Sunday, September 11, 2011

...and I'm back in the game! :)

Hello everyone!

After a two-month hiatus, baking classes have started again! I have graduated from a total newbie to a person that other classmates go to to ask questions! It's so great to be back in the culinary arts building, doing more of what I love... and boy do I love it! My first set of classes is in "Classic Pastry", so I will be learning all about eclairs, palmiers, and tarts, to name a few.

We started out the day with a beautifully simple work space: a tidy pile of flour, small cubes of butter, a cold mixture of egg and water, and a pinch of salt. After working the butter into the flour and salt until it reached a sand-like consistency, I formed a little well then poured in (slowly) some of the egg/water mixture. Using my fingertips to swirl around the flour, making "hummus" per our chef's recommendation, I started to make my first batch of totally hand-made pastry dough. The trick with this is (well one of them anyway!)...  make sure that you never get so much flour in the well as you're incorporating the dry & liquid ingredients that you actually make a dough. If you make a dough clump too early, then that little dough clump is happy and wants to stay a clump! Then you have to work extra hard to get your dough an even consistency.

Later on in the class, we made Tarte Tartin, palmiers, and sacristans. Here are some photos of the day!

 "mise en place"

 making "hummus"

 locking in the butter

 pretty little palmiers



 my first ever batch of caramel

 raspberry jam sacristans

 cutting up strips for sacristans

 rolling up sacristans

 my homemade pastry dough

 sacristans with homemade dough and a ginger/nutmeg/sugar filling

 finished raspberry sacristans

 finished palmiers

 finished sacristans

 finished apple tarts tartin
a slice of tarte tartin

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