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...