Valentine's Day Recap

Once Christmas is over, Valentine's Day comes in with vengeance.  These are the Valentine's Day themed treats we made for La Bonne Vie.

First up, Blackberry Macarons (which I lovingly refer to as "the Big Macs")

Giant macarons filled with cream cheese filling and blackberries.
Next, the Chocolate Mousse Domes....

Chocolate mousse, with vanilla creme center, chocolate chiffon cake base, finished with an uber-shiny chocolate glaze.  If you look closely, you can actually see my reflection on one of the domes.
The usual chocolate-dipped strawberries got dressed up with pink hearts.  I gave the other design a modern and classy/chic look.

And of course, a Valentine's Day inspired flavor macarons--Red Velvet.  A bit of cocoa powder and lots of red powder dye gave it the intense color it needed.  These are then filled with cream cheese filling.  The pink hearts are separate batter dyed pink then piped on before baking.

These are our members for now--Raspberry cream puffs, Lemon Chiffon, Strawberry tarts, Red Velvet cupcakes, and Fruit Strips.  Our menu is constantly shifting and changing according to season.  In a sense, it's annoying, but at the same time challenging and keeps everything interesting.

Holiday Recap--Christmas goodies at La Bonne Vie

During the holiday season, we had a special limited-edition Christmas pastries at La Bonne Vie.

We had vanilla and chocolate eclairs decorated with cute spun sugar toadstool.

And what's Christmas without a Buche du Noel? These are filled with rich praline creme, slathered with hazelnut buttercream and cut into individual portions.

 On top of the insane amount of macarons--of our usual flavors--that we had to make, we also had the holiday limited-edition macaron flavors.  These are the Eggnog macarons, filled with eggnog buttercream and sprinkled with a bit of nutmeg.  I used eggnog compound and *ahem* dark rum to make it extra noggy.

And these are bicolored Peppermint macarons;  both the shells and the filling contains peppermint flavoring.  These were for a special order--and hopefully I won't have to make them any more.  This flavor requires a double-batch batter, with one white and the other colored pink.  The batters are placed separately in two small pastry bags, then placed in a large one--so you get two different colored bags together in one bag.
This results in bicolored macs.  Unfortunately, this also resulted in an overstuffed pastry bag that my tiny hands had to strain to squeeze and pipe.

I was pretty certain that I'll be getting arthritis or carpal tunnel after I was done...
But they turned out absolutely beautiful!

Peppeminty pink-and-white swirly perfection!  The customers were very happy!
Other new pastries includes these Raspberry Financiers.  The base is hazelnut financiers filled with pastry cream, then topped with raspberries.  The whole thing is glazed with apricot gel (it helps "glue" everything together and also prevents the fruits from drying out), and finished with snow sugar and pistachios.

When chef made these first, they looked awfully familiar...then upon some Google search, I found some Parisian pastry shops that sell something very similar.  Not only that, these types of pastries are actually quite common in Paris.  It's been a few months since we started selling these, and they are kinda-sorta-maybe popular.  There are days when these disappear pretty quickly, and then other days when they don't sell at all;  it's really hard to predict.  The only that has been constantly selling really well are the macarons. :P

The Holidays recap--Grand America gingerbread house

Wow, has it been really four months since I wrote last?  I have just been extremely busy, and my laptop getting infected with some gnarly viruses didn't help either.  In my last post, I have mentioned that the holiday season is going to be like the passing of a hurricane.  Well...that was an understatement.

It felt more like an Armageddon.

Everyday was 13 to 14 hour-shift, and over one hundred reservations for the hotel's High Tea became the norm.  I mean, the paycheck was nice and plump, but physically I was very much drained.  My hands were starting to develop arthritis/carpal tunnel from piping out an INSANE. NUMBERS. OF. MACARONS.
It was getting to the point where we were making at least two batches every day.  I kid you not.

But other than the crazy work hours, the holidays are very eventful and fun!  We have a tradition of making a large gingerbread house for display every Christmas.  This year, the new exec pastry chef took things to the next level--he designed and built a life-sized gingerbread house.  When completed, this thing was large enough to accommodate several people (as long as they were under 5'10" in height)...

The gingerbread house required a wooden frame to support its massive structure.  Then planks after planks of real gingerbread were staple-gunned to the frame.
This is one of the sides of the house during construction.

And just to show how huge this thing is, I took a pic of one of the workers laying gingerbread shingles on the roof.  Apparently, this gentleman is a former roofer before he got into the culinary field.

Of course, a house must have windows!  The windows for this house was made from sugar, cast inside a wooden frame.

The interior was laid out with slabs of rice Krispy treats for flooring and colorful chocolate truffles, gumballs, and candy canes for wall decor.

 
Then right by the window was a toy elf indulging on macarons...which, by the way, are real, made by none other than me and my coworker.  We were wondering where the heck some of our supply disappeared to.

 
The finished house.  Yes, it's massive, it's cool, pretty....but alas, the colored windows made it really hard to see the inside.  And what's the point of decorating the interiors if no one can even see it?
And here are the stats for this house.  We ended up using a whopping 1200 lbs. of flour, 400 lbs. of sugar, 1200 eggs, 160 qts. of molasses, 800 lbs. of powdered sugar, 200 lbs. of rice Krispy treats, 200 lbs. of isomalt, and 25 lbs. of chocolate!

And what did we do with it after the holidays?  Apparently the whole thing went into garbage.  Yep.  It was heart-wrenching.  It was painful.  I even suggested that we summon a bunch of children to make their Hansel and Gretel fantasy come true (what kid wouldn't want to chow down on a life-sized gingerbread house??). But alas, it was carted out and was never seen again...