ThePurpleSpatula

Happy Deepavali everyone!

Take a deep breath guys, this is going to be a long one. This week in school was simply insane. They’ve certainly upped the ante in intermediate. On thursday we made Tart aux Fruits Rouge, friday was Gateau St. Honore and Saturday we made Tart au Chocolat Noir and Gateau Concorde.

Tart aux Fruits Rouge is simply a fruit tart covered in strawberries, raspberries and blueberries and filled with frangipane and pastry cream. Frangipane is a soft moist filling made of almonds. All the components were simple to make and it was fairly basic to put together. Like all the other fruit tarts we’ve made, it tasted amazing. Unlike the other fruit tarts however, the pastry cream took a back seat to the wonderfully moist and flavourful frangipane.

Friday was stressful and busy and incredibly difficult. A little background on Gateau St. Honore, it’s basically a puff pastry disc topped with a ring of choux pastry, filled with creme chibouste and decorated with caramel coated choux puffs, also filled with creme chibouste. It is then crowned with a nest of spun sugar. To me, that just sounds revolting. And boy was I right. I found the chef’s demo cake to be absolutely vile. My tumultuous relationship with choux pastry is well documented so I’m sure it comes as no surprise that I was dreading making it. To make matters worse, three chefs admitted that creme chibouste was notoriously temperamental and difficult to work with. Our allotted three hours in the kitchen stretched into four frantic, frenzied frustrating hours. In the end, only a small handful in the class managed to achieve workable creme chibouste. Thankfully I was one of them. Unfortunately I simply did not have the time to finish coating all my choux puffs with caramel and attach them to the cake. We were being yelled at to get out of the kitchen and my caramel decided that that would be a good time to set into a solid sugary mass. The Chef’s gateau looks nice, but about the nicest thing I can say about it. Mine looks a bit pathetic but I did get complimented on my successful creme chibouste and wicked piping skills.

Finally on Saturday thankfully the products were much simpler. Gateau Concord is made up of three discs of chocolate meringue sandwiching a chocolate mousse and decorated with broken meringue pieces. The chocolate tart involved chocolate short pastry and a chocolate ganache based filling. Both were really straightforward. The only sticking point was the mousse for the Gateau Concord. I was lucky that mine turned out perfectly, just the right temperature for me to work with. Most people ended up with their mousse too cold and hard, making it extremely difficult to finish their gateau. In the interest of applying ideas previously learnt, I decorated my gateau with a design inspired by St. Honore. Mostly because its unique piped design is the only thing I like about it. While marking, our chef said he could find no problems with my work and that it was beautiful and perfect. Woot! And that dark chocolate tart? Sinfully good…

Made chocolates this week. It was GREAT!!! Ok admittedly pretty stressful but awesome nonetheless. We made Vienna Almonds, Chocolate Vienna Almond Clusters, hand-dipped Chocolate Pralines, a moulded chocolate figurine and a chocolate truffle tower made from individually hand-dipped milk, dark and white chocolate ganache truffles. Yes, it was AMAZING. cue PICTURES!

In other news,

Just nerdy enough for N to love me.

First week back and they’ve got us making invert puff pastry. So much for easing into the new term. New kitchen, new chefs, a few classmates less. It’s all a little crazy. And let’s not forget the invert puff. For those of you wondering what invert puff pastry is, its made the same way as regular puff pastry except for one little thing. Where in regular puff pastry the dough encloses a block of butter and is rolled and layered, in invert puff, the butter encloses the dough. How on earth does that work you ask? Well, surprisingly less messy than one would think and the resulting puff pastry is lighter and less greasy than regular puff. We also made mini quiches, mini pizzas and parmesan twists. But for some reason the savoury petit fours just seemed pretty bleh to me.

We also made Gateau Mille Feuille. Literally translated it means a thousand leaves. Basically it’s invert puff layered with creme diplomat and topped with fondant. I’m not a huge fan of puff pastry in general so I didn’t like this gateau as much. The creme diplomat was really nice, it’s basically pastry cream with whipped cream folded into it and in this case, some gelatine as well to help it hold its shape. Of course, fondant is my enemy and true to form, it screwed me over again! I’m sure it’s fairly obvious from the pictures. Oh well…