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!

Perfect Time for Pies & Tarts!

August 20, 2016 Samantha van Gogh

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!

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!).

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.

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

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.

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.

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!