easy bake, simply because there were only 7 half sheet pans. But the gingersnaps were an entirely different story. Each person ended up with a full sheet pan of gingersnaps, and presently, only our two small convection ovens in the kitchen are functioning. With half sheet pans, even if we have a lot of them, this isn't too much of an issue, just because we can fit two per shelf, and there are 5 shelves in each oven, so we can fit 20 half sheets in at a time. Full sheet pans are an entirely different story. Being one of the 4 people in charge of baking for the night, I found myself leaving my station a lot to go put things in, rotate pans, or take pans out of the oven. It's definitely tough being one of the "bakers" for the night, just because you are leaving what you're doing so frequently, it's easy to fall behind. But I'm sure it will get easier as time goes on.
Making cornets
The last thing that we did on Monday was learn how to make a cornet (cor-NAY), aka a disposable parchment paper piping bag. This is one thing that I've always wanted to know how to do, and no matter how many times I tried, I could never get right. But hey, that's why we go to school, to learn new skills and techniques, and this is definitely one of those things. Looking back, I'm not sure why this eluded me for so long, it's really not terribly complicated, just takes a little bit of finesse. Regardless, I know how to make them now! It really just involves a little bit of folding, but the most complicated folds are the last two, where you have to take the two edges and sort of curl themselves in on each other toward the center line. It's hard to explain, and maybe that's the reason I could never figure it out! LOL
The first half of Wednesday night was much more hectic, but that's probably just because we had our first quiz! A quiz also means that we've completed a unit (yay!) and are moving into something new. In this case, we were finished with the cookie unit, and moving into my most favorite thing: tarts and pies! Our quiz was done in two parts, a written and a practical. The written quiz was no different than any other quiz you would be given in any other school; short answer, multiple choice, fill in the blank, true / false, etc. This only took about 10 minutes. Then we moved into the harder part, the practical portion. For our test, we had to present 12 vanilla crescents, which we made a batch of last week.
Getting set up for the quiz and some last minute note review
Completed my first practical!
Once we had our pans set up, we couldn't start doing anything else until Chef Jeanne gave us the go-ahead. Once the kitchen was ours, we had 45 minutes to get our cookies together from start to finish. She started our grading exactly at 7:00pm, and for every minute you are late presenting past that deadline, you lose a point; one minute, one point. Being the first quiz, pretty much everyone was 4 or 5 minutes past the deadline (myself included). I had everything mixed probably by 6:35, since we had to share the mixer between two people, there was some waiting around. Time just flew by after that, though. I started shaping my crescents and the next thing I knew, it was 6:50 -- ACK! It was pretty stressful, that's for sure. I pulled my cookies out right at 7:00, but before they could be rolled in the vanilla sugar / powdered sugar combo, they had to cool down for a few minutes, otherwise the sugar would just have melted off. I called time at 7:05, and presented my 12 vanilla crescents.
Chef Jeanne then went around the room and gave feedback to everyone on the shape, consistency, texture, and taste of their cookies. I was the last person to get feedback, just based on how she was going around the room, and although waiting to hear what she had to say was nerve-racking, after receiving nothing but good feedback, my mind was at ease.
We finished Wednesday night in the kitchen relatively early, around 9:45 after icing our brownies and making our first tart dough (which was to be used on Friday). We then had a little over an hour that was spent in a lecture on ServSafe. We take our test towards the end of next week for the certification.
Pop, slice, ice: completed brownies in 3 easy steps!
Arriving in the kitchen on Friday was pretty exciting because we were starting a new unit, and probably my favorite one, at that! Tarts and pies! We had a different instructor on Friday night, Chef Stephany, who I think is going to be our Friday instructor for the remainder of the program, or at least for this first half.
My little tray of veggies, pre-cut
We started off the night with some knife skills, since moving into this new unit, we'll be doing lots of slicing and dicing of fruits (and veggies!). We julienne'd some potatoes, did both small and medium dicing on some potatoes and onions, and finally, we did a chiffonade cut on some mint leaves (which I proceeded to toss in my water for a nice refreshing beverage for the evening). I wish I had taken a picture of my pretty little tray of veggies, but alas, I forgot to. Womp, womp, womp.
After we had plenty of practice cutting veggies, we caramelized our diced onions and set them aside for Monday (we're making an onion tart, if I recall correctly). Then we got into the good stuff, the apples! After our tart dough was rolled out and placed in the tart ring, we got to making our apple compote! We did a large dice on our apples, and put them in a saucepan with water, sugar, the vanilla bean seeds, a little bit of lemon juice, and then the vanilla bean husk itself. After that mixture started boiling, we popped a cartouche (parchment paper lid, as our book refers to it; upper right picture below) on top, and let that simmer for about 5 minutes.
Apple tart in the works!
After that 5 minutes was up, we just gave our apple chunks a few stirs and bam, instant apple compote! It was pretty cool, almost like magic. The apples didn't look cooked at all, but as soon as you started to stir them, about half of them mushed up and the other half remained whole, as you can see above. We then did a thin slice on some more apples (about 1/8"), then arranged them on top as best we could -- they were slippery little fellas. Just before putting them in the oven, the apples were brushed with melted butter and sprinkled with vanilla sugar. They baked for about 50 minutes, and while those were in the oven, we made a giant batch of pâte brisée -- the second type of tart dough we've learned to make so far; the dough for the apple tart is a pâte sucrée -- which we'll use all of next week for our tarts.
Apple tart has arrived! All we need now is some ice cream ;)
And just like that, week two is over! I can't wait until next week, since that's when we'll really start to get into tart making. But for now, that's a wrap! Stay tuned for my blog next week, and if you want more frequent updates, you can check out my Instagram.
Thanks for reading!
