Jessica's Dinner Party

by jessica yoon

le cordon bleu

Lesson 17 to 20 & Basic Pastry Exam

Basic Pastry classes have finished!  Now off to exams!  We will be tested on one of the following dishes:

Tarte aux Pommes
Saint-Honoré
Chausson aux Pommes & Palmiers
Dacquoise
Tarte Meringuée aux Poires Caramélisées
Moka
Brioche & Pain aux Raisins
Pithiviers & Sacristains
Buche Pistache-Chocolat
Gateau Basque

Along with the main dish, we are required to line a tart mold and pinch the edges. We will be given ingredient lists so I’m not too worried, but my main concern is time.  We have two and a half hours to complete our pastry and make a tart shell!  It sounds like a lot of time, but I know we will all be scrambling at the end.  The chef’s advise to use: work quickly in the beginning so we have enough time to spend on our presentation.  Looks are everything in patisserie.  No one wants to buy an ugly cake.

Here are photos from the last four lessons and three practicals.  Lesson 20 consisted only of a demo and tasting.

Lesson 17: Feuilltage: Pithiviers & Sacristains

The pithiviers is a pie-esque dish made with puff pastry.  The inside is filled with an almond cream that turns very crumbly and moist when baked. Sacristains are twists similar in taste to palmiers.  The difference lies in shape and the addition of chopped almonds and large grain, chouquette sugars. Sacristains are good to make with leftover, and scrap pieces of puff pastry.

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Lesson 10…16

It’s been a busy few weeks.  Somehow lesson 9 has jumped to 16 and with only a few classes left Basic Pastry is reaching its final stages.  Last week we took the written exam, next week marks the end of classes, and the following week is the practical exam.  Not everything I made has been perfect, lumpy ganache and deformed brioche heads, and not everything I made is a dish I enjoyed, raisin biscuits and mango charlotte, but I’ve been learning a lot, baking new pastries, and improving my meringue whipping skills!  I leave you with a photo essay of everything I’ve made thus far. Enjoy!

Lesson 10: Batons de Marechaux and Palets aux Raisins

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Lesson 6, 7, 8, & 9

I’m behind on my lesson updates!  There’s been a bit of internet drama during the past two weeks, but the important thing is that I have a connection now and will (hopefully) continue to have one.  Luckily, classes have been pretty slow averaging one to two demos/practicals per week.  After this mini-massive update, everyone will be almost up to speed.

These past four lessons are actually quite intertwined and related to each other.  We’ve been combining different techniques to create a range of desserts and pastries. In Lesson 6 we learned how to make pâte à choux or choux pastry, an important base for many French pastries such as chouquettes, éclairs, choux chantilly, as well as the St. Honoré and Paris-Brest in Lesson 8. The dacquoise, a meringue based almond sponge cake, from Lesson 7 is also featured in the tarte meringuée aux poires caramelisées in Lesson 9, while the praline buttercream used to frost the daquoise is similar to the filling of the Paris-Brest.  Furthermore, the pear tart from Lesson 9 is essentially the same as the tarte aux pommes but with pears, a partially almond pâte sucrée (also used as the base of the St. Honoré but without almond meal), and a meringue top.  Confused yet? To summarize: pâte sucrée, pâte à choux, and meringue have been the main areas of focus and are important to master.  During the various practicals, we made chouquettes, chocolate eclairs, a dacquoise, St. Honoré, and a meringue topped pear tart.

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Lesson 5: Feuilletage

Feuilletage or puff pastry is quite possibly one of the least tackled techniques of the home baker.  It is tedious, laborious, time sensitive, and a bit messy.  I have only made it once at home and am pretty sure that tally will remain steady for a long time.  Not because the recipe is difficult to make, but because I just don’t have the space and equipment.  I have a small toaster oven, which could fit probably two palmiers max, in an apartment without air conditioning.  The dough needs to be worked fast and kept as cool as possible so as not to melt the butter- impossible during the summer.  There’s also a question of who will eat a dozen apple turnovers containing a total of you-don’t-even-want-to-know amount of butter.  Two non-culinary friends plus me divided by x amount of butter equals way too much butter per person.

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Lesson 3 & 4: Cake et OFII

Week two began with a lesson on simple cakes.  We learned different methods of incorporating butter to make three different types: madeleines, cake aux fruits, and week-end.  To the delight and dismay of everyone, during the practical we made madeleines (delight) and fruit cake (dismay).  Most students (the sane ones) would have much preferred taking home two loaves of the more tedious lemon glazed week-end, but unfortunately we ended up with 250 grams worth of disgusting candied bits of jellied fruit embedded in rum drenched cake.  One of my cakes found a good home with my friend’s boyfriend who likes cake aux fruits (really?), and the other “somehow” found its way to the trash (surprise!).  I did eat some of it, carefully picking out the neon nibs of toxic waste, but it turned out to be too much work for too little pleasure.  Fruit cake is actually more work and complicated to make than it seems.  It requires creamed butter, alternating additions of eggs and flour, and enough beating to make elastic.  I under mixed, which is why my cake didn’t rise and flattened at the top.  Over beating is probably worse, as it causes the cake to be tough, but it’s also not great to under mix as it doesn’t develop the gluten enough.  During the demo the chef flamboyantly decorated five different fruit cakes with an assortment of dried fruit and spices, but ours were more humble with just a sprinkling of powdered sugar.

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