More French pastries I can't pronounce

It seems like I should have taken French instead of Spanish all those years... at least then maybe I could remember (for longer than a goldfish can) how to say the names of the pastries we made today. In my notes, I wrote them all phonetically, so that when I went back to tell someone what it was, I could actually say it correctly. So jalouise became "ja-loos-ee" and pithivier became even simpler "PTVA". I thought that English was kinda crazy with its "silent 'e'" nonsense.... but it seems to me like at least half of the letters in any given French word are "silent".

So today, we made jalouise, pithivier, band de fruit, and we started making Napoleons as well. In addition to those completed products, we made chantilly (which if you remember from an earlier post is a fancy way of saying sweetened whipped cream), pastry cream and diplomat cream. Let me tell you... if given the option to make "authentic, hand-whipped, whipped cream".... ALWAYS say... "that's okay, I'll just wait for the mixer". That is, unless you haven't done your arm workout yet for the day, and you feel like squeezing in a good 15-20 minutes of pain. Try it... you'll see what I mean. I'll even give you a formula to follow: 8 oz heavy cream, 1 oz granulated sugar and about a half tsp of vanilla. Use a whisk to whip to the stiff peak stage (should hold together on the whisk without drooping or sliding off the whisk when you take it out of the bowl). Let me know how it goes ;)

Here are a few photos from today...

 This is for the jalouise... it's a pastry dough base with frangipane, sliced pears, cherries soaked in water and almond extract, and then sprinkled with a sugar/ginger/nutmeg mixture. 

 Here's the jalouise just prior to baking. I gave it a cream wash (which gives it a more rustic look instead of the egg wash), a sprinkle of sanding sugar, and then crimped the edges with a fork. 

 Finished jalouise.... I wish you could smell how yummy it was! 

 I just love these tools :) 

 Pithivier... not only does this have a complicated name... it has many complicated steps too. Essentially it is two layers of pastry dough with a layer of raspberry jam and frangipane sandwiched between. The cut marks are a little tricky and have to be very precise, otherwise you'll let steam escape where it shouldn't and the whole thing will be ruined. 

 Cream horns with sanding sugar waiting to go into the oven. 

 Close up...

 Here is the finished pithivier... I figured it would taste pretty good.. but I actually kind of forgot about it till I got home. Then I decided I should cut a slice so I could take a picture of it, and figured I might as well try it since I cut it. WHOA. It is SO SO SO good. (Yes- worthy of 3 "so"s.. and so good that I didn't even remember to put up the photo I took of it sliced).

 Band de fruit & other pastries set up for a buffet (and grading). 

 Finished cream horn

Top view of band de fruit

Close up of jalouise

...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

Life (or how a half-marathon turns into chocolate chip pancakes)

So it's been a while, and I apologize for the long long long delay between my last post and this one. A lot has been going on! I'll quickly fill you in, and encourage you to check out the website in the coming weeks as I have more time to work on it and add new goodies to try!

I finished up my year teaching preschool; a bittersweet moment to be sure as I will certainly miss my little kiddos, but I am very excited to be living more in the heart of the city, and getting a chance to do more cooking and baking at work. (You should definitely come check out the cafe- we have breakfast all day, awesome smoothies and a great outdoor patio!)

I also was able to visit an awesome friend of mine (and make some new ones!) in Alaska, which happens to be one of my all-time favorite places on earth! :) The two of us were going to run a half-marathon together, and what had started out as a strict training regimen got gradually pushed to the side as both of us became busier and busier... and busier. So when Saturday morning rolled around, and I hadn't carved out time to run even just once in the past two weeks (and prior to that had just gotten maybe one to two runs in a week)... hitting snooze seemed like a much better idea than jumping out of bed and going to run 13.1 miles. We had a delightful breakfast of chocolate chip pancakes on the roof, overlooking gorgeous Alaskan mountains. I wouldn't have changed any part of it! That same trip, I also got to go rafting in Talkeetna, fly in a 6-person plan around Mt. McKinley AND get out on a glacier up there too, see a mama and baby moose suuuper close up, smoke a cigar, and have some great chats with some amazing people. :) What an incredible world we live in!

I have realized that "the best laid plans" really do not always go according to plan... and although I chose not to run a half-marathon at that time, there will be others (perhaps the same one next year!), and I am excited that each day is a new one, and with it comes the ability to make choices that bring me life and let me bless others.

NOW, onto some baking news. I had been really pondering how many calories one really consumes when they eat a cupcake.... possibly because how often do you go into a bake shop and see nutrition facts posted or available? Ummmm... never. (I suppose that's because we don't really want to know...) Anyway... I found this article through NPR (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10328143) which discusses the calories in popular NYC bakery cupcakes. A vanilla cupcake ranges from 386 to almost 800 calories. YIKES!

I decided to do some experimenting with different ratios of sugars, flours and fats, along with different ingredients... and came up with some pretty good combinations! I'm going to tweak them still, as I used olive oil instead of butter (which gave awesome texture but tasted a little too olive-y for my liking). But here's the best part.... the cupcakes (sans frosting, since I haven't played around with that yet) were all under 200 calories! One clocked in at 161 per cake! That means even with frosting, these new cupcakes are way worth the "indulgence" (since they'll still be no more than 250 per cupcake).  For one mix, I used honey, ground flax, and olive oil to replace granulated sugar and butter. Now, you can have a cupcake that tastes great, and has great things for your body too!

More updates (and photos!!) to come soon! 

Sous Chef for a day

One of my very best friends got married on Saturday (wooooohoooo!!!) and although the forecast throughout the majority of the week was rain all day Saturday, God delighted us with a gorgeous sunny day! She was a beautiful bride, and it was a beautiful day!

Then Sunday morning came... a little more tired than usual, I woke up for class. Imagine my surprise (and panic) when my clock said 6:32, which is already two minutes later than I need to leave my house, not to mention the fact that I still had bright pink fingernails (a major no-no in the culinary department). So after a stop at CVS for fingernail polish remover, since of course I couldn't find any at my house, I arrived to room 301 twenty minutes late. Apparently, I wasn't the only one who hadn't shown up, and our chef had already combined groups. This left me joining a group to make a group of 5, which is really not desirable, since we would be getting in each other's way all day. After apologizing for my tardiness, (which was appreciated and accepted), chef looked around and decided that it might be best for me to work with him for the day, doing side work and prep. He asked if I would be alright with this, to which I casually (as casually as I could anyway) said, "Sure!" 

Getting to work with the chef all day was busy, busy, busy, but awesome! I got to prepare different kinds of dough for demos, make Russian braid, hazelnut, apple, and cream cheese fillings, and pastry cream. I did start to feel a teensy bit self-conscious when other people in my class started calling me "sous-chef"; it was sort of reminiscent of being called "teacher's pet" in elementary school. It was nice to have answers to questions and be able to help people out, but I don't at all like it when I feel that people think I think I'm somehow better than them. (Know what I mean??)

Anyway, after being on my feet all day, learning tons of things about pastry, the huge box of goodies I brought home from class included the following delicious items: 

Russian Braid

Tea Rings (2 of them)

Banana Bread muffins

Sour Cream Coffee Cake muffins

Croissants

Danishes

and last but not least, Brioche with hazelnut filling, chocolate sticks and crumb topping

Anyone in the mood for some pastries? :) 

Chef said I did a great job on my tea rings (he might have even said they looked better than the ones he made that day for the demo!) 

Check out how you make them here:

After preparing the dough, you layer it with cinnamon filling and cake crumbs (which help absorb moisture). That 1-2 inches of open dough on the left is important.. you'll see why!

 Then you roll up the dough, not too tightly, not too loosely. (Here is the chef making a demo ring). 

Then, tuck the end of the cylinder into the dough that didn't have the filling, making a ring. 

 You then cut the dough at an angle with scissors, fanning out the cut pieces just a bit. 

After baking, the tea ring gets a glaze of apricot nepage and cinnamon roll glaze. (I put some sliced almonds on one ring too!)

Besides all the exciting baking in class yesterday, I also did a lot of other baking. For my friend's dress rehearsal dinner, I made vanilla-coconut cupcakes with 3 different kinds of buttercream: coconut, lime, and chocolate (so so so delicious!). Here are some pictures of those: 

 The "trial" cupcakes to test the frosting :) 

(coconut buttercream in the front)

 Chocolate buttercream: pre-toasted coconut

 Lime buttercream (with the swirl and sugar sprinkles)

Big cupcakes (regular size) with coconut mixed into the batter, chocolate buttercream and toasted coconut. 

Also, I made gingerbread men with my kiddos in school on Friday. They loved it! (And the hallways smelled like Christmas!) I decorated some and then they each decorate their own as well.. nothing like bringing home two cookies instead of one! 

Sticky Buns and Cinnamon Rolls :)

Sticky Buns.. a-ma-zing.

I've moved from artisan breads which are mostly lean, meaning they don't have any, or very little, fats and/or sugars, to viennoiserie... which is essentially baking with doughs that are made of butter, butter, and more butter (and maybe some sugar too). Although I certainly can't eat anything I made yesterday, I can definitely admire the products and enjoy giving them to people who can eat them (and love to!)

Really though, these doughs, known as enriched or sweet doughs, have a lot of butter... our laminated dough formula (used to make croissants and danishes) contains 20% butter of the final dough weight. And not just any butter, mind you, but butter that has at least 82% fat. Our chef (who is awesome! he's been a vegetarian for 32 years for health reasons, and can deliver hilarious one liners without cracking a smile, plus he is great at challenging us to challenge ourselves).. anyway.. our chef prefers to use "plugra" butter.. which is a play on the French words for "more fat" (plus gras). 

So for my first day, which was the longest by far at 12 and a half hours, we were going non-stop all day... and I LOVED it! First, we made some laminated dough, which would later be used for croissants. The process is crazy, and let me tell you, those "crescent rolls" that pop out of a can have nothing on real croissants. Without telling you every single step... the basics are: you use a sheeter (a manually-directed machine that rolls dough back and forth, making it thinner with each pass) to create layers of butter and dough. By the time you get to the last step, you essentially have a dough that is layer upon layer upon layer of dough and butter- which makes for beautifully flaky pastries. See what I mean...

Check out these layers!

Chocolate croissants

Notice how these are darker than you typically see in grocery stores, etc. 

Chef says that many American pastries and baked goods are underbaked, 

because we see darker coloring and think- burned!!! But, this isn't the case. 

These croissants have perfect coloring (they've been egg washed twice). 

One step of the lamination process- the tri-fold.

Dough on the sheeter.

Chocolate croissants ready to proof.

Rolling up a chocolate croissant. 

We also made sticky buns and cinnamon rolls... which again, are much darker than we typically see them. Also, chef noted that he puts the glaze on the rolls while they are still hot, so that the glaze seals in over the roll combining with and complementing the other flavors and textures of the roll, rather than waiting until the roll is cool, so there is a layer of white sugar on top. Sticky buns start out as cinnamon rolls, but they get a special home in a muffin tin coated with a brown sugar, honey & butter smear with pecans. The bottom of each bun then becomes the top. 

Rolling up cinnamon rolls

Making sticky buns.

Our cinnamon rolls (pre-glaze)

Sticky buns!! 

Cinnamon rolls!

I brought home a HUGE box full of cinnamon rolls, sticky buns, croissants and brioche. HUGE. I have no room left in my freezer. Stay tuned to see what yummy treats I get to make next week!