#89 - Death by tuiles...

Replating the desserts... 
I keep thinking it's Friday night but it's not.  My lattice stencil arrived yesterday and I picked it up from a friend today so that I could have a practice run at my plating with all the decorations.  Yech - another try tomorrow...it's a pain because I don't feel like I have a natural talent for putting the shapes and things together.    Nothing came out quite the way I imagined or hoped except for the white chocolate twirls.  I had to make my own blackberry puree so I had to guess a bit.  It turned my tuile mix purple instead of a dark pink or deep red.  I know part of it is the the tuile batter but still...lavender?  And the pretty tuiles broke because I overcooked them so I had to use the crappy one for the plating.

Had to be kind of ruthless with the chocolate twirls.  Hopefully I'll get the same shape or be able to snap it around the same place during the exam - it's hard to get the angles exactly right and depending on the acetate you get, sometimes it's easier than others to get the twirls to be around the same circumference/curve as what you're aiming for.  Got lucky today with the twirl, but still ended up breaking the long twirls into a better height to go on the plate.

Have been having trouble coming up with a design on the plate where I would have enough sauce and still have something that looks clean and interesting.  This still isn't quite what I was looking for, but it's an improvement over what happened during the exam skills class with our plated dessert earlier in the week.  I've been lucky enough to get some suggestions from friends who did this exam two terms ago.  They had a couple of ideas which I think I can try tomorrow so that I can put photos in the portfolio.  At this point if it takes too much time, I'm not doing it for the exam (except for piping the poppyseed tuile and even that has me whining that it sucks when the batter is melting).

The Anglaise came out this time but the coulis is still really thick even though I didn't boil the sugar as hot as the other day.  The coulis gets this weird skin on top - I think blackberries must have some kind of pectin because the coulis looked like it might set if I left it to its own devices for a while.  In any case, the Anglaise wasn't as runny today and the coulis not as lumpy so I think I've fixed my technical difficulties.  Hopefully there will be time to do them again tomorrow - just in case, and also to try out the suggested platings with the sauces.  We've got a few ideas on the go so hopefully one of them will look good.  I don't want to try anything fancy because I know my hands will be shaking by the time I get to plating the dessert and wobbly hands don't do good piping or other fine, delicate work.

JB has been a very good sport and tasted each of the components I made today - a bit of a feat given he was trying to eat dinner and go out while I was plying him with the Anglaise (he wanted to know what it was.  I could only explain it by saying it's kind of like a custard), the coulis and tuile.  He declined the white chocolate - probably just as well, I need the twirls after all so that I can try a couple of more alternative platings.

Dinner

Then it was time for dinner.  I was really craving the goat's cheese and the baby beets I bought last night.  Also the mac 'n cheese.  And I bought some chicken today - baked it wrapped in Serrano ham.  It sounded good in theory but not good in practice.  The bottom part of the chicken  / ham roll kind got steamed / boiled so it wasn't crispy like I had thought it would.  Super classy dinner, non?  I think the best part of dinner was the salad though - the chicken was boring and the mac 'n cheese stopped being nice right around when the breadcrumbs started to go a bit soggy.

Tempering is really taking it out of me.  Somehow managed to get the white chocolate twirls done but my hand has started to peel.  Have decided that I will not cook again before finals after I've turned in my portfolio (well, except to cook dinner or something).  I want to rest everything as much as possible for the big days.

Anyway, it's time to go to sleep.  I've been sitting here trying to formulate a sentence for quite a while now and am afraid I have said something silly further up.  Thank goodness for artistic friends who can make a judgment call as to whether something is pretty or not.  Or clean looking or not.  So until next time, may the suggestions you get from your friends be as good and useful as the ones I have received from mine.  

#85 - Finals Practice Day 1 - Compulsories

It's almost like the old school figure skating competitions.  We worked on our compulsory items today and tomorrow we work on our free plated dessert.


Disclaimer:  Keep in mind the following while you look at the photos:  I haven't made chocolates since October and this is my second sugar sculpture since November.  I have never before made the spiral sables (and it shows!) but I made the brioche a few times last week.  You can see what was practiced recently and what wasn't...I'd fix the formatting but it's difficult to keep my eyes open and I have an early class, so must get on with it.

Compulsories started well enough.  The first hour was a frantic rush - the brioche got made, the sables were finished and rolled and by the second hour, the chocolate shells for the truffles had set and were filled with ganache.  It all started to come apart in the third hour - my sables ended up way too big (I'll make a half recipe next time) and the brioche took twice as long as it should have to prove.


Then the truffles - the seal went on well enough, but they were really stuck when I tried to get them out at the end.  Chef asked if I had cleaned my mould well - yes I had, and I had the extra spilled over bits of chocolate which had gotten into other holds in the mould which had come out easily, all shiny and pretty.  The culprit was my white chocolate - it had gone out of temper when I brushed it onto the mould because I wanted to get a lot of definition on the white lines.  Too many brush strokes and it kills your chocolate - the truffles stick to the mould and they don't come out cleanly, if at all.  The result - broken chocolates.  Since we have to present 6 identical chocolates on the day, this is a bit of a failure unless you count the broken-ness as them being identical.  I think the chefs might consider that an identical lack of skill... 

I don't know what happened to my sugar but it was all bad.  It crystallized, which it had never done before, so it was hideous when I tried to stick things together.  Then the main piece was too top heavy (and answers the question of which way the teardrop window should face) and it broke before I managed to present it to the chef.  In the exam you have to somehow glue the pieces back together and present something because the compulsories are just that - compulsory.  Failure to present one is an automatic disqualification - i.e. you fail the exam and the course - or at least, that's how I understand it.  If you manage to stick something on a cake board, you might eke out a half point, keeping you in the game - as long as the rest of your work is good.  I think most people had a shocker of a day today, although not all.  In my case, most of the tasting seemed ok but the execution of the techniques - oh my.  I so don't want to put up photos because it was all a bit of a disaster, but the whole point of this is to share the good (sometimes) and the not-so-good (lately feels like an awful lot of the time).


The brioche wasn't so bad although the head was on crooked.  I felt so disorganized this morning - my kit and bits and pieces had all been left at home because I had taken things out of my bag or put them back in or I thought I had put them back in.  When I found I didn't have a few things, there was some mild panicking for the first hour or so.  Hopefully tomorrow will go more smoothly now that I kind of have a better idea of what I want to do and I've reviewed my knife kit / Patisserie toolbox.  It's kind of stupid - there's a rule that you can't bring in a bag other than your knife kit because people were stealing stuff from the old school.  The thing is, we need a lot of extra stuff in Patisserie so you actually do need that extra bag for things like our paint scrapers, grout spreaders (I'm not sure if that's even the right term), extra palette knife - and since there are quite a few of us who seem to want to do the same thing, I've packed my own moulds.  This way I am guaranteed to have the correct sized moulds for various things, like my chocolate and tuile decorations, as well as the actual dessert itself.


Lunch provided a sop to the OCD part of my personality -a sink right in the middle of a casual Portuguese chicken place!  No need for hand sanitizer, I could wash my hands after I paid for my food and before I sat down.  How could any germaphobe or a self-professed clean freak not be happy?


Wish us Merde - we will need it in order to survive our feedback and the subsequent change of recipes.


Until next time, may you feel more competent at whatever it is you're doing than I have felt today.

#44 - Jinxes, chocolate and more chocolate.

It has been just a few short days since the last post and already it feels like things are starting to ratchet up about 100 notches.  For one thing, we now have our briefs for our final exams for each of Cuisine and Patisserie.

Let the Panicking begin
The Patisserie final is 6 hours long and designed to take up pretty much every second of those 6 hours.  Am seriously contemplating the need for those astronaut diaper things - they don't stop the clock once it starts.  We are having 6-hour stints in Patisserie at the moment as quite a few of our practicals require 2 parts (we get a break in the middle, our pieces get a chance to set before assembling) so it's almost a chance to get used to working for that time.  This entire term is basically going to be spent going over things to prepare us for our final (3 compulsory items, poured sugar sculpture and our 2 identical plated desserts which have 8 components by the time you get to the sauces and decorations).

The Cuisine final is 4 hours long - and includes my current bete-noir, Hollandaise.  Hopefully we get an extra egg or two because poached eggs have known to break during reheating under the stress of plating.  We have to plate two identical starters (savory shortcrust pastry tart with what looks like sauteed spinach, poached egg, Hollandaise and garnish) then two identical main course plates (pigeon, chicken mousse[?], more turned vegetables, confit something or other and sauce).

Recap
Ah, but I am ahead of myself here.  First, a backtrack to the last two Cuisine dishes from last week:  the herb crusted salmon steak with mushroom flan and Madeira jus, followed by the grilled Lamb Noisettes with Potatoes Maxim and Asparagus with Hollandaise.

The Salmon Steak
I think I am jinxed when Chef FJ is in the kitchen.  Every single practical we have had with him has ended with sad food...in this case, the salmon was overcooked (I like it cooked all the way through but they wanted it medium) and the mushroom flan was too egg-y, even though I followed the recipe.  I can't tell if the photo I have is of Chef's demo plate or mine, so I have left it out.  I suspect it's the demo plate because the mousse looks fine on it and mine had problems.

I have promised Chef FJ that one of these days I will get him a good dish.  He said he is waiting...

Lamb Noisettes
This one was a bit of a Three Bears and Goldilocks plate - I thought I sliced the pieces evenly but somehow ended up with one overcooked (just how I like it), one just right (medium) and one undercooked.  Part of that was running out of time - I'm not quite sure how or when, but it happened.

Return of the Evil Hollandaise
Well, a variation of the evil Hollandaise, anyway.  I'm not sure if the difficulty here is that the sauce is actually so difficult or whether I've gotten psyched out by its reputation.  In any case, it seemed to be going well, then split while I was adding my butter before service, which is why it is missing from my asparagus stems.  The result was a slightly acidic butter coating on the asparagus (which needed more salt - go figure).

A deep breath
Then it was a lovely weekend of catching up with friends (World Cup Rugby breakfast on Saturday, lunch cooked for me by a friend, dinner with another friend from Sydney) dancing on Sunday and trying to figure out my recipes for Cuisine and Superior finals.  Oh - and laundry.  Somehow I ended up doing laundry every day last week due to chocolate mysteriously appearing in random places on my uniform and the heat in the Cuisine kitchens (a cool and breezy 33C).

Chocolate nightmare
Monday was not a good day this week.  It started out well enough with tempering the chocolate.  The problems came when it was time to unmould our large egg moulds - my chocolate egg halves came out of the moulds like they were supposed to when I flipped it.  Unfortunately, I happened to tap the mould down to release the last egg (there were 3 halves) just as one of them dropped out of the mould.  The result:  unmitigated disaster.  I tried to fix the egg but ended up having to borrow Chef's egg in order to finish the windmill.  Having handled the base so much, my fingers left smudges all over it which is why it's not shiny in the photo.

Then of course there was the cracking of the windmill blades (?) themselves.  Oh dear...the only thing that turned out ok were the practice milk chocolate truffle shells, although they could use a bit more white chocolate by way of decoration so that it doesn't look like a mistake.  We have to use 2 different colors of chocolate and temper both simultaneously.  This was just a practice run - I am so glad they built in so much practice time for these.  If something must go wrong, better to do it while there is a chef in the room so they can tell you what you did wrong (other than being stubborn and not listening to them).

We don't need no stinkin' gym!
One of the things about tempering chocolate (other than trying to keep your own temper when things are not going well) is that the initial melting and tempering becomes easier (not easy, you'll note).  The hard part comes with trying to keep it at the right temperature to use.  The Chefs can tell pretty much by looking at it.  I have to check by using the back of my finger.  So as it gets cooler, it gets thicker and more viscous.  Which isn't fun when you have to keep stirring it to get it back to temperature.  I haven't been to the gym in longer than I care to remember, but all the aching arms (both of them, from switching when one gets tired) have resulted in getting stronger.  Moms have babies, Patisserie students have chocolate.  And dough.

Sweet success

Today went much better - the chocolate tempered, the shells for the truffles got made (ok, a little thick at the very top) and the chocolate box was (mostly) ok except for the little bit where I didn't spread enough chocolate for the bottom.  There was a certain amount of hurry up and wait because you have to work fast with the chocolate when you work with it, then you have to wait for it to set.
Somehow the mistakes got salvaged with the result on the left.  This is my Chocolate Box (entirely made of chocolate) and a couple of different types of chocolate technique thrown in - or rather, required by Chef CB.  I wanted to do a swirl but the pieces kept breaking (hence the skinny ones) and the ones I had meant to make swirly ended up being the larger curls.  At this point, I was just happy to get them on the box.

One of the girls in class didn't want her white chocolate truffles so she offered them to me - I put them in my box because they all look so pretty together.  And I dropped the box lid on the way home, so it's good I have the couple of extra truffles kicking around in there - it doesn't look quite as incomplete.

Tomorrow we get going in Cuisine again - Beef Wellington Part 1 (the puff pastry, chicken mousse, beef and a few other bits and pieces).  Wish us luck with the puff pastry.  I have a feeling we are going to have to work on the baking trays again because we don't start cooking until noon.  I am guessing the kitchen will be hot.

Until next time - enjoy the eating.  And now I know why chocolates are so darn expensive!