Rest of pastry school

I graduated from pastry school about a month ago. Caught up in the whirlwind of it all, I didn't really have time to post. But now, enjoying my first 3-day weekend in a LOOOOOOOONG time (more on that later), I thought I would play catch-up. Here is my summation of the last 2 months of school:

Sugar 2:

We learned about different sugar techniques, none of them that interesting. You can pour it into a mold! Blow it like glass! We did a lot of sitting, burning of our hands, and I did a lot of breaking. In fact, I broke the class's final project, something I am not too proud of. It was bound to break anyway - made out of sugar!

This is a basket I "wove" out of sugar. Exciting!

The project I am most proud of, my gangster pig made out of the components of a sugar owl mold. Check out that chain, gatt, and bullet belt!

Onto a unit that I am actually excited about, Plated Desserts 3....

I have a horrible memory, hence writing this blog so I can remember what I ate. I don't remember a lot of the components to these desserts, so forgive the BSing.

uhhhh.... spring rolls? I think there was banana in them.

Mango beggar's purse. I hate this presentation.

You make streusel by stretching a simple dough to as large as a table - you need 2 people to do this. Sprinkle with clarified butter, make a filling, and then roll it up. We made an apple version, with vanilla ice cream. It's kind of like sheets of phylo, but the mode is different.

Zeppole. We filled them with vanilla and chocolate pastry cream. I am shocked that these made it to the plate.

Zeppole plated in a classier "uptown" version.

Beer-battered fruit beignets. These were meh. Lindsay and I did go rogue and made a triple-battered coconut version that I remember very clearly.

Churrrrrrrrrrrrrrrros.

Passionfruit and raspberry fruit souffle. Dang son, look at that rise!

Blue cheese souffle.

This was a cake made with a dessert wine that was delicious. Not too fond of that other shit on the plate, though.

Chocolate cake.

Have no idea what this is. But I do remember that the ice cream was pink peppercorn flavored - yummo!

Gingerbread cake, cranberry compote.

Olive oil cake, orange salad.

Tropical fruit tasting plate.

This was my own creation, of which I am very proud. It was part of our menu project, in which we had to conceptualize a restaurant, and create a dessert menu for it. Our chefs chose 2 dishes, and we had to create and present them. This is a brown butter nutmeg baumkuchen, with caramel blood oranges, candied fennel, and earl grey ice cream.

Another one of my selections from the menu. This is a chocolate fig cake, with dried fig compote, balsamic ice cream, olive oil powder, and chocolate decoration.

Wedding cake! We each had to make a cake based on a theme created by the class below ours. They chose a crazy overdone Victorian theme. So I made the best of it and went classic and simple. I did pulled sugar strings for decoration at the base of each tier, and spent most of my time making roses, peonies, and hydrangea flowers out of sugar.

Final. To be honest, at the time of the final I had already checked out. We weren't making anything new at this point, and I had no interest in making some food I had already made for judges I didn't know. I made a genoise with buttercream, a gateaux St. Honore, bourbon pecan cookies, and spice bon bons. All came out relatively well. I made a showpiece based on Boston (which I guess I forgot to take a picture of?). My family came to my graduation, we celebrated, and I graduated with honors and perfect attendance. Peace out, school!

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

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.

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!

pork buns

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

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.

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.