Intro to Pastry Week Final

Intro to Pastry Week Final!!

Well, it's here folks....the Final Project. Each of us drew a lottery on the components required in our plated dessert. I got shortbread base, ganache filling, French buttercream frosting, fresh fruit (for garnish), and caramel sauce. Oh boy. This one's gonna be hard. The only dessert I could think of that had shortbread with ganache filling was a chocolate tart. And it had to have a buttercream frosting to go with it?? On top of that, it had to be something that can be frozen for a week. The instructor set it up so that the prep day and the plating day was 1 week apart. In other words, we had to make everything on the prep day, freeze it, and then plate it a week later. Annoying, yes. And some of the pastry elements, such as pastry cream, tend to liquify during the freezing process.

I searched high and low online for pictures of chocolate tart that had frosting on it, to no avail. Finally, I decided to layer the tart with an additional element to make something that resembled a torte. Since the oranges are in season, I thought about making something orange and chocolate. OK...how about an orange mousse layered with chocolate ganache tart? The mousse wasn't one of the required elements, but the Instructor said that it's OK to incorporate extra elements into the desserts...but that I can get graded on it too. I thought that was fine, without thinking too much about it.With that picture in mind, I went to go take my final...

Things seemed to go pretty well at first. Shortbread was easy, the French buttercream, while tedious, wasn't too hard...except mine turned out a bit soft, but it tasted great. Then I made the orange mousse. I creamed mascarpone with grand marnier and heavy cream, placed it into a container and froze it. BIG MISTAKE. The following week, I took out the mousse. I didn't notice at first, but as it thawed out, it turned into this grainy mousse. It still tasted great, but the texture was NOT GOOD. At this point, I was already assembling everything, and didn't have time to make fresh mousse, so I went ahead and piped it in, put a chocolate sheet on it, piped the buttercream...and hoped for the best. And I am still beating myself up over the mousse (Oh why, WHY did I have to pipe that horrible mousse in???)

This is the dessert that 'B' in my group came up with. Sort of a deconstructed Black Forest Cake, with frozen cherry sherbet cup thingy. The four judges gave him a pretty good score...

A dessert by 'R', another guy in my group. Chocolate genoise layered with vanilla pastry cream, with wine-poached pear gelee and tuile decorations. I think he did pretty well also...

...And here's mine. Orange-Chocolate Layer Tart with French buttercream and caramel sauce. I scored lower than 'B'! When I looked over the score paper, I saw that three of the judges said that my buttercream was "grainy", while one said that it was "perfect!"... I was confused. How is it that one group thought the buttercream was grainy and the other thought it was perfect?? Especially when the cream came from the same batch??? Then it hit me...the only one who knew that I was making an orange mascarpone mousse was the Instructor; the others had no idea. The three judges must've thought that the orange mascarpone mousse was the buttercream!! There was no other way to explain why they thought my buttercream was grainy!

Here's what happened. When I handed the dessert to the judges, I just said the name of the dessert...and didn't really describe what was in it. And yes, I am beating myself up over that. All I had to do was to explain that the buttercream was the cream on top of the dessert and not the layer in the middle! arrrrrgghhh....

So lessons learned:

#1 Remember to really explain the plate! That's why there's a description by every dish on the menu!

#2 Glaze every fruit (and I mean every fruit). The judges thought my orange segments looked "dry and old". I was confused over that too...I just barely cut a fresh orange for those! How could they "look old"?? I guess that's their way of saying, "glaze the fruit".

#3 Don't incorporate an unnecessary element into the final project, cuz it will count against me. They don't take extra credits for extra effort during the final.

So that was the final. I'm not happy with the score, and somewhat disappointed in myself. But hey, what can I do but just keep going?

Now that the winter break's here, I can concentrate on other things. Like, making Christmas goodies for instance.

My mom and I wanted to send a Christmas gift to our relatives in Japan...but what to send them? Japan has everything, from McDonald's to Godiva, from Pokemon to Powerpuff Girls. So we sent them something that even Japan doesn't have...handmade chocolate truffles.

I made hazelnut truffles using Nutella as filling. After chilling it in the fridge, I formed a ball of it around toasted hazelnut, coated it in crushed wafer crumbs, and froze it. The entire thing was dipped in melted chocolate and rolled in chopped hazelnuts (except I ran out midway, and substituted pistachios).

I need to work on shaping them into better-looking spheres.... but they turned out delicious. We packaged them into pretty boxes and sent them to both my aunts and my sister.

There was one other experimental dessert I wanted to try: the Black Pearl Torte, a.k.a. Black sesame torte. It consists of layers of black sesame cake filled with black sesame buttercream. I used the black sesame powder found at a local Chinese food store...

...and I utilized the buttercream leftover from the final. Paired with orange sauce, it tasted pretty good. I took a small sample to work. The Sous Chef, Eleanor, really liked the taste, but she thought the looks was too scary....grey cake with grey cream? But when I told her that black sesame dessert is all the craze in places like New York and San Francisco, she agreed that we should definitely think about incorporating it into our dessert menu. In Utah, we are way behind when it comes to current trends. When a trend originates in NY and San Fran, it takes about 5 years for it to finally get here. So we both figured that the black sesame craze will arrive in a few years. Why not get started now? We discussed the issue, and thought about glazing the cake with ganache...Hmmm this is definitely worth brainstorming....

And speaking of our dessert menu, here are our current desserts at Naked Fish:

Gelato Profiterole. Well, we discontinued this one. It just wasn't selling. Chef Toshi left to go open his own restaurant up in Park City, so he maybe serving this at his place.

The Eggnog Cheesecake, available until December 24th. Served with Caramel sauce, this cake sells faster than the Green Tea Cheesecake...but probably because it's limited edition.

Bananas Foster. Our second most popular dessert. Flambeed bananas served with vanilla ice cream and house-made (by me!) chocolate sauce.

And then, our Number One best-seller....

The Mocha Trifle, served with a tuile cigar cookie. Last Friday, there were 8 in the fridge. They were all gone by Saturday night. Call me crazy, but I always get these warm, fuzzy feeling when Eleanor calls and informs me that the restaurant is completely out of desserts... :)

Intro to Pastry Week 9

Happy belated Thanksgiving! I swear, weeks fly by so quickly these days...it's almost two weeks into December already! Well, here's the much-awaited update...
For Thanksgiving, we invited our friends, Toshi and Setsuko for our family tradition of Bible-reading marathon, where we read the Bible passage out loud for approximately 2 hours (we take breaks), and a dinner. Nothing special for dinner, just oden, a Japanese pot-au-feu type of dish. The dessert, however, was quite special...

Peach Mille Feuille, using the peaches from farmer's market that we canned during summer months. The puff pastry was the leftover from previous week's class (remember the vol-au-vent?). With the puff pastry, I made another dessert...

Deconstructed Apple Pie. Puff pastry leaf, apple compote (using the apples from our backyard!) and dried cranberry compote. Designed for those who prefer the higher ratio of the apples to the crust.

Then on to the Week 9 of Intro to Pastry...at this point, there aren't any new recipes. We are now building up on everything that we've learned so far. The syllabus/schedule simply stated, "Fraisir Torte" and "Baked Alaska". Fraisir Torte is a layered cake with spongecake and strawberry mousse or cream filling, with sliced strawberries embedded in the cream. There were four people in my group: R, T, me...and M again. Although M was actually quite cooperative and easier to work with this time. T wanted to do the Fraisir Torte, M volunteered to do the Baked Alaska (it's the easiest one to do...), R had this "dream" of twisting a panna cotta into a twirly shape, and I had in mind...a Chevre Cake (a.k.a. Goat Cheese Cake).

Here's what happened. Earlier in the week, a few of my classmates in my Menu Management class told me how their baking class ran out of cream cheese...so I suspected that the exact same thing will happen in my class as well. In which case, I thought about other cheeses that I could substitute--that can be mascarpone, ricotta, cottage cheese (heaven forbid) ...and goat cheese. I've seen the recipe for it online, and also thought about maybe making it at Naked Fish. I know, a Japanese restaurant that carries goat cheese, right? Unfortunately, the cheese is used on, and only on, salad. That's it. Why not fully utilize what the restaurant carries? So I've always wanted to make a Goat Cheese Cake, but alas, it is expensive, around $5 for a 4 oz. block (the recipe requires 12 oz) and I wasn't about to spend $15 on something that may turn out gross.

So that was what went on in my mind when I proposed the plan to others. And to my delight, we were indeed out of cream cheese...but had a tub of goat cheese! There were only about 8 oz, so I substituted 4 oz. ricotta. The recipe I followed is designed to make an Italian souffle style cheesecake. Here are our products...

T's Fraisir Torte with Strawberry Sauce. The "doughy"-looking thing on top is marzipan. It was OK...

M's Baked Alaska, with caramel sauce. He followed my suggestions on making a chocolate cake base with coffee ice cream for it. Despite its looks, it was quite tasty.

R's Dream. Poor R. He tried twisting the panna cotta strip, but it was too stiff to hold its shape.

My Goat Cheesecake with Cranberry-Fig compote and Madeira Wine Sauce. The texture was so fluffy and light! As for the taste...got mixed reviews. Only those who liked goat cheese really liked it, and those who didn't thought it was gross. I was surprised Dad liked it. Mom wasn't a big fan, she thought it was too "goat cheese-y".

Then I took it to Naked Fish for a sampling. Oh my. Turns out every cooks/chefs LOVE goat cheese. They thought the cake was phenomenal. They suggested I make it for an omakase customer, whose palate would be sophisticated enough to appreciate goat cheese.

Over the weekend, we went grocery shopping at a Chinese market in downtown. I spotted something labeled "sweet yam" that looked suspiciously like the Japanese sweet potato. I begged my mom to get one, just for a taste--if it tastes good, great, if not, we only wasted two dollars. We ate it that night, and yep....it was the Japanese sweet potato! We had two, so I used the other one to make a sweet yam cream. With that, I made...

Mont Fuji. Japanese rendition of the Mont Blanc. This French entremet is traditionally made using chestnut cream. The sweet yam made it much lighter and creamier than the traditional version. The base is an angel food cake I had baked earlier in the week.

This week was the finals in Intro to Pastry...I'll update as soon as it's over...