Get Comfy, We've Got Some Catching Up To Do...

Ok, let's get started...we completed our exam on breads and moved right into tarts, pies and cakes. In the two weeks since we began we've moved through pies & tarts and now we're just doing cakes. First we learned how to make three different doughs; pate sucree (sweet dough), pate brisee (a standard pie dough) and lastly pate a pate (which I am unable to spell correctly because I cannot add the accents in the proper places. This dough holds up well in high humidity). I don't generally enjoy pies and I tend to only like the filling in tarts because I find these doughs to be dry and boring...until last week anyway. The doughs we made were clean, their texture was perfect and when I ate a piece of tart my plate was empty.

First up we made a basic Apple Tart:

A simple pate sucree with a layer of our apple compote topped with apple slices and baked...pretty simple, and tasty.

Along the same lines we have here a Poached Pear Tart (in the background), an Apricot Tart (which turned out to be my favorite) and a Country Apple Tart (which was an apple tart with a custard filling and some raisins):

Now we enter a section where we've got to start decorating. No longer is it ready to go straight out of the oven:

With this fruit tart we filled the shell with almond cream and baked it off. We then layer on the fruit; strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, and mango slices. Chef is talking to us about how movement matters when you're putting together a tart like this and height makes a difference. We made the chocolate curls to put on top and added mint & gold leaf for color and sparkle...who doesn't want sparkle????

This next tart is a Pecan "Ganache" Tart:

Ganache is in quotation marks because it isn't filled with a classic ganache. I'm not sure how to describe this one, it was unlike anything I'd ever tasted. My sister took it to her cheer tryouts and it was loved by adults and teenagers alike so it was definitely a hit.
I really struggled with decorating this one...as you can see. This was only the second tart we decorated and I was feeling extremely insecure about my "artistic" abilities...my vision lacked clarity. Eh, while I'd never decorate anything to look like this again I can let it go.

Oh, so something more savory is what you've been waiting for...well then how about an amazing Onion Tart:

I know, I know, nothing fancy to look at but it was quite delicious. We caramelized these onions for over an hour in olive oil and butter (Chef is french we make everything with butter) in addition to some white wine and thyme. You would need to really like onions to fully enjoy this. Each and every bite is all onion. I love onions and had multiple slices for my lunch on this day.

Did someone say Creme Brulee???

Oh yes, a Creme Brulee Tart!!! I'm pretty sure the base of this tart is an almond cream filled tart shell. We then placed a frozen round of creme brulee on top (which I didn't brulee because it was going to be hours until anyone ate it, so actually its just creme). All the black markings you see on the creme "brulee" is the vanilla which settled to the bottom while freezing. I would have flipped this over but the top isn't a flat surface due to air bubbles which popped during freezing. As strange as this looks it still looks better than the flip side. I'm getting more into my decorating groove here so things will begin looking much more pretty from this point forward...

...savory excluded; this is a Ham & Cheese Torte:

Torte, tart, what's the difference? That's what I wanted to know. Apparently a torte has a top to it. Ahhhh, that makes sense. This was basically a ham and cheese croissant made with inverted pastry puff dough. Yea, we had to go back to making pastry puff dough...that were not a fun two days by any means. I'm going to assume I hadn't had enough of a break between breads and remaking pastry puff because all the same frustrations and irritations kept coming up for me. This torte was quite a mess. The dough barely puffed at all, my butter distribution was probably equivalent to the first time I tried making this stuff, which means it was horrible, and it didn't even get cooked all the way through. That said...I ate about 3/4 of it (not in one sitting, but over the course of a few days).

This beautiful masterpiece is a true Chocolate Ganache Tart:

Underneath the glaze is a disk of chocolate ganache, similar to the creme "brulee". While I think the decorating on this tart is fine, nothing spectacular but definitely nice, Chef disagreed completely. This week in class people had been getting their egos busted left and right. Once people are putting their artistic foot forward everything seems to be extremely personal.
On this tart I had put everything together in a pattern of four, I like even numbers and they are easy for me to work with. Chef comes by and explains to me that odd numbers are actually more catching to the eye and therefore I should focus more on creating that way...sounds good to me. This guy obviously knows what he's talking about and I'm here to learn. That, however, is one single opinion that not everyone shared. One of Chef's jobs is to teach us how to sell our deliciousness. No one is going to want to taste it if it doesn't look pretty, no matter how freakin' amazing it tastes (and they are all amazing by the way). However, my fellow students would get crushed when Chef explained why theirs wouldn't sell well or how they could make it better. I think overall it had been a long week, though it was funny to watch from the outside. That's not nice Shannon....ooops ;)

A classic, Tart Tartaine:

Ok, this one I couldn't wait to write about. This was an entire day long process...I'm not kidding, this took us eight hours to make. OMG is right!!! Very classic French tart. It's basically an upside down apple pie. First we caramelized the apples ourselves, that was awesome!!! Making caramel was fun!!! Then we loaded them into a sautee pan to cook in the caramel. Each of those apples has absorbed a pan full of caramel and is that same caramel color and flavor throughout. These apple slices are jam packed into this sautee pan, no room for anything else and as they cook down and more room becomes available we just kept adding more apple slices. Then we cover the top of the sautee pan with the dough, bake them together until the dough is done and then they hang out in the fridge together until chilled, chilled, chilled. We warmed it up some to get it out of the pan, which explains all the messy caramel on my cake board there, and viola...tart tartaine.
Chef told us, one of the many, stories of how tart tartaine came to be. He said two sisters had been drinking, a lot apparently, and suddenly decided they wanted apple pie. They were so drunk they made the damn thing upside down and that's how it came to be. As we were making this tart I decided there's no way two drunk ladies put that much work into this tart. Not only did it take a lot of hours but was detailed work; making the caramel, fitting all the apples in the pan, again and again, no way. Another chef told us the tale that a woman working at a lodge was called away by a hunter and forgot about her tart and that's how it ended up the way it did. Obviously I'm missing some essential parts to that story because I'm sitting here wondering what's the significance of the lodge and the hunter in that story.
Either way it was sooooooo rich I could only eat a couple of bites. Good? Yes. Super rich? Super yes!!!

Coconut Tart:

This one's pretty simple. Coconut, butter, and...something else which I don't recall at the moment. We all had left over batter and made mini ones. I ate those all weekend long. My friend June tried one and said it was exactly the same as a Filipino dessert she's had before...and I cannot remember the name of that either. Wow, I'm just a bundle of info on this treat.

Chocolate Ganache Tart:

The difference between this one and the previous chocolate ganache tart is that this tart is a shell filled completely with chocolate ganache. I don't know if you've ever eaten straight ganache but it's super rich. I took this to my friend Zeke's house for a dinner he made and I had maybe a half inch slice, possibly a full inch, and could only muster a few bites. It was crazy rich. More so than the Tart Tartaine? Hmmmm??? The tart tartaine was much sweeter while this was a creamier kind of richer. Not sure which was the richer winner.

We're almost caught up to real time...
Crock Apple Tart:

We made a special hazelnut dough for this tart. It was scrumptious!!! So this baby has a hazelnut dough and is filled with a hazelnut chocolate cream and apples which have been cooked down in butter and sugar, then topped with a praline and hazelnut cream mousse and further finished off with that chocolate disk which is an amazing chocolate mixed with a praline butter (like peanut butter). The added praline butter (which isn't what it's actually called) softens the chocolate so that when you cut into this tart the chocolate doesn't snap into a bunch of pieces. It's very pliable and had we actually tempered our chocolate properly you would be able to slice right into it like a normal pie/tart/cake with no breaking. We, all of us in class that is, all heated our chocolate too hot and then laid it out so it never reached a truly workable state and it began to gray and separate. It's really weird to see chocolate separate while still in its solid form.

Lemon!!!!

Growing up my favorite dessert was my grandmother's lemon meringue pie. OMG!!! Lemon is still my favorite dessert flavor and I adore any excuse to put meringue on anything. My newest favorite dessert is a Pavlova which is a large meringue filled with lemon curd and fresh berries topped with whipped cream. Deeee-lish!
So we made this lemon curd which was a different recipe than I've ever used and I think I like it better...why? It was way less ingredients than my recipe and much more rich in lemon flavor and a great consistency (mine always seems to come out too thick). There's no cornstarch in this recipe either which I like :)
I gave my grandmother a slice of this pie and she loved it. Come to find out she never even made lemon curd, just filled that lemon pie up with lemon filling from a can. Eh, I'm pretty sure that through nostalgia alone it will always rank as on of my favorites!

Cakes, cakes, cakes! My love! My nemesis!

When I began taking a cake decorating class a couple of years ago I loved it, and I was good at it! Then a year later I made my nieces birthday cake and was left to wonder if everything I had previously learned had been sucked from my brain and flushed down the toilet. Frosting her birthday cake was the most difficult thing I'd ever done...now I know it was because I did so with a frosting I'd never worked with before. That'll teach me.
In class we're frosting with a buttercream frosting with a....wait for it....OMG you're going to die.....meringue base. Shut up!!! I love it!!! Basically its an Italian meringue; which means we melt the sugar to a certain temperature then slowly add it to the egg whites and whip it until it cools (which basically takes forever) and then add a buttload of butter to it. Wonderful! A) As I've previously shared I love meringue. B) Buttercream frosting, while not as popular as it was in the past is still an American classic...yummers!!! and C)...well I don't have a C but A+B is good enough for me!
And this frosting is so easy for me to work with and I'm getting great practice at frosting cakes. Yea, I need it because Addyson turns two in August and Jada & Tyson are up in December!!!

This next cake I added just because its so different...simple & different:

What's it called? That's an excellent question to which I have no answer :( We made the cake from one recipe and the filling from another and put them together. I did NOT eat any of this cake...my conscious got the best of me. The filling is pastry cream mixed with butter and praline butter...we made it on a Friday, I had spent the entire week feeling guilty about the 10 pounds I've put on since class began and just couldn't bring myself to go there. I did touch it though and once chilled the filling gets hard, as you'd expect with butter, and was very rich!!! For a small cake it packs a lot of punch!

And now....my baby:

It is very uncommon of me to become attached to a cake. Why would I? That would be silly, right? However this cake I absolutely adore.
This was a two day project, somewhat labor intensive. First we made the patterned cake you see on the outside. That was awesome, I had no idea you could pattern a cake like that. First we made a chocolate batter which we stenciled onto a silpat. You could freehand a design as well but one of the gifts I've been given in life is to know my limitations and respect them :) So I stenciled. Then we froze that batter while making the cake batter, which we then spread on top of the hardened chocolate batter. While baking the chocolate melts into the cake and voila...beautiful!
That's the outside. On the inside, layer by layer from the bottom to the top is:Vanilla sponge cake, creme anglaise (which if you're unfamiliar is awesome and basically an ice cream base), bluberries, creme anglaise, sponge cake, a fruit jelly we made with raspberry and blackberry puree, and topped with more creme anglaise. Now just reading that you might be thinking, "wow, that's a lot of creme anglaise and cake. What a heavy cake" and I am here to shock and amaze you. This cake is really light and fresh.

The creme anglaise is whipped with whipping cream in a "soft peak" stage so it isn't dense at all, and all the fruit in its different forms is so flavorful and refreshing in each bite. I am definitely going to make this cake again. It'll be a great summer dessert!

I am loving this new section. First off the pace is much slower than breadmaking which re-affirms for me that while I truly enjoyed breadmaking, desserts are definitely my forte! Friday I came home with three cakes and while we are making a lot in a week and in a day, our schedule allows for us to enjoy breaks and full lunches and be present with each project in front of us, even when we're working on two at a time. It's a completely different world!

Cakes are turning out to be a bit more complex than I'd imagined. I completely understand why someone started putting cake mixes in boxes and selling them, and I understand how they made so much money doing so. We're making these intense cakes which require heating ingredients to certain temperatures before adding them and where before I could just add all the ingredients together into one bowl now everything is sperate and there are warm ingredients and cold ingredients and they can't be mixed together until a certain point and even then they have to be mixed together in a very specific and delicate manner. Holy Hell! And there are plenty more cake types we haven't even touched on yet. (*My apologies for that poorly structured and run on sentence, which I won't be fixing so I can end this blog entry)

I promise to be more updated on my entries...
Be well.