European Cakes & Tortes Weeks 4 & 5

For Week 4, we made the components for White Chocolate Mousse Cake w/Raspberry and the Fraisir Torte; and then we finished (as in, glazed and decorated) the Tortes that we made last week: the Whiskey Hazelnut Dome and the Chocolate Mint Cake.

Whiskey Hazelnut Dome. Nice sheen on the glaze...caramelized hazelnuts...chocolate plaques... I waited until the glaze set up a bit, so they won't slide off. The white specks on the chocolate are fleur de sel, an artisan sea salt hand-harvested from the top layers of salt pans. It has a characteristic crunch and its high mineral content gives it a clean, yet complex flavor. Due to its scarcity and the amount of labor involved in harvesting, these are one of the most expensive salts around. We sprinkled some on the chocolate plaques, and put them in layered with the mousse. And even though the recipe called for them, I totally regret using them at all. This salt supposedly pairs well with dark chocolate, but all it did was make the (otherwise heavenly) torte abominably salty. I had to perform a "surgery" when I took it home, which involved cutting out the salty interior and replacing it with a mixture of wafers and Nutella, which actually did the trick. I think it would've been better if the salt was used on the caramelized hazelnuts instead.

Chocolate Mint Mousse cake. There's a mint creme brulee insert in the cake. The refreshing mint balanced well with the richness of the chocolate mousse.

Then there was another problem: How to take these tortes home without melting them into oblivion in the summer heat. I put them back in the freezer until the very last minute, put them on a sheet cake board, and loaded them into my car (which was already scorchingly hot inside). I blasted the A/C all the way home, and managed to save them (well, they did melt a little).

For Week 5, we made the components for Palomo Torte and Rubies Torte, and finished the Fraisir Torte and White Chocolate Mousse Cake w/Raspberry.

Fraisir Torte has raspberry cream filling sandwiched inbetween pistachio spongecake layers, with fresh strawberries in the mousse. It is then topped with French buttercream and marzipan.

White Chocolate Mousse Cake w/Raspberry. Finished with raspberry gelee. I messed up on the amount of gelatin in the gelee and it ended up all weird-looking. Otherwise, the cake turned out very nicely.

The class on Week 5 felt extremely hectic, mostly due to the partner I worked with. She was quite slow, so I had to do most of the tasks to compensate. The quality of the people in the team definitely makes a lot of difference...

Artisan Bread Weeks 5 & 6

Week 5 Day 1 was a "Flatbread" day--naan, pita, and focaccia. Chef Ramzy (an experienced chef instructor who is notorious for his sharp mind and encyclopedia-caliber knowledge about food and cooking) came into our class to give us his focaccia recipe. His recipe contains milk and honey, making it very tender compared to other focaccia.

The focaccia is in the back. We sprinkled ours with Parmesan and rosemary, a winning combo. People kept snagging a bite every time they passed by--about a third of it was gone before the end of class. Our pita breads (in the front) turned out...fluffy. Chef said that they are the fluffiest pita breads she has ever come across. She was blaming the recipe, since everyone's pita turned out funny. But I know for sure that the oven temperature was set too low. These were supposed to be baked at 475F, but the oven was set at 400F, causing these to rise too slowly to form that characteristic air pocket. But they tasted fine, just like a regular sandwich bread.

Naan. We smeared it all over with olive oil and grilled them. Great smoky flavor--I took them home, and Mom had it with curry. She thought they were 'too smoky', but otherwise tasted great.

For Day 2...

German Mason's Bread. Made with rye flour, but it was so airy and light! ..Also, August 9th, was the 66th anniversary since the Nagasaki bombing. Wanting to commemorate that day and to honor the victims, I cut a stencil from foil and used it to dust a peace symbol on it.

Italian Breads. They're basically French Bread with shortening and sugar added to it, so they're more tender and definitely taste more enriched. They turned out beautiful!

Cuban-style breads, very much like French bread. Used to make Cuban sandwiches, they are traditionally baked with palmetto leaves on top instead of being scored. The leaves help the bread split open during baking. We just scored ours since we didn't have any palmetto leaves. I wonder if using bamboo leaves or corn husks have a similar effect?

Artisan Bread Weeks 3 & 4

I love taking the pictures of our breads; it allows us to compare the breads we've been making versus the ones we are making now. It's really cool to watch how our bread-making skills improve over the course of just a few weeks.

First of all, products from Week 3 Day 1...

Carrot Herb Bread. Has grated carrots, parsley and rosemary. The recipe called for thyme, (not rosemary) but we didn't have any--I love rosemary, so I didn't mind. It baked into a very flavorful bread with good carrot and onion flavor.

This one's called a Tiger Bread. The bread is smeared with a fermented mixture of yeast, flour and water, and allowed to proof. The coating bubbles and crackles as it ferments, and bakes into this cool leopard-like pattern (...so why is it named "Tiger Bread" instead of "Leopard Bread"? I have no idea). The bread is super-soft, with the coating creating a crunchy crust.

For Day 2....

Clockwise from top: Multigrain Sourdough, Nine-Grain, and Black Pepper Cheddar Bread. Multigrain didn't taste sour at all. It was delicious, with nutty flavor from the grains and subtley sweet from the honey. The 9-grain was pretty good too--unfortunately, it got a little overproofed and wasn't as light as we had hoped. The Black Pepper Cheddar actually contains no cheddar--we substituted Gruyere, since we were out of cheddar. Other groups subbed blue cheese, which interestingly gave the bread a bluish-grey color, but had no blue cheese flavor. Another group used Parmesan cheese, which was a great alternative.

Then on to Week 4 Day 1...

Foreground: Milk Bread. Those are Kaiser rolls way in the back. The Milk Bread is enriched with eggs, shortening and (of course) milk. Very tender and slightly sweet bread. We shaped ours into a boule, and a row of 5 rolls with almonds on top.

French Bread. For our third bread, Chef let us choose whatever bread we wanted to make, so we picked this one. It's versatile, and who doesn't like French bread? They turned out great, so soft on the inside, awesome crust--we're getting better at shaping the breads!

Then on Day 2...

Clockwise from the top left: Pullman loaves, Plie Breton (Brittany French rye), American hamburger buns. All our breads turned out beautiful and great, I think we had the best Pullman loaf in the class. Great flavor, texture, and color on all of them. One group made their hamburger bun the size of a tortilla (whether by accident or on purpose, I don't know); another group's Plie Breton's "lip" wasn't pressed down very well and the whole thing kinda fell apart; and all the other groups' Pullman loaves were somehow chewy on the outside, while ours were nice and crusty.

Close-up of the Plie Breton. Exactly the way they're supposed to look :)

I shall post Week 5 update very soon!

Farewell Tanu...

Tanu, our faithful feline for the last 15 years, passed away this morning at 5:15am. She came to us when she was about 1 or 2 years old--so we're guessing her age to be around 17, a good long life for a cat. The day was December 18th, one week before Christmas. Mom saw a shaggy-looking creature wandering around the street. It went up to the house across the street from us...but the family who lived there already owned a cat, and had to turn it away. Dejected, it hobbled down to the middle of the street where it sat there meowing. When Mom opened the gate, it immediately pranced toward us.

She was a skinny little thing--we could see her ribs through her long-haired coat. At this time, Dad hated cats (he had a "traumatizing" experience with cats when he was little), so we decided to just feed her some leftover turkey and then turn her away the next day. She slept in a blanket-lined box we provided. The next day came--and it was a blizzard. We just could not find it in our hearts to banish this defenseless (she was declawed) scrawny creature into the snow-whipping streets. So Dad (very reluctantly) agreed to let her stay until spring, when the weather warms up. Our plan was to put up posters around the neighborhood for a lost cat first thing during spring.

That never happened. Come spring, she had her own room, a litter box, a bag of food, and was wrestling with a wad of plastic bag in the living room. Few months later, I would wake up in the middle of the night to a snoring pile of silky fur on my neck. Or she would be wedged inbetween Mom and Dad, (who, by this time, had fallen in love with her).

Over the years, she brought us comfort and joy. Giving food to a cat with that irresistible Puss-in-Boots eyes certainly cured my Dad of his hatred toward cats. She begged for everything, from chicken to corn to pumpkin to bagels. Yes she loved corn. Even in her last days, she begged for corn, even though her weakened digestive system could no longer handle it.

I tried to celebrate her "birthday" as often as I could. December 18th is technically not the day of her birth, it's the day she arrived at our house. One year, I gave her yummy canned cat food for her birthday, and stuck a lit candle on it...unfortunately my plan kinda backfired and she ended up singed whiskers and eyebrow.

And did I mention she had the cutest googly eyes?? Who can resist those?

Here she is, munching on the wheatgrass I got from A la Carte Kitchen at school. She loved to snack on grass in general. Guess they helped with digestion and getting rid of hairballs.

Then on August 18th, 2010, she suddenly had a seizure. She was having spasms that lasted for a minute or two. She seemed dazed and confused after--we were so worried! But then she seemed fine for a while. Over the following few months, she had several episodes of these seizures/spasms. She gradually lost weight. In the last few months, her appetite dropped significantly; she stopped begging and constantly drank water.

During the last few weeks, she stopped eating altogether. Her weight dropped some more; she was just skin and bones, light as feather...as if she was getting ready to fly away to heaven. She slept pretty much all the time, and got up only to take a sip of water.

Two days before she went, she did this strange thing where she would weakly get up from her sleeping spot, wander a few feet away, lie down, rest for a few minutes, then slowly get up to wander a few feet further...and repeat the cycle until she finally settled down in her original sleeping spot. I took this picture during one of those "wanderings" that she did. It looks as if though she's looking up at the sky, praying to God to accept her soul, that she'll be there with Him shortly. Indeed, two days later, on August 19th, 2011 (exactly one year after her first seizure) she passed away early in the morning. We will be burying her tomorrow in our bakcyard, under a pine tree.

Farewell Tanu. You will be missed, you will always be in our hearts. We love you.

European Cakes & Tortes Week 1 ~ 3

Here's what's been going in my other class: European Cakes & Tortes

Just like my Advanced Plated Desserts class, we make the components of the tortes one week, then finish them the following week. Week 1 in this class consisted of making the cake bases for the tortes we'll be making the rest of the quarter. That meant a lot of cakes. I mean, a lot of cakes.

Each of us were assigned a cake. There were chocolate, pistachio, almond, fruit & nuts cakes (among others) to be made. I got assigned Hazelnut & Cherry Meringue cake. This cake is simply a meringue with a mixture of nut flour, chopped nuts and dried cherries folded into it. I needed to make enough to fill a few full sheet pans, which required me to quadruple the textbook recipe. And that meant...

...whipping 6 lbs. of egg whites. Took me 15 minutes just to separate cartons after cartons of egg whites.

Behold. 6lbs of meringue. This was my first time ever using the huge commercial-use mixer.

My classmate folding the meringue and the cake base together. He dealt with 2lbs of meringue.

One of the finished cakes. This one is the Emmanuel Sponge, with chopped pistachios and dried cherries on top. This is a component in the White Chocolate Mousse Cake.

So that was Week 1. I don't have picture from Week 2 because utter chaos ensued and had no time whatsoever. Basically Chef told us that each one of us has to make/assemble two tortes in one class time--that's two tortes in under 5 hours. All of us were stressed and scrambling, especially since we didn't have enough equipments to accomodate everyone.

Week 3, we finished the tortes we made in Week 2. One was Raspberry Mousse torte.

Chef told everyone to freeze the torte after putting the gelee on--but I knew better. I've done that before and the gelee got wrinkly. So I put mine in the fridge while everyone else put theirs in the freezer. Sure enough, everyone's gelee was wrinkled except for mine.

Fruit Charlotte. Ladyfinger base with Diplomat cream and lemon cream insert.

It would be nice if the instructor was a little more organized. Nevertheless, I still love this class.