Showing Off a Little

I just finished my very last kitchen class of pastry school! I'm obviously excited, as it means I'm almost done with school, but it's a little bittersweet because the kitchen classes are the best part of school. All I have left are some classroom classes- cost control, computers, a wine class amongst others. I do have a three week break from classes in September, as some of my credits from my BFA transferred and I don't have to take English.

I thought in honor of my final kitchen class I'd post a little retrospective of some of my favorite pictures and projects that haven't yet appeared on the blog.

This was a project from a cake class. We had to make a cake with our choice of cake flavor, filling and icing. Mine was based on an Arnold Palmer- a beverage named after the golfer consisting of half iced tea and half lemonade. This is an iced tea chiffon cake with lemon curd filling, sweet tea syrup and lemon-tea italian butter cream. The lemon/mint garnish is supposed to recall a glass of iced tea. It was delish, and very summery.

This was a project from custard class. We had to make a bavarian or mousse in some sort of sponge-type cake. Mine was called a Mocha Char-latte Russe. (A Charlotte Russe is a bavarian custard lined with ladyfingers.) It was a layer of chocolate bavarian, a layer of coffee bavarian, ladyfingers (yes, I made the ladyfingers), topped with whipped cream and cocoa powder. (Like a mocha!) I clearly find a lot of inspiration in beverages...

This is a Dobos torte. It's a traditional fancy-pants Hungarian cake made with seven layers of almond sponge brushed with rum syrup, filled with chocolate buttercream and topped with hard caramel glazed sponge cake.

This was a final project from petit fours class. It's an assortment of petit fours, including mini fruit tarts, French macaroons, cream puffs, eclairs, mini strawberry mousse and hazelnut truffles.

There are obviously dozens of things we've made, and I have pictures galore, but these are a few of my favorites.

Pour Some Sugar on Me

Well, last week while the site was down, I had my final week of chocolate and sugar class. We were on the sugar module, which was a very different experience. I've made edible sugar- candies, caramel, spun sugar, but this was structural sugar. This was statues and objects modeled out of hot sugar...

Sugar sculpture isn't really home baker territory. It's pastry chef territory. Not trying to be snooty, but given that it's labor intensive, requires a good deal of specialized equipment and that the final product is only edible in the very most technical sense of the word, it's not really something one would bother with at home. It's also really hot. Really, really hot.

Most pastry chefs use isomalt sugar, a special sugar treated with enzymes that resists humidity better than cane sugar. (It's edible, and is used sometimes in food products, but it has some... unpleasant... gastro-intestinal side effects if eaten in too large a quantity...yuck!) The isomalt is cooked with a quantity of water until it reaches 320F. It is then poured out onto silicone mats to cool enough that it can be pulled. Pulling incorporates air and makes the sugar glossy and easier to work with. Once pulled, the sugar is placed in a Plexiglas box under a heat lamp to keep it hot enough to work with. At this point, it can be modeled, blown and pulled into desired shapes.

One day, we were supposed to practice our blown sugar by making fruits. I was bound and determined to make a pumpkin... It only took three tries! (hahaha... bleh.) I accented it with leaves and shaded it with an airbrush. I think it turned out well.

Most of the week was spent practicing for our final project. My team planned a sculpture of a Chinese dragon on a mountain with a cherry tree and a Chinese lantern. We ran into a small kink when on our practical exam day, the chef ran out of isomalt, which meant our sculpture had to be smaller and required us to be very creative in our sugar usage. All in all, though, we were happy with our final result. Enjoy...

To the Moon!

Recently at pastry school, I've been in a chocolate and sugar class. It was divided into two sections, chocolate and sugar. (You probably could have guessed that...) We just finished the chocolate section Wednesday, which ended with a final project- a chocolate centerpiece. I'll be honest, I liked making bon bons and truffles and chocolate candies, but the centerpiece was a stressful affair.

In case you've never worked extensively with chocolate before (which I hadn't prior to this class- though I had eaten chocolate extensively) there are several steps required to ensure that your chocolate will dry smooth and shiny, will be hard and will release properly from molds. Every kind of chocolate you will ever buy, from a plain ol' Hershey's bar to a box of Godiva truffles (yum!) has gone through this process, called tempering.

Tempering is basically a process in which you melt your chocolate to a specific temperature (it varies by the type of chocolate), then you pour it out and paddle it on a marble or stainless steel table until it cools to a specific temperature, then you warm it back up to another specific temperature. If you don't temper chocolate, it won't harden properly, it will have a grainy texture and it will have a sticky feel.

After tempering the chocolates (we had to use white, milk and dark in our sculptures) I poured them out, let them cool slightly and cut out my pattern pieces (which I had made from paper the day prior). Once all the pieces were cut out and cooled, I carefully assembled them using more melted chocolate and a special cooling spray that cools the chocolate so it sets faster. Some were assembled flat, others were assembled once the piece was upright on the base. The final touch was some bon-bons and chocolate garnishes on the base, some edible luster dusts and filigree work.


Mine, as you can see, was space themed, with a comet, stars and the aurora borealis. (The aurora borealis was done with colored cocoa butter and luster dusts.) From the base to the tip of the comet's tail was probably about 15in. Chef liked it, and I got an excellent grade, which was gratifying, as my goal for the project was to make something that at least wouldn't collapse under its own weight.
We just started working with sugar last night, which is a very different process. Much hotter. I should probably stock up on burn cream.

Oh, I Know I'm a Tease!

Last night was perhaps the most glorious night of my pastry school career... We made marshmallows. I have to, perhaps, explain my deep, passionate love of marshmallows. As far as I am concerned, marshmallows are a tangible manifestation of joy, goodness and light. And I'm just talkin' about store-bought Stay-Puft type marshmallows... Homemade marshmallows, I learned last night, will turn your world around and will change your life. Maybe I'm being over-dramatic, maybe I'm speaking the dead-honest truth.

Also as it turns out, marshmallows are pretty easy to make. There's a lot of steps involved, and a bit of patience required, but none of it is difficult. I joked to one of my partners last night that I wanted to make "a hundred marshmallows"- it was a joke, but our chef made it sound like one batch of fluff only made a small amount of marshmallows, so we doubled the recipe. Even accounting for the fluff we ate straight out of the bowl, and the marshmallows that never made it to the final dusting, we still had well over a hundred. Tonight, were going to cover some of them with chocolate! Eeep!


Here's some pictures of me making marshmallows, and one of Alia following good sanitation protocol, of course...







I promise a recipe and a complete marshmallow tutorial soon- I've enlisted Kyle's help this weekend to make a batch at home, so I can photograph the steps. Sorry to be such a tease, but the wait will make the reward that much sweeter!


In the meantime though, I do have a simple recipe for delish homemade hot cocoa. I pilfered a few marshmallows last night, because the thought of a big mug of chocolate chaud for breakfast was just too tempting!

Chocolate Chaud aux Guimauves

(Hot Cocoa with Marshmallows)

Serves 1

• 1Tbsp good quality cocoa powder (preferably dutch process- I buy mine from Penzey's)
• 1/2-1Tbsp sugar, to taste
• 2oz boiling water
• 8oz milk of your choice (I used vanilla soymilk)
• pinch cinnamon (again, I use Penzey's China Cassia)(optional)
• tinsy-weensy pinch cayenne pepper (optional)
• Marshmallows

In a small saucepan, begin heating milk over low med-low heat. In a small, heatproof dish, whisk the cocoa, sugar and, if using, the cinnamon and cayenne. Pour the hot water over the mixture and whisk to remove any lumps. Add the cocoa slurry to the milk and heat to desired temperature. Pour in mug and top with copious quantities of marshmallows.

A Wedding Cake for the Bride of Dracula

For the past three weeks, I've been in an advanced cakes class at culinary school. It's been quite an enjoyable class, except for this week, when I was freaking out about our final wedding cake. We had a short 4-day week, which means we lost a day of production time, not to mention it's summer in Florida, and therefore humid as a sauna in Hell. The humidity wreaked havoc on our (or at least my) gumpaste (which wouldn't dry) and fondant (which tended to get sticky), not to mention my royal icing, which started out a perfect consistency, but slowly absorbed moisture from the air and became gooey and runny. I suppose the end result is, if I can make a presentable wedding cake in 80% humidity, I can do it anywhere.

We were allowed to design our own cakes and themes, provided the cake met certain requirements- it had to have at least two tiers, a handmade topper, covered in fondant, and needed royal icing filigree, a pastillage* component and gumpaste** flowers or fruit.

Since I loooove Halloween and all that spooky stuff, I decided to create a Gothic wedding cake. It was two tiers, a six and a ten inch. The tiers were covered in purple fondant, which I airbrushed so the color faded from purple to black. I then piped the whole tiers in royal icing spiderwebs. The tiers are separated with pastillage, which was hidden with purple and black "dead" gumpaste roses. The whole cake was covered in a swag of lavender fondant, and was topped with a skull and spider that I moulded from fondant and airbrushed. The skull turned out super-adorable, kind of doofy and loveable, and we decided he needed a name. We named him Elliot. It seemed to fit. His spider friend's name was Lenore.

There was more I would have done had time permitted (I wanted to put edible glitter on the spiderwebs), but on the whole, I was really happy with it. I wanted to do something creepy, but elegant, and I think I achieved that. (The Chair of the Pastry Program said it was "elegant, but bizarre" and laughingly suggested that the school offered free counseling, if I felt like I needed to talk about anything.)
*Pastillage is a dough made from powdered sugar, glucose and gelatin that can be rolled out and cut into shapes and then dried. It dries very hard. It's good for cake toppers and also for making separators for the tiers. It's basically the same stuff that Necco wafers and candy cigarettes are made of, only unflavored.

**Gumpaste is a dough made from powdered sugar, glucose and gum tragacanth. It's used mostly for moulding flowers and fruit on cakes. It dries firm, but not hard. It's technically edible, but it doesn't taste too great, plus with the amount of touching required to make flowers, I wouldn't recommend eating it.