Wednesday, December 22, 2010

pork buns


mmmmmmmmm.......... tasty!

Thursday, November 18, 2010

Sugar 1

The sugar unit consisted of making objects out of edible things that did not taste tasty. It was pretty much a sculpture class, and as far as units go it was pretty boring. I don't know if it was because I have an art background, used to work for a cake decorator, or if this shit just doesn't really interest me anymore and I don't find it that important, but I was just not into it. Regardless, I still want to get the most out of schooling, so I mustered up whatever enthusiasm I could find and made the best of it.

One of our first projects was to make a nougatine basket with marzipan fruit. I don't really get marzipan. Sure, it tastes ok, but would you eat a golf-ball sized piece? I guess the answer for some would be yes, and they would like to spend 10 bucks for it too. We molded little fruits out of marzipan, and airbrushed them to further the illusion that you were eating something of nutritional value... but wait... it's almonds and sugar! FOOLED! Then we made a nougatine basket, which is caramel and sliced almonds. That sounds easier than it actually is. In our first attempt at making nougatine, my partner... dear friend Rachel, dumped caramel on my pants, shoes, and floor. God saved my skin from burning, probably because I am destined to be a foot model or something.

Anyway, we made the nougatine and the marzipan fruits. I even made a label for it saying "fruit" as part of the trick. OH MY GOD IT IS FRUIT!














After this, we made sugar paste with Ron Ben-Israel, the *fabulous* cake designer who charges people out the asshole for cakes that they will subsequently not appreciate and destroy. He showed us how to make flowers out of sugar paste, and have them look just like real flowers. I worked for a very talented wedding cake designer for a year, making sugar flowers. It is a scam. People getting married pay a ridiculous amount of money for a cake with sugar flowers made to look like real flowers that they won't eat, when they can just pay less money for a cake with real flowers. Anyway, I forgot to take pictures. My bitterness clouded me. Suffice it to say that my wedding cake will be a chocolate fountain with a pile of doughnuts. Much tastier. A lot cheaper.

The next project, I actually had some fun with. Our assignment was to make a cake stand to support a 6" cake 6" off the base out of pastillage, with 4 favor boxes. We had to choose a theme, and go all out. To make this more interesting for myself, I chose a meat theme. My base was a butcher block, and I made a ham, froie gras, chicken legs, sausage links, chorizo, bacon, and a T-bone surrounding the base. On top I had my 6" cake, with butcher twine around the base, and 2 crossed lamb chops on top. My favor boxes were speck and prusciutto rolls. I actually had a fun time making this, and I thought it turned out pretty well. Ended the unit on a positive note.

Thursday, November 4, 2010

Plated Desserts 1

By the time I actually get around to posting anything, a month has passed.

Plated desserts was one of my most favorite units. We finally got to put components together, and feel like we were working in a kinda sorta kitchen. Each team made their main component, plus a couple of extra side components to the dish that we all would share. This allowed for independent work and some creative freedom. The composition was up to Chef Jae, and wasn't dependant on our hard and fast curriculum. This freedom was welcomed, and we got to make some cool stuff, which I'll get to right now...

Our first plated dessert was a chocolate marquis (triangle thing), with dyed spun sugar (troll hair on top), toasted marshmallow, mint creme anglaise, blackberries, and shortbread crumbs. I wasn't a fan of the texture of the marquis, but the flavor was good. Didn't like the dyed spun sugar. Mint creme anglaise was on point. Overall, I didn't really see all of these components going together. Seemed a little scattered from a composed dessert. Not the worst start, though.



















Creme brulee with shortbread cookies. All of the components were super tasty. But I really don't like them together. I like my creme brulee with some fruit or some kind of acid. Not some other rich-tasting sweet thing.














Creme caramel, with pineapple compote, mango salad, tuile, caramel sauce, mango coulis. Rachel and I must have burned our caramel a bit because it was NASTY BITTER. However we did make the pineapple compote and it was BOMB. All of these things would have tasted delicious together had our creme caramel turned out well. However I don't like putting sprigs of mint on shit for the sake of putting some mint on shit - ya dig?















Fig tart, port reduction, vanilla bean creme chantilly, olive oil ice cream. Figs were mushy, I suspect they weren't the best quality. Port reduction on point - made with a dry caramel with a bottle of port, slowly reduced. Olive oil ice cream delicious! I love making ice cream. From this point forward, Rachel and I volunteered for every ice cream opportunity- which kicked our ass because it was time consuming. After realizing how easy it is to make ice cream, my mind has since exploded with ice cream ideas.















Chocolate crepes with chocolate ganache filling, carrot orange sorbet, candied carrots, chocolate sauce, creme chantilly. The sorbet was great, didn't really think everything went that well together, though.


















Orange crepes with orange pastry cream filling, vanilla ice cream, vanilla orange caramel sauce, caramel sauce. Hated the orange pastry cream, everything else bueno. I didn't like the way he presented the caramel sauce - looked too 80s.


















Kiwi and milk marmalade tart. Puff pastry, milk marmalade, lemon-cashew frozen yogurt, kiwi cookie, kiwi salad, kiwi coulis. I liked the "milk marmalade" (I hated the name) and kiwi paired together. The frozen yogurt was way too tart. But the acidity of the kiwi cut through the richness of the puff pastry filling. Like texture combinations too.














Manjari chocolate tart, toasted coconut ice cream, coconut creme anglaise, chocolate sauce. Chocolate tart was good, don't like chocolate sable as a crust. Toasted coconut ice cream - maybe the best ice cream ever. SO GOOD. Good textures, good flavors. Didn't like the sauce presentation.














Spinach and mushroom jalousie, scallion bechamel, chives, parmesan. Thought this was pretty tasty. Very rich though. I accidentally put too much salt into our puff pastry (didn't know Rachel had put it in already - whoops), which revealed, lets say a saltine-like flavor.
















Lemon tart, basil creme anglaise, berry sorbet, berry coulis, basil powder. Lemon tart was super tasty - Adam deemed it the best lemon tart ever. Loved the basil and berry flavor with it. Good acid, not too sweet. Maybe my favorite dessert of the unit. I brought 6 lemon tarts home with me, because it is Adam's favorite dessert. The next morning, Adam decides to eat one for breakfast while getting ready for work. From the bathroom, I hear "uh-oh" to find that while putting on his deodorant he stuck his arm up, sticking the lemon tart to the ceiling. Good thing we had 5 more for back-ups.















Sorry these pictures are shitty. Rachel took these and sent them to me because I forgot my camera.

Banana macadamia financier, granduja ice cream, creme chantilly. These were awesome. Really nice flavor, kind of heavy.










Mini raspberry charlotte russe, red currant ice cream, red currant sauce, candied rose petal. Meh.











Pineapple tart tatin, orange butter sauce, mojito frozen yogurt. Didn't like the frozen yogurt. The crust and the pineapple part on the tatin was too separated - I wish we had baked them together.










Apple raisin charlotte, apple sorbet, caramelized macadamia nut, apple caramel sauce, currant sauce. This was a real hodge-podge of stuff. I made the green apple sorbet, which was a FAIL. Chef told me not to strain it, and the resulting texture was like frozen applesauce. We were also introduced to stabilizers that class, and so it had a weird aftertaste. Lindsay called it booger sorbet (she always adds a touch of class to our group). Apple charlotte = good, other components = weird.


Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Chocolate 1

Let's just say I have a much stronger appreciation for those who work with chocolate. Not only is the process of making chocolate from cocoa pod to bar incredibly complex, but getting it to do anything that you want it to is a pain in the ass. This was our first chocolate unit, and it almost ruined how I feel about chocolate. If you showed me a Snicker's bar after class, I would want to vomit all over it instead of saying "Snack time!" like I usually do. Luckily for me, I could never get really and truly sick of chocolate.

In our first class, we received an introduction to how chocolate is made and tempered. Chocolate making requires the beans to be harvested, fermented, dried, roasted, cracked, ground, mixed, refined, conched, tempered, and molded. Alterations to that process, as well as the way it is sourced, alters and the taste and mouth feel of the chocolate. We tasted a lot of chocolate in order to figure out all of those subtleties.







































We then learned how to temper it. Correctly tempered chocolate allows it to stay solid at room temperature, and contains the 5 S's : smooth mouth feel, shiny, snap, sets, shrinks. In order to temper, it requires time, temperature and agitation in order to fight off the bad crystals (4 of the 6) from setting and ruining the good crystal structure. One must heat it up to 122 f, cool it while constantly agitating down to 81, and then reheat and hold it at 86-90. If any of those points are missed, or if you do not maintain that awful holding temperature, then you have to start all over again. You can NEVER get any water into it throughout this process.

Most of you know me. Most of you know that I am neither neat nor patient. You can imagine my frustration at this part. We also didn't get to MAKE a lot of shit. I really like making shit, not spending an hour tempering and re-tempering chocolate, getting water into it, starting over again, making a mess, cleaning it up, re-tempering, getting chocolate on my face, etc.

This is what we did get to make. First, a dried fruit and nut chocolate cake with chocolate glaze and chocolate leaves. I loved the flavor of this cake.














A chocolate box to hold our truffles. I forgot to take pictures of the truffles, but they were a chocolate orange truffle (I HATE chocolate and orange mixed together. HATE IT. I will forever reference those god awful chocolate oranges from back in the day that were DISGUSTING, to the point that I could never even imagine tasting these, which were supposedly really tasty). I was actually proud of my chocolate box. While I originally wanted my sides to be smooth, I ended up painting over them to create kind of a woody texture because they got really messy. My design was a little corny, but whatever, I made a box out of chocolate!














Queen of Sheba cake. I always think of the Julia Child video of her making this cake. It was a nice and dense chocolate-almond cake. We decorated it with chocolate tiles we made using a transfer sheet. I went a little out there with my chocolate tile placement, but whatever, it's school.

























And now, for the grand finale. For our final chocolate project, we had to create a chocolate candy stand that was at least 6" high and contained a bowl to hold our chocolate candies. It had to be made entirely of chocolate and we had 1.5 classes to complete it. We had to choose a theme based on the first letter of our first name.

I chose Jupiter (jazz, jellybean, and junkyard were not interesting to me), so I decided to make a stand called "Jupiter and its Moons". I know you dorks are going to say that Jupiter actually has a shitload of moons, but I decided to do the main 4. It was incredibly stupid of me to think that I could put a heavy object (Jupiter) on top of a 6" skinny pole, relying on just perfectly tempered chocolate to pull it off. Only at the end did Chef Jae say "Julia, it was very risky making this", not when I showed him the diagram. Truthfully, I wanted to make something easy, I hated working with this shit.

I had multiple fails while making this, to the point where I began calling it Poopiter. I had fun decorating, though. I loved my solar system base, and making Jupiter look like Jupiter- it had a red storm and everything. It survived the trip from my work table to the chef's table, but on its way to the display table, Jupiter fell over and acted like a bowling ball, knocking down all of the moons in its path. I thought it was the perfect finale




























Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Cakes II!

In cakes dos, we were able to build upon what we learned from cakes uno (go figure) with more focus on decorating techniques. Decoration ain't really my thang, despite it being my means of gainful employment. Sure I want it to have eye appeal, but I would rather spend more time making that shit taste good. It was fun anyway.

Yule log. I didn't know people made these anymore. I think it's a throwback to French hotel dining back in the day. That's the only setting I can see someone pulling this off. Ye Olde Yule Log is essentially a roulade cake. For this one we used a simple sponge, soaked in booze, with a cranberry meringue buttercream and chestnuts. It's wrapped and chilled, then cut and assembled to look like a log in a forest. We decorated it with chocolate buttercream, meringue mushrooms, and marzipan Holly. I thought it looked mad corny, but later in my life when I am a housewife in the suburbs, I can pull this one out at my annual Christmas party and really wow the husbands. <--- That was a joke. Yule-icious!















Lemon chiffon cake. This was VERY similar to a cake we make at Mags. A lemony cake, with lemon curd between the layers. But we used a plain buttercream to coat the outside. It was buttery and delicious. I practiced my basket-weave in buttercream on this one, something I hope I never have to do in my professional life. So tacky!














Chocolate-pistachio roll cake. I know this cake doesn't look at all interesting from the outside (we were practicing covering cakes with rolled marzipan) but it was BOMB on the inside. A chocolate roulade cake with pistachio cream! I LOVE chocolate and pistachio!














Fraisier cake. This was pretty tasty and rich. Vanilla cake layers soaked in champagne, with moussaline and strawberries. Note how I spelled "Fraisier" wrong on the top.














Hello. I am a Black Forest cake that stepped out of the 80s.














Ah, and the grand finale. This baby was my pride and joy! This was for our midterm exam, and we had to draw from a hat out cake, filling, and covering combinations. I got Biscuit Cuillere (lady fingers), Bavarian cream, and fondant. To do this successfully, I had to pipe my lady fingers into discs, and make a buttercream barrier to my white peach Bavarian cream. The chill the whole cake for awhile to get it nice and solid before covering it with fondant and decorating.

We had to choose a celebration theme for our cakes, and because I make birthday, anniversary, and congratulations cakes all the time, I wanted to choose something different. Adam was going to go crabbing soon, and wanting to do something pictoral, I decided on "Happy crabbing!"

How I made it: I tinted my fondant a light blue and covered the cake, squaring it off. I then painted the water, seaweed, and a couple of fishies on. While waiting for that to dry, I made all of my fondant decoration parts - I made the crabbing boat with the figures, and a bunch of little blue crabs. Once it was dry, I piped the beading on the bottom - coloring the royal icing to make it look like pebbles on a river bed. I then piped royal icing on the border of the water and sky to emphasize the frothiness of the waves. I stuck all the fondant pieces on, piped a royal icing trap, seagulls, and inscription, and VOILA! A crabbing cake! I was impressed with how much detail I was able to pull off in the about 2 hours of decoration time I got. I know it's hard to see, but in between the 2 crabbers, there is a crabbing basket with a claw sticking out. That's one of my favorite parts!





Thursday, September 2, 2010

Petit Fours MUTHA FUCKAS!

Petit fours are such a tease! They're dessert "four(s)-play", if you will. And served in a line on silver platters you can't help but treat them like cocaine. Give me more!

So I liked this unit a lot. Not just because I got to work with Janet (or Janae, as the cheese-eating surrender-monkey French would say - holler girl!) but because they're just so goddamn cute! AWWWWW! Little-wittle desserts...

Janae and my first platter was composed of (from left/top to right/bottom) these little raisin cookies that I thought were gross and old-timey that I couldn't stop eating nonetheless; Financiers (w/ mango!)... tasty!; pate sucree with passionfruit curd and a blueberry; Sarah Bernhart's boobies - almond macaroon with whipped ganache and choc glaze. I was a fan of most of these things.














Next tray. I actually didn't like most of these. It was composed of desserts that just weren't quite cutting it for me. The French seem to like their good shit all muddled up with bad shit. Making a caramel? Put some chocolate in it to make some combination of muddled choco-caramelyness that's not good as either. Making a cake? Put as much fucking buttercream and filling on it that it makes you want to vomit it all up (but still eat it the first time around because it tastes good until you feel your stomach rapidly sinking into your small intestine). Nice lemon cookies? Dip them in chocolate for a totally unnecessary citrus chocolate combination WHICH I HATE. So here goes from left/bottom to right/top: Some thing with cake on the bottom, 3 different types of buttercream (Janae and I chose hazelnut, vanilla, and raspberry - but through no fault of our own this still just tasted like a shitload of flavored buttercream on a wafer); lemon and raspberry sandwich cookies dipped in chocolate; caramel mou - caramel with chocolate and rolled in cocoa powder; a cake thing made with raspberry jam, marzipan, and a fondant glaze; and another thin layer of cake thing with a mound of buttercream "enrobed" in chocolate. Good grief this tray looked like it stepped out of the 80s!














Mmmm.... how pleasant... Macaroons! From left to right: Gerbert macaroons with a raspberry filling; lemon Madelines; some gross shit I don't remember the name of made with peanut butter puff pastry, royal icing, and raspberry jam; chocolate macaroons with chocolate ganache; more Madelines; Opera cake - really good - hazelnut and chocolate together is my jam!














From top/left to bottom/right: Pineapple pate de fruits "tropical!"; Nougat; almond tuiles; sablee chocolate and vanilla swirl cookies - not too much going on, but pleasant; Russian tea cakes - always good; Florentines - not my jam but a respectable addition to the party. The sophisticate uncle from Italy, if you will.














Ahhh... Janae and my opus to the art of petit fours. Our Sistine Chapel amongst the punk-ass Basquiat wannabes. Our very own "little ovens", we birthed these babes from our combined creative juices. Yes, that's right, Janae and I made them. I present to you our final exam. Together we made 7 - we had to collaborate on 1 freestyle petit four, and separately freestyle on 1 other, and then adapt a recipe from the unit for 2 more. They are as follows, from left to right:
(Our combined freestyle) A black sesame seed pound cake with passionfruit curd, white chocolate glaze and toasted black sesame seeds.
(My adaptation) Pistachio Russian tea cake.
(My adaptation) Kaffir lime mousse sandwich, biscuit d'Amandes w/ pate a cornet design, candied orange.
(Janae's freestyle) Mini banana cream pie with painted choc crust and caramelized banana
(Janae's adaptation) Lemon Madeline
(Janae's adaptation) Green tea checkerboard sablee
(My adaptation) Sarah Bernhart with almond macaroon, earl grey and honey ganache, chocolate glaze and candied lavender.

B-b-b-b-b-b-bomb baby.
It was so good I had to post all 3 pictures that Janae sent me.







































This post is mostly a way to scare off my grandmother from reading my blog. I thought she didn't know how to turn on her computer, despite my mother and I showing her multiple times. However she does, and uses the interwebs, and locates this blog and reads it. Grandma, if you're still reading this, then you can withstand more than I thought, and you're even cooler than I thought you already were. Sex, drugs and rock and roll GRAM$! And computers!

Did you get enough shout-outs Janae?

Thursday, August 19, 2010

Bread 2

We had our 2nd bread unit in Pastry 2. This was for the most part a continuation of the Vienoisserie in Pastry 1.

This was not my most favorite unit, and I was going through a personally rough time - temporarily homeless due to an absolutely crazy landlord, Adam and I had to crash at people's houses, lose lots of sleep, meet with lawyers, and find a new apartment throughout the duration of this unit. I fucking hate landlords. This resulted in me not really giving my all to school - I was doing the minimum according to my standards. So lets just look at the pictures and move on, shall we! Petits Fours is next!


Petits Pans. Wow, small baguettes!














Irish soda bread. Tasty!














Croissants take 2. Plain, ham and cheese (super yum!), and pain au chocolat.














Sweet potato brioche. This was really tasty, we stuffed it with spiced pepperoni, and goat cheese.














5-grain rolls. Not a huge fan. "healthy".














Banana muffins. Kind of dry, liked the crumb topping.














Tart Alsacienne. Caramelized onions, olives, anchovies. Decent.














Ciabatta. Fun fact: means "slipper" in Italian.














Corn muffins. Included jalapenos and bacon! Best kind!














Lemon poppy muffins. Zesty and poppilicious.














Foccacia. Sounds like an STD, tastes like rosemary.














English muffins. Cool. Note: burned ones made by Lindsay and Melissa, inferior students and sabateurs (pictured below).