#45 - Planning, planning, planning...dessert!

Reprieve
Saturday was supposed to be a double session - 8am - 11am, plan out an entremet (fancy dessert with multiple layers and textures filled with a mousse or a mousse-type filling) and decorated with things to show our artistic and technical skills with chocolate, possibly sugar, tuiles, flavor combinations and creativity, then 12 - 3pm making the bases for our desserts.  Um, ok...it all sounds really good in theory, except sometimes it takes a while for ideas to come.  So the first 3-hour set (or rather, a bit later) was spent trying to get our ideas together.

Lucky for us our chefs had pity on my group.  We were slated to start building the bases for our desserts that day (!) and finish them today with all decorations, etc. then get our feedback this afternoon.  It wouldn't have given us a chance to put in special requests for items not on the list of available ingredients or to figure out how to make certain items (for example, how to deal with wanting pineapple flavor in my mousse when pineapple contains some enzyme which keeps the mousse from setting).  After checking schedules, we were offered the chance to leave early on Saturday and have the feedback session on Tuesday at noon instead, giving the chefs time to order in special ingredients between Saturday and Monday afternoon.  Since all of us appear to be endowed with a certain amount of intelligence (or a sense of self-preservation), we all elected to wait until Monday afternoon to start the bases for our entremets.  I am hoping mine will be quite delicious.  Surely they will be able to guess the general theme given the request for coconut, pineapple and Malibu rum...

Starting at the end
Obviously I am not any good at starting at the beginning and continuing until I get to the end.  I seem to start at the end quite often, then loop back to the beginning.  Thankfully my name is not Alice and I don't have to worry about hearing "Off with her head!" in reference to the separation of said head from my body due to the inability to start at the beginning.

Back to the beginning - sort of
The last post ended with the chocolate box, truffles and finally having an item finished for presentation.  The lid fell out of the package on my way home and smashed into a zillion pieces.  The box and the truffles went to one of the girls in Cuisine - she likes chocolate and I am happy to see the end of chocolate - until Monday afternoon when we will be doing more work with it.

Return of the Evil Puff Pastry - Take...9,783,301
Ok, this heading might be guilty of a tiny bit of hyperbole and just a little drama queenishness, but it's quite true.  We had to make puff pastry on Wednesday in preparation for Part II of our Beef Wellington practical.  Beef Wellington Part I involved making the puff pastry in a cuisine kitchen, which we have aready established is not cool.  In addition, foie gras needed to be seared, truffles sliced, a lot of mushrooms chopped, a few other things chopped, sliced and diced and a chicken mousse made.  In between various steps the puff pastry needed to have a few more turns and the beef stuffed with cooled cooked foie gras before being tied and cooked to rare.  Doesn't seem like a lot except that after the last time I made a mousse, I was too nervous to rush it this time.  I'm not sure where all the time went, but went it did and I was left at the end of the practical wondering what alternate dimension I had been in while everyone had been cooking in this one.

Fortunate ones
Thursday morning did not start well for a couple of the Cuisine groups.  Somehow the cool room, where they had stored their puff pastry, prepared beef, chicken mousse and the remaining mise en place from the day before, had had the power turned off overnight.  The result was that anything that contained protein was not usable and they had to start again (although apparently they were given puff pastry from the rolls the school has when we don't have to make our own and the chef made more mousse for them), then finish their Beef Wellingtons.  I have to say, the students in those groups were very cool about it all.  Maybe it was different in the kitchens, but when we saw them outside later, they were fairly philosophical.

My beef ok - a bit overdone on the very outside because I didn't sear it quickly enough, although it was rare in the middle, which was the aim.  The good part about it was that LM had been wanting to try the Beef Wellington for a while.  This piece was supposed to serve 2.  It ended up more as about 3-4 meals.  Neither of us likes foie gras as a general rule.  I picked mine out and she managed to eat hers.  There was no sauce left to speak of since it had all been poured on the meat which had soaked it all up by the time I got it home.  As always, the meal was much more enjoyable when shared with a friend.

The next day was a red mullet in crispy potato scales - a signature dish at Bocuse.  It seemed straightforward enough - make a broccoli flan, clean 2 scallops, boil the shells, butcher a fish, make a sauce, cover the fish fillets in scales made of potato slices. Except somehow that managed to take all of the time allotted to the practical.   One of these days I will have something that is good pretty much all around.   Fish day was not one of them. We had to mount the sauce in butter at the end but it kept reducing while I was waiting to plate. The result - a thick, buttery sauce which was to heavy for a plate where the fish was basically fried, covered in fried potato scales (yes, we had to lay them on one piece at a time) and a flan with double cream in it. Saffron also tends to get pretty strong when it reduces for that long, so must learn to keep from forgetting about the sauces on the stove while doing other things.

We happened to make it and finish just in time for lunch.  3 guesses as to what I had for lunch that day (and the last 2 don't count).

Friday night was a quiet-ish one.  That is to say, there was a brief stop at the pub before heading off to ballet class.  A teacher whose class I haven't taken before - learned a lot, still feeling it in the legs...

A perfect afternoon
Then of course there was the Saturday morning and the reprieve mentioned at the beginning of this post.  It turned into one of those relaxed afternoons - I met up with LM and we had a late lunch in Chelsea, then wandered around a bit.  It was the usual perfect girly afternoon - we chatted about a zillion things but if you asked what they were, I couldn't tell you.

It was a beautiful sunny afternoon, a little on the cool side - perfect, because it's not as nice to walk around it if it's hot.  We passed the Chelsea (Farmer's?) Market - it only took a glance at each other before we headed in the entrance.  I think we were both expecting something like Borough Market - a big, sprawling market with lots of stalls and things.  It was actually a few restaurants / pub-type things and an organic store.  It was cleverly designed so once you went in, you kind of got funneled past the shops and restaurants.  There was also something that looked like a giant green house, once you got past the little atrium of flowers which just looks like a flower stall.  We didn't make it in because it was getting on in the afternoon and we were headed to lunch at a bar whose name I can't remember.  There was a garden area but it was such a nice day that it was crowded out there (and the smokers were outside, which I find tends to spoil the taste of your food if you aren't a smoker).  Inside it was, and a very unhealthy but yummy lunch.

The nice thing about being a grown-up (or at least being able to go places by yourself and do mostly what you want to do) is that if you want to, you can have crispy fried chicken bits and nachos and a chili dog (all beef - my first chili dog ever) and no one will say anything.  For those of you who know me, I shared all that food...it appears that London has revealed the limits to even my appetite.

After a late lunch we headed to Oxford Street and John Lewis - LM wanted a particular cake pan (they didn't have it) and we both needed to do some baby shopping.  She had a godson whose christening is coming up and I have a niece or a nephew arriving soon.  And of course since it was close to the children's section, she and I both ended up shopping for our respective nieces.

At the end of it all, we both had quite a few items and had to take ourselves out.  It helped that the store was closing!  We dropped off a few things, then had a quick bite (well, hers was quick) while we discussed what she was going to do for the dessert after the christening.  There were certain constraints on what she could do and they limited her options.  The result was something that she is going to try out this week, using the big pan I bought which has adjustable dividers.

(Our bite - because it's French food.  The beef bourguinon was delicious and she loved her feuilletine with chocolate mousse thing.  True to form she went for the sweets and I went for the food.)

Then I remembered I still had leftover puff pastry from beef wellington and it needed to be used.  We have a student event dinner coming up and the palmiers I made with the leftover pastry were so cute, I proposed them as a possible petit four to my team mates.  I also finally see why we don't use this puff pastry for croissants. 

Sunday morning and a tense morning of watching the Rugby World Cup and lamenting the Wallabies' form. Occasional flashes of brilliance and a general improvement over some of their previous problem areas, but not up to their best standard. Playing against the All Blacks, I'm not sure that a team can afford to play less than their best. Especially since NZ was trying to break away from their tendency to lose to Australia during the World Cup - well, at least during the last couple that I've seen.

This was followed by brunch, which turned into lunch in Islington.  I was meeting ACP and KP for lunch, whom I hadn't seen since late August or so.  They are expecting Baby P so ACP is a bit restricted in what she can eat.  Fortunately palmiers are on the list of "can eat".  Lunch was ok, but the company was excellent.  Quick dinner with a friend from Australia (who has now relocated to London) at a pub, then home to prepare recipes, etc. for class.

Entremets (aka fancy dessert of our own design aka Tropical Sunset - because I didn't want to put Hawaii in the title)

Thank goodness I checked my schedule last night.  I thought we had class from 3-9pm, which has been the case for the last couple of weeks.  Of course if I had turned up at 3pm today, class would have been over.  That's right, it started at 8am.

Am rethinking making fruit glazes - reducing juice takes a long time and you have to reduce the amount of water to concentrate the flavor, as well as other technical things which I can't remember right now, but it's important because of our final exam (which is 8 weeks away).  Have realized that my time plans are completely unrealistic.  They might be fine if I were SuperChef or something, but since I'm just me...we'll see how it comes out tomorrow.  One of my jellies didn't set today - thank goodness I'd made a second one (and added a tiny tad more gelatine to it).  We put everything together and we unmould them tomorrow, then finish our decorating.  My chocolate was really bad today - it set so fast that I couldn't bend it without cracking it.  Hopefully they broken pieces will be big enough to use.  The tuiles kept breaking because of the toasted coconut in the mix - I forgot that if you put things in the batter, they can make it more fragile.  We'll see what's left tomorrow...

In the meantime, have made a pina colada mousse, poached pear and compote, passion orange jelly, have reduced the passionfruit puree and orange juice for the glaze tomorrow and kept back some of the Malibu for the pina colada coulis.  Haven't worked out what I'm going to do with the crunchy biscuit layer yet...photos forthcoming.  I believe there will be tasting (and judgement?) tomorrow.  For now, I am doing more laundry to combat the insidious appearance of chocolate in odd places - hardly ever on the front of my jacket, but frequently on the left sleeve or the right elbow...

One of the other girls did something with pina colada too, which I only found out this morning.  No problem, we shared the coconut milk.  She is extremely artistic and ended up tempering white chocolate, some of which she colored, before piping her chocolate decorations.  I expect it will all be very impressive and am looking forward to seeing it tomorrow.  Chef GB had a little taste and said it was a sexy mousse.  Great to see passion for food doesn't fade.

So until next time, share a bite, share a story and have fun with your loved ones.

(I actually started writing this on Saturday, so please ignore any lapses in the chronology.)