Chocolate and Chemistry May 20, 2010

Tonight was our first venture into the world of chocolate, e.g. candies, dipping, melting, etc.  Let me just say that when I walked in, there was a lot of stuff on the board I didn’t understand that looked pretty complicated.  Eva was super excited (what else is new?) because she had done some chocolate tempering in her cake decorating class.  I told her she had to stand next to me because I knew somehow, some way, I was going to mess something up.  We started out class with some demoes of chocolaty things, the first some being ice cream.  Why is this important?  Because to make chocolate ice cream, you make ganache.  The traditional ratio is two parts chocolate to one part cream.  And once you make it, you use it.  If you stick it in the fridge or something and try to remelt it, it’s not ganache.  ”So what is it?”  Chocolate with cream in it.  Fair enough.  I’ve done ganache before and really the only trick is not to whip air into it.  Never take the whisk out of the chocolate and no bubbles.

The next thing we made was brownies.  But I thought Chef Mark didn’t ever make brownies?  True, but as he explained, “I’m sure you all have the perfect brownie recipe, so just think of this as one more.”  Something I never really thought about, brownies are expensive!  His recipe made a 12×18 sheet pan, used a crap load of butter, chocolate, and 10 eggs.  Not to mention the walnut pieces.  Nuts are expensive too.  Noted.  Nothing too tricky there, but we learned that Dutch process cocoa is made in a way that reduces the acidity of the chocolate.  Which then affects the ratio of baking soda and baking powder.  I think most brands are Dutch process and most of the time I use Hershey’s anyway which is fine, so I’m not looking at labels.  (Shh!  Spend money on real chocolate, Hershey’s cocoa powder rocks.)

After that, we had a ridiculously long lecture on the chemical make up of chocolate.  Are you ready, class?  Try and follow me here.  Chocolate is made of two basic ingredients, cocoa butter and a cocoa mass.  Cocoa butter is the active ingredient that makes crystals and changes the way it looks and shines and all that jazz.  Cocoa mass creates the flavor, but has nothing to do with crystals.  Some things to remember.  Chocolate doesn’t like heat.  It doesn’t like moisture.  It never wants to be rushed.  And chocolate doesn’t want to work hard.  Chocolate sounds like a little bitch to me.  All this means is that it should be melted veeeeeeery slowly, veeeeeeeeery gently.  Never EVER touch it with water.  One drop and you is screwed!

Okay, on to chocolate curves.  The reason you take all these steps is because you want whatever candy you’re making to look shiny and wonderful.  Just melting chocolate and covering something won’t do it.  So do this.  Chop up all your chocolate into bitty tiny pieces to allow for even melting.  For the record, chopping 20 ounces is a pain.  ”Where’s Allen?  I’ll give him $10 to finish this for me!”  About 20 minutes later, I was done.  My tendonitis is acting up.   Step two, melt all the crystals out, break everything up and essentially start your chemistry from the very beginning, which means taking it up to about 125 degrees.  Some of the assistants walked around with temperature guns, so that’s how we did it.  Fancy little gadget, those things.  But be careful, too much higher and you start to get into trouble with separation and stuff like that.  Step three, bring the temperature way down, about 82 degrees to start the formation of the good crystals.  Why?  I don’t know.  Be careful here too, much farther below 82 and you end up falling through the floor and you need to start the process over.  And step four, bring it up to the ‘use range’ which is between 86 and 90 degrees for semisweet.  Once it’s there, dip away and it’ll harden to a lovely sheen with no graininess or weird colors or anything that resembles a candy bar that just melted on your dashboard that you stuck in the fridge.

Are you bored yet?  I am.  But once you get here and you dip or make candy, to save the chocolate you just need to spread it out on some parchment and let it set.  You can retemper about 6 times before it starts to get weird.  We actually made something cool, we blew up little water balloons and dipped the bottoms, making chocolate cups.  Then we stuck a little brownie piece in the bottom and topped it with a little scoop of the chocolate ice cream.  It really makes a cute dessert, I’m not gonna lie.  So if I feel ambitious I might work this out for the future.

If you like chemistry, I suggest googling chocolate temper curves.  It gets really complicated really quickly, but the way I figure, I know the steps now so maybe this is one time where I can forgo understanding the why aspect.

Next week, dipped stuff and truffles.  Ooooooooh, truffles!

“I wish I could make this more difficult.” May 13, 2010

This was the last class in petit fours.  I thought we were going to make little cakes, but instead we had another buffet of cookies.  This time, much to the delight of Eva, we made parisian macaroons.  What are those?  They’re those colored cookies that look like two hamburger buns stuck together.  Made with two little meringue puffs, the color tells you the type of filling on the inside.  Pink is raspberry, yellow is lemon, brown is chocolate or coffee, green is pistachio, and so on.  Each group was assigned a type of macaroon to make, colors, fillings, and all.  To make the cookie is so easy.  Disgustingly easy.  At this point in the class, we’ve done a fair amount of essentials that one should know in order to make a huge amount of desserts.  We learned how to make meringues weeks ago and that’s really all this cookie is.  The trick to these however, is to make a stiff French meringue and then depoof it as you fold in the confectioners sugar.  Then it makes a really smooth, but stiff light batter.  And because it won’t hold a peak, as you pipe those little colored buttons, the top will be really smooth.  No Hershey Kiss cookies tonight!

Eva was super excited to do this, she’d been asking about these little cookies forever now.  So when we broke to go make ours, she was running in the kitchen shouting, “come on, come on!”  Then she ran some more to get bowls and spatulas…  Like Flash Gordon of baking.  So we’re whipping the meringue, she’s jumping, it was really too much, I couldn’t stop laughing!  Anita was also working with us so we filled the pastry bag and took turns piping our dots.  Of course, Eva went first.  The goal is to not get a point on top.  You squeeze the bag and when you release the pressure, you do a little swirl to kind of blend the tip into the rest of the cookie.  And the smoothness of this batter should really just absorb the folds.  It takes practice, it really does.  Eva’s going along alright, then she’s like, “I want to make a big one!” and comes out with two buttons the size of Jupiter!  Petit fours… petite?  We’re all gabbing about our piping technique and somehow end up with a song.  Song-ish.  More of a chant, maybe.  And it goes a little something like this…. Squeeeeeeeeeze STOP!  Squeeeeeeeeze STOP!  When it gets to my turn to make some buttons, I’ve got the Pastry Techniques Choir cracking me up with the world’s most annoying song, people are looking, Chef is all like, you are all craaazy!  Squeeeeeeeeeeeze STOP!  You’re not helping.  Squeeeeeeeeze STOP!  I really think we’re annoying people.  Squeeeeeeeeze STOP!  You’re making me laugh, I’m making meringue eggs now!!!  Honestly, I don’t know how we got a whole tray done, but we did.  Okay, so let those dry, then bake.

In the meantime we worked together to make some other things.  Coconut macaroons.  Again, so easy.  Heat egg whites and sugar until the sugar dissolve.  Pour over coconut until you can form it into balls.  Scoop on a tray, top with a cherry.  I made those, but I’m not sure why.  It takes some time to take wet coconut and make balls that stick together.  We also made some kind of raisin cookie.  Ewwww, raisins!  For the record, I did try one.  But just one.  Those were topped with an apricot glaze which Anita was making and a rum 10x glaze that Eva was doing.  That girl likes rum…  I asked Allen if she could have a little mug of it for herself, but maybe he thought I was kidding.  Oh yeah, we did cigarette russe also.  You’ll know them as those round tubes from Pepperidge Farm.  I think they sell them as straws for drinking cereal milk too.  That’s weird.  Those you just need to be fast with.  And probably have people to help.  They bake in round disks and when they come out of the oven, you have maybe a minute to roll all of them around dowels into the tube shape before they get hard.  It’s a real assembly line cookie.  But you can fill them with chocolate mousse or dip the end in ganache an maybe in some chopped nuts.  It’s an interesting decorative cookie.

After I finished my coconut balls and Eva stopped drinking rum, we assembled our parisian macaroons.  Our flavor was chocolate and the filling was ganache.  I flipped over some cookies for her, she piped a dot in the middle, and I made sandwiches.  The joke of the class is that we’re the speed demons in the kitchen.  We almost always get done first and I think it’s become our little game.  I don’t think it always works though because as soon as we’re done we have to find someone else to help, so we end up working more, not less.  But as we’re making the sandwiches I’m cheering her on going, “faster, faster!  I’m too quick for you, keep piping!”  For some reason, tonight was the night to be loud.

At the end we all divvied up the different flavors of macaroons evenly plus all the rest of the cookies and ended up with an excellent spread.  Chef Mark’s favorite thing to say is “This will make a great dessert for your Saturday night.”  Anita laughed and said, “I like how he thinks they even make it to Saturday night.”  True enough.  Half of my cookies didn’t even make it home.

Next week begins three rounds with chocolate.  No more partner stuff.  Just me and the chocolate, developing our relationship.

Eva posted a bunch of pictures from class on her Facebook, so check out some of the things we’ve made!

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2057866&id=1179656254&ref=mf

They’re almost as dangerous as brownies or chocolate cake May 5, 2010

As promised, this week was frozen desserts.  A similar set up to the hot dessert class, we did the first half as a demo and talked about a bunch of recipes and the second half we split up into groups and made a bunch of different things.  But first thing’s first: ice cream!!!  As with most desserts we’ve made thus far, ice cream comes in two forms, French or American.  The difference is pretty obvious when you think about it.  French ice cream has a creme anglaise base with eggs, so it’s like a frozen custard.  American ice cream is all milk.  Those damn French and their creamy eggy nonsense.  The ice cream demo was coffee, but no extract here.  This was a coffee infusion.  Extracts are great, never underestimate a decent extract, but when you can infuse the flavor of a real food?  I mean, really.  That $30 knock-off Prada bag looks pretty decent.  Maybe they’re full of silicon but they’re still boobs.  And blonde looks great on you even if your eyebrows are still brown.  All passable.  All fine.  But somehow, it’s not quite as good as the real thing.  This is how I feel about infusions.  But only as of today, because now I know how to do it.  And maybe because in my head I know it’s real.  So coffee… heat up your half and half, add in a bunch of coffee beans, and let it sit somewhere for an hour.  Strain out the beans and start your ice cream recipe from the beginning.  Easy, right?  But as Chef Mark likes to say, when people think of coffee, they expect the ice cream to be brown, which at this point it isn’t a never will be.  Food coloring is a wonderful thing.

While that froze, we learned how to make a Baked Alaska.  Don’t ask me why, but for some reason I’ve always thought a Baked Alaska was made out of fish.  Like a meringue covered salmon or something.  Alaska, water, fish?  Well, it’s not.  It doesn’t even have anything to do with Alaska, it was invented in Europe.  What it really is, is layers of cake and ice cream shaped like an upside down Noah’s Ark.  Then you cover the whole thing in meringue and put an obscene amount of curly cues and decorations on it.  Chef Mark didn’t have time to make ice cream before hand, so since you need it to be rather firm for shaping, he bought stuff from the store.  Bright green mint chocolate chip.  Check out the picture of it below.  Then imagine cutting into this gorgeous thing and seeing a neon green little boy’s birthday party ice cream inside.  Shaping it takes some work, three layers of roulade cake and about an inch of ice cream between the two.  Then you put walls around the whole thing and smoosh it all together.  Oh yeah, the baked part.  With the invention of blow torches, no need for baking.  A little brown all the way around and you’re good to go.  You can even freeze it after you torch it, which is what we did.  Chef Mark really spent some time decorating this thing, making waves and swirls and two effing doves on the top!  Really, there were two birds.  Two meringue birds.  But as he said, “There’s always an opportunity to dumb stuff down, so every once in a while, take some time to jazz it up a bit.”  Consider that while looking at the picture.  An ark made of Eddy’s mint chocolate chip ice cream, vanilla cake, and meringue.  And how much someone would pay for something so pretty, yet so simple and cheap to make.  Hmmm…

Next, parfaits.  Not like that stuff you get an McD’s.  Parfait in America describes that layered assembly.  Parfait in France describes a compound.  It’s sort of like a bavarian, I guess.  Eggs and sugar, heat sugar and water to soft ball stage, whisk until cool, add flavors, fold together with whipped cream.  We flavored ours with triple sec, but I didn’t see any orange food coloring, so I used red, and it is now pink.  How’s that for messing with your mind!  It’s pink but tastes like oranges!!!!

After that we had a choice of what to make next: chocolate chip cookies, almond tuiles, or vanilla piped sable.  Since we were done first, I pulled the chocolate chip cookies because they were the easiest.  Go down the list of ingredients one at a time and just keep adding to the bowl.  I told Eva I’d race her to see who could finish a tray first, but after being in a cake decorating class for three weeks she was concentrating on making these perfect little Keebler elf sized cookies and I was all SPLAT SPLAT SPLAT.  So my cookies were ugly, but I still won.  The thing about chocolate chip cookies is the same with chocolate cake or brownies, as Chef Mark says.  There are so many recipes and these things are made so often that no matter how you make it, someone will always go, “Yeah, but it’s not as good as my Aunt So and So’s.”  It’s not meant to be discouraging, but in the world of baking, no one will ever EVER have the perfect recipe for any of those things.  So make all the bavarians, cream puffs, frangipane tarts, and danishes you want, but for goodness sake, don’t make one damn chocolate chip cookie.  Noted.

Almond tuiles are yummy but weird.  The batter is really thin and what you do is after they come out of the oven, you shape them, warm, over a rolling pin.  Someone nailed it when she said, “This is how they make Pringles!”  They really do look like that.  I used them to scoop up the coffee ice cream, that was awesome.

The piped sable I found out after asking, are fairly similar to the butter press cookies I make around Christmas time, but the batter for these is softer because you pipe it by hand.  So yeah, it’s just a butter cookie and I can’t really explain it well, but when you see the picture you’ll think, yeah, I know those cookies.  They were my favorite.  Some lemon and orange zest, a dusting of sugar before they go in the oven.  Plus I ate some when they were still warm which is the best!

Next week, we’ll be working on petit fours.  We hit the first type already which were the cookies, or the sec category.  Next time we do the glace, which are those little cakes everyone thinks about, and frais, which is the fresh category, things like tarts or eclairs.  So stuff we’ve done before, just in doll size.

Raisins are just embarrassed grapes April 30, 2010

Every week when I walk into class, there’s a dry erase board with the outline of what we’ll be doing: the topic for the week, what we’ll go over, what will be demoed, and then what we’ll be doing.  So I make myself comfy, all ready to learn, and what does the board say?  Hot desserts… pudding.  PUDDING!  NOOOOOOOO!!!!!  Lord have mercy, bread pudding, rice pudding, pastry cream…  It was like I had died and gone to an egg yolk hell.  But okay, let’s just take it in stride.  These things must be learned and I should be a trooper.  You can’t love everything just because it has sugar in it.  Wait.  What?  Who am I?

Demo 1: Cheese souffle.  This was actually exciting.  I had my first experience with a souffle back in 2006, a cheese one even, and it was one of the most exciting things I had done in the kitchen.  I took pictures of it rising.  In the oven.  Seriously.  And it tasted good, but it was pretty eggy and not so much cheesy.  It was also kind of dense.  Not like an omelet or a quiche, but just not fluffy like souffles ought to be.  Demo begins, I’m familiar with the process, blah blah blah.  Well, what did I do wrong?  More cheese.  Don’t beat the whites stiffer than styrofoam.  And I cooked it too long.  The trick to souffles is that they sauce themselves.  The perfect souffle should be ooey gooey in the center so for service, you crack the top, scoop out a piece from the top or side, then dig in the middle for the ‘sauce’ and top.  “Ewww, uncooked eggs for a sauce?”  No.  You cook eggs and cheese or anything else at 400 degrees for 30 minutes and it’s done.  I promise.  Chef Mark’s cheese souffle was wonderful, way better than mine, but I kept my portion small.  For something so light it’s still pretty rich.

The rest of the class was basically organized chaos.  This is class #14, so we are familiar with the basics of baking and the terms we need to know, so the goal was to begin a dish, explain the rest of it, then set us all free to make sense of it.  We split into teams to make everything on the list.  Ellen and Valerie were making two bread puddings, they had a station set up next to mine.  Eva and I tackled the rice pudding but we each had to make our own batch.  To my left was the pastry cream team.  Behind me there were some crepe stations.  In the back, one person made chocolate mousse, another made compound butter.  Then we had teams of either three or four people to make souffles of our flavor choosing.

Rice pudding.  So easy.  It’s pretty much rice made with milk the way you make rice.  Then add some egg yolks and sugar, vanilla, add more milk and done.  The only thing is that you stir it like risotto, so pull up a chair and make no plans for the next 25 minutes.  As my rice was simmering, the bread pudding team was buttering brioche triangles furiously and panicking because Chef Mark would come in every five minutes and tell them to go faster.  I decided since I was mooching snacks from the crust bowl that I should probably help, we I went back and forth from buttering to stirring.  My pudding became more of a community effort because I was wandering away from it to help people do whatever and I think the assistants thought I was abandoning it.  Rice pudding babysitters.  We set up our souffle station next to Eva on a larger table and the two of us took turns with Anita, our third teammate, stirring a pudding or making a roux or doing whatever.  Oh yeah, souffles start with a roux.  I might have not done that step the first time either.  Oops.  Our flavor was vanilla and a little triple sec.  It figures, I think Eva is a closet drunk.  We had some raisins for the rice pudding (EW!!! ) that were soaked in rum and she seemed a little too excited about them.  Just saying.    I left all the raisins for her because, thank goodness, someone else next to me hated raisins, so I made an executive decision to make one without.  Raisins are just embarrassed grapes.

One other thing we were all supposed to do was make a crepe, but both Eva and I dodged it while we concentrated on rice pudding stirring.  Honestly, I don’t think I’ll ever make a crepe in my life.  I live alone.  There’s no need.  But it seemed not so difficult.  The first two or so are practice, then I think you can get the hang of it.

After everything was finished, Chef Mark set up a crepe suzette station on the demo table (that’s a crepe cooked in that compound butter someone made and folded in half twice) and we put everything else buffet-style around it.  On my plate from the top going clockwise: our vanilla triple sec souffle, chocolate souffle, rice pudding sans raisins, bread pudding, and a crepe filled with chocolate mousse and topped with some creme anglaise.  This is actually the plate I dropped off to Rebecca in the cooking class next door (hey girl!) because I didn’t want to contaminate my food with raisins.  EW!  The rice pudding we made turned out really good!  Creamy and sweet, but it’s a pudding.  Or custard, rather.  So it fills you up pretty fast.  But people liked it.  The bread pudding was awesome!  I had never had bread pudding before in my life, so I was kind of shocked at how much I liked it.  Honestly, I think it was the brioche.   I mean, come on.  Buttered brioche triangles?  What’s not to love?  Plus I don’t think they had enough custard to fill two containers, so it wasn’t as dense.  We all shared our souffles with each other and everyone’s tuned out great.  So next time you want to try it, don’t be afraid.  It’s not as hard as it looks.  I promise.

I’m so glad I didn’t have eggs for breakfast that morning like I had planned.

Next week: frozen desserts.  Ice cream!!!!!!

Some like it tarty. April 21, 2010

As planned, tonight’s class was the second in our series of mousses and Bavarians.  Last week being such a major success, I was confident going into this weeks plans.  This is the 13th class (I think… 13?  14?) and we’ve come a long way.  Chef Mark says make a French meringue, we got it.  Bloom gelatin.  Yes.  Stiff peaks, bavarois, creme anglaise, done done done.  The terms especially make everything a lot easier because it takes a recipe with 14 steps and really breaks it down to three or so.  Anyway, tonight Chef Mark demoed a bunch of stuff and we made variations on it.  First up: white chocolate mousse.  Sweet Jesus, Mary and Joseph, I love white chocolate.  If love had a taste, if joy had a taste, pure happiness is white chocolate.  Not like I’m gonna sit down and gnaw away at a hunk at it, but the flavor added to anything is right up my alley.  Chef Mark did not agree.  ”I don’t use the word ‘hate’ a lot.  But I hate white chocolate.”  Fine.  What did some fatty cocoa butter ever do to you? Show us anyway.  White chocolate mousse is technically a Bavarian.  It’s the gelatin.  But you can call it mousse, I don’t know.  I’m guessing it doesn’t matter anymore.  The two textures are extremely different, but I’m sure if you put a big bowl of white chocolate goop in front of the average eater and say, “hey, what’s this?”, the answer you’ll get is, “stuff.  Good stuff.”  Or possibly “pudding”.

Our variation on this was a dark chocolate mousse.  So Eva and I were just starting to make our creme anglaise and I asked Chef Mark if you put the chocolate in first to melt or the gelatin, and as he’s telling me, he dumps the chocolate into the pot!  Um… that wasn’t done yet…  Can you make a creme anglaise with the chocolate already in it?  Eva didn’t know.  I didn’t know.  I still don’t know.  But I have two small loaf pans in my fridge waiting for me to find out.  Eva and I agreed that if it’s messed up, it’s not our fault.

Second demo was a lemon mousse made with lemon curd that we had done in earlier weeks.  Let me say that the recipe for a fruit mousse has three ingredients.  3.  Two cups of fruit puree, 4 sheets of gelatin, and 2 cups of whipping cream whipped really soft.  That’s it.  I swear.  Our variation was a raspberry mousse.  Now you can sweeten the puree if you want by melting sugar into it, but Eva’s not a big sweet person and I love a tarty raspberry.  heehee  That’s funny.  :)  Chef Mark tasted ours and said it was too tart, but honestly, that’s on purpose.  It came out this brilliant pink color too, just glorious.  So it’s our Fabulous Tarty Mousse.  A few people ended up with it on their jackets.  It looked like they got shot with pink raspberry paintballs.

The last thing we made was an almond meringue cookie button.  I think I’m a big fan of cookie buttons, they look really cute and make the perfect companion to the dixie cup raspberry mousses.  So for these, a French meringue and some almond flour.  Bake to the consistency you like: dry all the way through or a little soft in the center.  Each of those have different fancy french names, so impress your friends and say, “Dahling, I made you some daquoise!”  Oh yay, some half-baked nut meringue cookies!  No one will be the wiser.

I have a small collection of fun words that sound important, but really aren’t.  You know when you break open an egg and there’s that  little white thingy that clings on?  Chalaza.  (Sha-LAY-za)  Entremet, a large plated dessert.  Gougere, cheese balls.  Detrempe and beurrage, parts of a laminated dough.  Bavarois, barely whipped cream.  Jaconde and pate a cornet, a thin cake with chocolate paste designs.  I’m starting to feel like a dictionary of totally useless words in the English language.  I like them though, they make me sound smart.  Like I know what I’m doing.  With all the elements we created today, I’m planning a well thought out dessert for Sunday, so I’ll take pictures and document testimonials.  I’m still thinking of a title.  But the phrase “cake hat” will be in it.  And “dark chocolate mousse balls”.  I might spell it moose balls for fun.  Maybe not.  :-/  Stay tuned.

What’s a Bavarian? April 16, 2010

Tonight’s class was all about mousses and bavarians.  I’ve made a mousse before, once.  Turned out well.  Bavarian?  What the hell does that mean?  I was about to find out.  Class was split in two this week, all demos in the beginning, then all ‘practique’ for the second half.  Part 1: Classic Chocolate Mousse.  Generally speaking, a mousse is something that’s light.  You begin with a flavor base, either sweet or savory.  Salmon mousse, perhaps?  My cats would eat it, I’m sure.  This week is chocolate.  Then enrichment, like egg yolks or butter.  I’d call this the fatty deliciousness part.  Then you lighten it with egg whites, cream, and even one of those CO2 thingies if you have them.  Fancy.  An optional element is texture, i.e. things that you could fold into it like small nuts, or in the case of Chef Mark, if you don’t feel like waiting for all your chocolate to melt, little chocolate bits.  Screw up your mousse and call it texture.  Very Julia Child, I’m digging it.  One of the most important thing with creams like this is to get your mis en place all set up because it’s not just the individual ingredients to worry about, but the pairing of them.  So you whisk egg yolks and liquor.  Melt chocolate and your liquid.  (Oh Lord, DO NOT use a microwave.  Sacrilege, honestly.  I can’t condone this kind of chocolate melting behavior.  You might as well melt it on your car engine.)  Turn the egg whites and sugar into a French meringue.  And whisk heavy cream to stiff peaks.  But don’t make it butter.  Or do make it butter.  Call it texture.

One thing I had never done before was whisk heavy cream by hand.  You’d be surprised to know it’s really not that hard, nor does it take a lot of time.  This technique is especially important when you get to Bavarians, but either way, just try it.  Get a mixing bowl and just move the whisk around.  Easy.  I like to think it connects you with the food more.  But I’m weird like that.

Once all those elements are ready, you fold everything together in stages.  A light touch and an air of hesitation is needed.  Always better to under than over-mix.  Eva and I stiffened our whites too much, so as a result our mousse was pretty thick.  But I liked it.  Can’t eat too much, but I’m going to go with that being a good thing.

Now Bavarians.  Some restaurants will trick you and call a Bavarian a mousse.  Why?  “Who knows what the heck a Bavarian is?” says Chef Mark.  Excellent point.  “But if it’s $12 for dessert… Bavarian.  Ooooh, fancy!”  Hah, not really.  A Bavarian is creme anglaise based, which is the same as an ice cream base: heated milk, egg yolks, and sugar with your flavoring.  The main difference though is that Bavarians use gelatin, so they’re sturdier.  People I think are kind of scared of gelatin, but the trick is to use it in moderation.  Err on the side of less, because the more you put in, the more rubber you’re going to get out.  So I said this was the more important thing to hand whisk cream for, right?  Right.  Reason?  The creme anglaise base, even after adding gelatin, is still liquid.  If you whisk firm peaks into your cream, you’ll be pushing a whipped island around trying to get it to incorporate.  We were told soft peaks, but really, you should stop before that.  Make it thick, yes, but it just needs to not be drippy.  The gelatin will hold it, I promise.

We ended up with 14 dixie cups filled to the brim with one recipe.  Freeze those and before serving, turn upside down, peel off the cup, glop some of that ‘textured’ chocolate mousse next to it and top with raspberry sauce or something.  They just need to come down in temperature enough to eat with a spoon.  Yum!  Denser than mousse, for sure, but very close to soft serve ice cream.  And richer.  Love.  It’s our Saturday night dessert, Chef Mark said.  Problem though… as Alan was taking our trays of cups to the freezer, he almost lost half of them!  As a result, some of the perfectly full cups I and my classmates had made spilled everywhere.  I told Alan if my date stormed out because my Bavarian dessert looked uneven, I was blaming him.

Last on our list were Lady Fingers.  Now the recipe for Lady Fingers is basically the same as a separated egg cake, or sponge cake.  But you need a stiffer consistency to be able to pipe it, so whisk the shit out of those egg whites.  These were so yummy, I’ve kind of been snacking on them all day.  But I wouldn’t use them in a tiramisu.  The ones from class are somewhere between a cake a a cookie.  Maybe like a stale cake.  And if you try to soak them in coffee and marsala, forget it, they’ll just fall apart.  But added to the Bavarian/chocolate mousse/sauce combo from earlier…. Drool…  Seriously, it was amazing.

Next week: fruit creams and a white chocolate mousse.  Heaven!

10 pounds of cake April 7, 2010

This week, we ended our short affair with cakes.  And how does one celebrate such a sweet tryst?  With more buttercream!!!!!  ::groan::  After overdosing during last week’s Italian meringue buttercream extravaganza, honestly, the last thing I felt like doing was turning 5 sticks of butter into a sweet, gloopy mess and cementing cake together with it.  Yeah, you heard me, 5 sticks.  You might as well cover a stick of butter in sugar and take a big ol’ bite.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.  To start we were to make a roulade, which is a thin piece of separated egg sponge cake that’s rolled with whatever you want.  Think of a jelly roll or a buche de noel.  Separated egg cakes are a pain in the patooty to make because they involve lots of bowl cleaning, lots of whipping, and paying attention to what your egg parts are doing.  But damn, does it taste good.

After working with Eva for a bunch of weeks now, we pretty much have this thing down to a science.  She loves running around getting spatulas, washing bowls, cutting butter into little pieces… I always ask her if she wants to whisk something or stir something, but no, she’s cool with her sous chef duties.  Which is fine, but it means I take the fall if anything comes out poorly.  Dislike.  So the sponge cake came out great, no issues there.  But the dreaded buttercream…  This time we made the whole egg version, which is totally unstable and fussy as an actual icing, but excellent in fillings because it’s rich and can absorb a lot of flavors.  Step one, boil sugar and water to soft ball which means, doing the finger thing!  Stephanie G. and Ellen were next to us again, soaking their fingers while Eva ran off to get a spoon.  Ellen called me a wuss.  I’m okay with that.  I told her if she was really hard core, she should test ours AND hers, so we ended up with all of us taking turns: spoon, finger, spoon, finger.  No bandaids, no burns, perfect sugar.  Then whisk all those damn eggs and pour sugar SLOWLY into it.  Last week I got sugar everywhere, but this time I found the magic spot.  No mess.  So far, so good.  Continue to whisk and ice, then add an entire grocery store’s worth of butter.  So I checked the temperature and I swear, it seemed fine to me… Eva and I start adding the butter and when almost all of it was in, I’ll be damned, it started splashing everywhere!  NOOOOOOOO!!!!!  Chef Mark comes by and he goes, “Messy messy!  What’s going on here!”  Apparently the eggs were still too warm.  He looked skeptical that we could fix this mess, but I said to Eva, “Let’s just keep whisking it over ice and see how we do.”  5 minutes go by.  7 minutes.  10 minutes.  And then…… YES!  It has been reborn!  So I’m all excited, “Our buttercream resurrected itself, it’s an Easter miracle!”  A statement which I found to be hilarious.  Most other people, not so much.  To make the roulade, we spritzed our cake with some vanilla syrup and spread on what should have been a thin layer of buttercream.  Yeah.  Not so thin.  We also got to try a slice of the one Chef Mark made topped with a chocolate ganache.  As he poured the ganache over the cake, it sounded like we were watching porn.  Shiny, dark, chocolate porn.

Lastly, Chef Mark decided, hesitantly, that he would give us his recipe for chocolate cake.  Chocolate cake sounds easy, but to do it right is actually pretty hard.  Why?  Because, he says, everyone who likes chocolate cake knows what the best chocolate cake is.  To translate, everyone likes something different about it: more chocolate, moister, fluffier, denser, whatever.  While testing for this recipe, he made a bunch of cakes side by side, picked the elements he wanted and combined them into one recipe.  This is a technique I should try.  If I had time to make 10 cakes.  I need more taste testers.  So he made the cake which I will certainly NOT share the recipe for (sorry) and turned it into a Boston Cream Pie, which is slicing the cake in half and filling with pastry cream.  Oh Lord, pastry cream.  As if buttercream wasn’t bad enough, I think I’m gaining weight just looking at it.  Oh yeah, top that with ganache, too.  I took that home, so I haven’t tried the cake yet.  I also took home about three pounds of buttercream.  Someone. Help. Me.  If you would like some, just let me know, I’ll be more than happy to share.

Next week: Bavarian Cream and Mousses

I’ve been eating buttercream for hours, I’m going to be sick… March 31, 2010

Today was our stint in cake decorating.  Both vanilla buttercream and cake made last week were ready for some massive con/des-truction.  None of this I had ever done before, nor had I ever had the desire to do before, but I might as well participate.  At least make the cake look nice so people will eat it.  First thing’s first, did I mention how buttercream is never at the correct temperature?  Well, this is true.  Our cottage cheese buttercream got steamed a bit to give it that glossy shine, but it took a few trips to the hot water to keep it lovely.  What a pain.  So while Eva was working that situation out, I was attempting to cut my cake into even layers.  Cakes bake in a dome, but you can use the top as a middle layer.  Eff that, I scalped my cake and snacked while I worked.  I believe I started a trend in the work room.  Then I cut the rest into two layers.  Turned out pretty even if I do say so myself.  My table companions, however, did not fare so well.  One minute Stephanie G. is cutting and the next minute one of the assistants is covering her hand in blue band aids.  What’s happening?  We’re cutting cake, not 2x4s!  But what was really hilarious was when she put on a latex glove and called herself the Michael Jackson of cake decorating.  So back to focusing on making even layers, when Ellen, her partner, almost slices off a finger!  Hot mess.  A hot, cakey mess, those two.

After making layers, we could fill it with either the vanilla buttercream we made or one of the flavored ones, praline and mocha.  I picked mocha, yum.  So to ice a cake with buttercream and make it look nice, there’s a mantra: Center – Out, Top – Down, Bottom – Up, Center – Lift.  There, now you can all ice a cake!  Sorry, it’s just way to boring to explain, but around the room we had a large variety of cake decors.  One of the women behind me had been doing it for something like 15 years, so poof!  Her cake was done in 15 minutes!  A lot of people said mine looked great and Stephanie G. called me the star pupil.  Not sure how I feel about that.  I’m simultaneously proud and embarrassed.  It got worse when I said, yeah, too bad I’m never doing this again.  That’s right.  I don’t like cakes.  Cupcakes.  Pies.  Tarts.  Small things I like.  Minis.  And fondant?  Ugh, don’t even.  If I have to choose between rolling and icing, I’ll ice.  But my motto is “If you can’t pipe it, it’s not worth doing.”  I stand by that.

In any case, my cake came out looking very lovely and even, much better than anything I’ve ever made before.  Then we did a border around the edge.  I made little star dots out of chocolate buttercream.  I tried to make shells, but the tube was really small, so they just looked messy.  Then we had some paper cones which are used for really fine piping work and filigree.  Most people wrote Happy Birthday because that’s what Chef Mark wrote, but I chose something a little more unusual… Photo below.  :)  Now keep in mind that I haven’t written in cursive since grade school, let alone write in chocolate, so please forgive the terrible penmanship.

To end class, we made marzipan roses which Chef Mark had demoed for us last week.  I think mine turned out really nice!  Now THAT is something I will make again, even if people don’t eat them.  Who would, really?  Marzipan?  Blech.  But I had enough to make two, so two it was.  I will be more than happy to make marzipan roses for your next occasion.  And puff pastry.  If you’re nice.

The Trouble With Buttercream March 24, 2010

Cake Day #1.  BOOYAH!  I got to class mad early as usual and was chatting with Chef Mark and some of the assistants.  “We’re starting cakes today, are you excited?” Chef Mark asked.  I told him cakes are totally my thing, and to leave a world of rolling and waiting and rolling some more, yes, I am excited.  We got the basic rundown of the types of cake you can make, their differences in texture, taste, and how you would go about constructing a large cake using each type.  He gave us a demonstration on how to make a sponge cake which is made without using chemical leaveners.  Baking powder and baking soda make the traditional high-ratio cake rise, but sponge cake gets fluffy by the way you incorporate air into the batter.  Sounds easy, but it’s one of those things you have to see to know if you’re doing it right.  How do you know when it’s fluffy enough?  You know when you know, you know?  That was the demo, but we made a regular good ole American yellow butter cake.  My partner Eva and I got to work and busted out that batter in a hot minute.  There’s a technique to cakes.  An order.  A ritual, if you will.  But we’ve got that shit down.  I think we’d make a good kitchen team, no putzing around aimlessly for us.  So Eva is evening out the batter in the pans, and I’m sticking my finger in the bowl.  You know, making sure it’s clean… Yeah… “You’re eating it!  Stop eating it!!!” she’s yelling at me, laughing like crazy because I am clearly a child.  Yes mom.  Even though everyone else is doing it too.  One more lick while she’s not looking.

The next thing we talked about was buttercream.  Oooohhhh buttercream.  Many different kinds, many different preparations, and many different uses.  American vs. French, to meringue or not to meringue.  I tend to stick with the American version.  It’s like birthday cake icing, can take on a lot of colors, everyone knows the flavor, you make it in 5 minutes.  And stability is an issue.  Anything made with meringue tends to be unstable in different temperatures depending on what you make.  But today we did a classic French buttercream with an Italian meringue.  What’s Italian meringue?  Italian men are hot: Italian meringue = cooked/hot eggs.  Step one is to boil some sugar to the soft ball stage, which I’ve done before with my handy dandy candy thermometer which is… oh… wait a second… No thermometers in the school.  Fine, I’ve done that before to, I know what soft ball feels like.  But Chef Mark raises the bar and sticks his damn finger right in the sugar!  NO NO NO, I am NOT doing that.  I came here with 10 fingers, I’ll leave with 10.  “Oh, it’s fine, just wet your hand, do it fast, no big deal.”  What. Ever.

Eva and I are standing next to Ellen, this chatty, bubbly girl, and I see her soaking her hand in ice water.  “Are you gonna do it?” I ask.  “Hell yeah, I’m a champ!” she says.  Eva and I are there cheering her on, people are turning around like, WTF are you all doing?  So Ellen gets ready… “I’m gonna do it, I’m gonna do it…”  She’s taking her hand out of the water, close to the pot… “No, I’m not ready…”  We’re still giggling and cheering.  Her hand goes into the pot and right into the water so fast I think Flash Gordon would be impressed.  And?  She says, “I didn’t do it, I wussed out.”  She actually wussed out twice more before she got it done.  Once.  And that was it.  Brownie points at our table.

Step two is whisking your egg whites while pouring a slow stream of sugar between the spinning whisk and the bowl, but don’t hit the whisk because sugar flies everywhere and you don’t cook your eggs.  Right, YOU try it.  Find that magic spot where you don’t make a mess, because I tell you, I didn’t find it.  In the end, our buttercream looked a little lumpy, but our consolation prize is that buttercream is so finicky that the only thing consistent about it is that it’s never ever the right temperature.  So during use, one must always keep hot water and ice on hand to try and maintain near perfection temperature.  So by next week when we build our cake tower, we’ll be able to whisk it into something usable.  Oh yeah, I liked that bowl a little too.  “Stop eating it!!!”

We didn’t get to take home anything this week, we’re going to be building and decorating our little cakes next time, but we ate the sponge cake Chef Mark demoed for us, spritzed with some simple syrup and liquor, cut into thin layers, and separated with chocolate buttercream.  Topped with… wait for it… homemade chocolate ice cream!  Heaveeeeennnnn!    To make good homemade ice cream is also a pain in the ass, but so worth it.  Maybe.  Ben and Jerry do alright too.

“To have a second draft, there must be a first draft.” March 17, 2010

This week we wrapped up the first segment of the course which was doughs and baked off all of our danishes we had made the week before.  Danishes can be made into lots of fun little shapes, but we stuck with three: diamond, square, and pinwheel.  To begin, we rolled out the dough to about 1/8″ thick which proved to be more difficult than I remember… I don’t know what axis I’m living on, but it makes my dough much larger on the right hand side.  Blast.  Then you cut 2×2″ squares to make each of the shapes.  The fun part is that each shape bakes up to what looks like a different size, but it’s really the same piece of dough.  I’m going to use that to trick people on diets.  Take the small one, no big deal!  It’s teeny tiny!  The diamond: take two corners of the square and fold to the center, overlap slightly, push a dimple in the middle.  Big and odd looking, but alright.  Square: fold all four corners into the center and push.  Someone next to me said it looked like a diaper.  I concur.  NOT cute.  Pinwheel: the class favorite.  Cut from each corner almost to the center, take every other point and fold into the center, push.  Fantastic, 15 danishes of varying shape.

We made a bunch of different fillings for these, pastry cream (EW!), cream cheese, and almond paste, and topped with a cherry, cooked apples, or walnuts.  Then bake.  Paint with either apricot glaze, rum glaze, or nothing and boom, wonderful finger-lickin danishes.  Chef Mark gave us the pairings to do, but really, you can do what you want.  I put the pastry cream in some of them anyway, but I’m not eating any more because I think I’m boycotting puddings.  Except creme brulee.  I mean, come on!  Anyway, after we painted our glazes on and sat down, my partner, Eva, says, “I put rum on everything,” and giggles.  Haha, oh my…  I started talking to the woman in the class who works for a catering company and I asked her if she likes cooking for than baking.  No way, she says, I’m totally a baker.  I said it was easier for me to make mistakes in baking and someone said, yeah, but you can fix them easier in cooking!  My response was, maybe, but when I cook something bad… it’s REALLY bad.  I made some not-so-great croissants the other day, but I’ll be damned if they’re going to waste.  Bread and chocolate!  It didn’t rise like it should, but it still tastes alright.  I figure if you put sugar on something, I’ll probably eat it.

One question I brought up to the class was, if you make something according to someone else’s recipe and sell it, is that some kind of copyright infringement?  The general answer is this: if I add an extra teaspoon of vanilla to something or add things in a different order, the recipe becomes mine.  You can’t copyright a recipe, but Chef Mark said it’s really a moral issue that you shouldn’t be passing off someone else’s recipe as your own.  So say I made a chocolate cake and added all kinds of nonsense to it or changed the texture or something, that’s within the bounds of moral rightness.  Another fun fact?  87% of the carrot cakes he made in his catering business were sold to lawyers.  Why?  Brain food.  Hm.  And the first snack you should offer a foreign dignitary visiting the US?  The danish.

So I screwed up the croissants I made at home and became a cautionary tale for the class.  I never should have admitted that.  But I learned valuable lessons.  1) Always let the dough rest until it’s ready, not for just the time the recipe says.  What do they know anyway?  2) Proof my dough completely before baking at 80 degrees.  Very important in laminated doughs.  Too excited, I guess.  3) Turn down the heat and crack a window if I’m going to be rolling.  And 4) Never ever use a baking recipe out of the Joy of Cooking.  Sorry JoC, you have let me down too many times in that chapter and I am done with you.  Epic fail credit is shared.  The quote above was Chef Mark’s quote to motivate people to try, try again.  Which I will.  But next time, half a recipe.  I still have 7 failed croissants.  Danish, anyone?