Thursday, January 27, 2011

Holiday care packages

I've begun a tradition of creating holiday gift packages to send out to friends and family right before Christmas. It usually involves a couple of weeks of planning, excel spreadsheets, and a big mess. Every year I say I'm not going to do it again, and then I do.

This year, I made:
Salt + pepper shortbread
Lemon sandwich cookies
Mallowmars
Guava thumbprint cookies
Walnut orange meringues
Caramel grapefruit jellies
Chocolate chip cookies
Cardamom pistachio brittle









Thursday, January 13, 2011

Plated Desserts 2


Plated desserts continues to be my favorite part of school so far. It's so exciting to see how you can put items together - both visually and by taste. I love it!















Mint dome with flourless chocolate cake base, orange salad, orange coulis, chocolate sauce, chocolate cigarette. The flourless chocolate cake base was BOMB - it was thin and rich, and was the perfect base. I didn't like the glaze we used - it was too sticky and tacky. I also am not in love with chocolate, mint, and orange all together.















Omar and Rachel pointing out that the goos from coating the dome looked like a swarm of killer squid!
















White chocolate citrus semifreddo, pear compote, pear chip, white chocolate decoration. I liked the citrus and pear combination. The citrus semifreddo was delicious.















Milk chocolate semifreddo, hazelnut biscuit, pear compote, pear chip, balsamic reduction. Liked this dessert. Balsamic reduction really good with the chocolate and hazelnut. Good flavor combinations.















White chocolate hazelnut mendiant, raisin cream, maple tuile, white chocolate decoration. Raisin cream looked like straight up poop. Tasted good. Bad presentation.















Marsala sabayon, caramel apples, pistachio. I LOVE SABAYON! Why was I not introduced to this before? It's like the perfect sauce!















Sabayon, berries.















Tiramisu, coffee creme anglaise, espresso granita, chocolate espresso cup. Tiramisu really good. I don't think I like granita. It's like a slurpee, and the flavor just drains to the bottom.















Buttermilk panna cotta, sesame tuile, fruit spice soup, almond cubes, pineapple. This was the best dessert of the unit. Panna cotta was delicious, and all the flavors in this were really balanced. I thought the soup was too sweet, though. And I don't like how we call it soup, either.















At the culmination of our 2nd plated desserts project, we hosted an "Evening of Desserts", at which our friends and family were invited to come and enjoy our food. We each made a plate with our partner. Rie and I made a Lebni tart, with a pear yuzu compote, honey ice cream, pine nut brittle, currant paper, and currant coulis. The picture shows the plate upside down, but the woman who worked the event totally sucked.

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Chocolate 2

Sorry to all my fans out there for not posting anything school related in awhile. My bad....

Our first unit in Pastry 3 was our 2nd chocolate unit. We made bon bons, chocolate candy, some chocolate tiered cake thing, and a chocolate showpiece. I don't know why I don't have many pictures from this unit. I guess there weren't that many exciting pictures to be taken... except for my chocolate showpiece!

Our chocolate showpieces were supposed to be along the theme of "fall". Anyone who knows me well knows that I really want to go turkey hunting at some point. So I made a fall-themed chocolate showpiece around the pursuit of the turkey, the most elusive to bullets yet so widely spotted hunting trophy. They always taunt me with their high-visibility.

Checkity check out the techniques homies! I made a base by pouring chocolate onto a transfer sheet that I had painted with colored cocoa butter to look like a leafy ground. Made a mold for the base of my tree, and then made branches by putting chocolate in a robot coupe and grinding it until it became almost like a paste, then formed branches. Chocolate glued it all together. Piped bark on to it. Made leaves by doing a Doran-patented DOUBLE TRANSFER!: coloring acetate, dropping white chocolate leaves, then covering it with another transfer sheet to get color on both sides. Attached a bunch of leaves to the tree. Made a cardinal, squirrel, and my turkeys out of modeling chocolate. Even made some mushrooms! Gobble gobble gobble!