This week was (ignoring the ominous presence of chocolate on day 1) the best so far. That is without a doubt because we got to make bread. Every semester I'm always fervently looking forward to the few scarce lessons on breadmaking, because I love bread - both making and eating it. I love the smell, the starters, the kneading, the proving, and just simply squatting by the oven and watching them transform into these beautiful loaves.

Ok, so the week started off with chocolate, which wasn't really too good..I've developed a little dislike for both making and eating chocolate ever since I took up this course..still ok with dark but totally put off with milk and white..but we have to complete the task since it is part of our lesson.

Chef did one with a chocolate rose in demo, which was really pretty. I did my decorative piece by spreading some colour and white chocolate on a crumpled piece of silicon paper and curling it up like a fiery wave. I also got Lucile, my French classmate to teach me some French so that I could write "avec tout mon amoun" on my box, which means "with all my love". I should have made my decorative piece smaller so that the outline of the box would be more visible..occured to me only after I made the piece, so I did not try to push my luck and trim it for fear of breaking the entire piece (as I had only made one).

On day 2 we made panettone, a sweet Christmas yeast bread which originated from Milan, Italy, and left it to ferment slowly overnight.

Ditto for the biga starter which we made a day ahead for our ciabatta lesson. And we made Bienenstich aka Bee Sting, which is a German sweet bread sandwiched with mousseline cream and topped with a crunchy almond and honey crust. A myth goes that it was called bee sting because when the baker made the bread, a bee got attracted to the honey topping, flew over and stung him. This bread is quite nice..it is rather moist and soft, and not overly sweet (but don't be fooled it has alot of calories from the buttercream filling).

Day 2 ended exceptionally well as Chef Joseph is one awesome chef and he made some amazing sourdough bread with olive oil and vinegar during class for us to munch on at the end of the lesson. It was super yummy with a crusty exterior and a nice, soft crumb inside.

Day 3 was a wierd day of sorts, because we had to go to a new kitchen due to ongoing renovations. It was 2 floors down out usual haunt, tucked away in a small dark corner, with really dim lighting to complete it all. We baked our panettone, deep fried our churros and baked 'em lovely ciabattas, making a tarte flambe with the leftover ciabatta dough (the tart's basically a dough baked with creme fraiche and sweated bacon plus onions).

Traditionally, the making of ciabatta (Italian slipper bread) is a long process so that the bread can develop a good flavour as well as better/ lighter crumb structure.

Anyways, within the short period of class time that we had, we still managed to produce some of this awesome bread. I love how there is a rather special technique to handling and shaping this bread..the key is to be patient and gentle..no kneading on this one!

Anyways, by far the best part of today was tasting the wonderful german stollen. Though it was only for demonstration purposes, we got to try the bread and it was just awesome, especially with the homemade marzipan inside..yum yum..

I did a crazy thing last week. Guess what? I walked home from Rozelle after work - a total of about 10km. Of course I kindly treated myself to some energy boosting pastries on the way, with a walnut irish soda bread roll from Bowan Island Bakery and an almond croissant from Sunny's Hot Bread Shop. Both tried and ticked off my list of patisseries/bakeries that I wanted to visit. Bourke St Bakery still ranks number one.

I was also extremely productive over the weekend, finishing all my assignments for the school term, and testing out my self-created gateau for the exam twice - that set me back by a considerable amount of money, having to buy the cream, super expensive almond meal, pistachio and praline paste etc.

Alright, off to work. Maybe I'll take a break this weekend..just sit down with a nice cup of hot tea and my newly borrowed bread science book from the library.

Right. If you think my mood ain't so good right now, you're spot on. That's because the internet hanged right after I typed my post for week 3. Now I have to retype and maybe the feelings that I put in the previous post would've been lost.

Anyways, this week was a sweet affair where we made lots of confectionary and petit fours. Only two things caught my attention. The first one was the colouring of moulded chocolates. Chef showed us how to use cocoa-butter colouring/ paste, luster dust and transfer sheets to design our chocolates..all these used properly really makes a chocolate go 10 notches up in term of appearance. I especially loved the copper luster dust which gave my yellow-coloured chocolates a lovely orange hue with just a very light dusting. I think the hue can't be seen from the photo but it's the two pieces in the bottom right hand corner. The fudge and caramelised marzipan/ fruits were the other part of the lesson which I didn't like because I think caramelised fruits are more for display rather than consumption (the caramel is horrible and too hard and sticks to your teeth, and the fudge is way too sweet).

The second thing which got my attention was marzipan modelling. Chef Joseph asked me during class whether I liked marzipan modelling, as I previously did prince and rapunzel for my croquembouche, an elf for my buche de noel, and most recently a piglet on top of the fruits that we were supposed to model. I said no, but I kept thinking about it when I got home..I'm not sure whether I like it, but it's just that I find it therapeutic and really satisfying when I complete a figurine. Maybe I need to take up a course on this when I've saved up enough money again. Anyways, during modelling, we got to use the spray gun, which is a totally awesome tool! It makes the stuff look so real..check out the red spray on the pear and apple..the right technique is to hold the spray gun at a distance from the fruit and spray so as to get a thin, even colour coat. My only complaint? THE GUN IS NOISY. Hahaha.

From left to right: That's the Gianduja on the left, which is pretty similar to fudge, except that it is made up of chocolate, praline cream and paillete feuilletine (pronounced as pie-teh fil-tin - puff pastry crumbs). Second, nougat montelimar - which is a soft nougat hailing from the city of Montelimar in France. And third, Pate de Fruits - French for fruit jelly. This jelly was gelled using a combination of yellow ribbon pectin (a citrus-based halal alternative to gelatin, made from plant cell extract) and tartaric acid (to activate the pectin).

Alright. Off to do my assignments. I'm gonna complete all in the next two days so that I can concentrate on planning for my exam gateau and theory.

At the start of Week 2, I carelessly sliced off part of my finger after deciding to clean the freezer at my workplace but decided not to go to the doc. It hurtortunately, it was my right hand so I could still go to school. Even if it had been my left hand I would still have gone to school anyway - I wouldn't think of missing school because of a stupid finger injury. Anyways, Superior was spent doing some classical French desserts. First we did petit fours, which means oven-baked bite-size cakes. These are traditionally covered in a thin layer of fondant and given a little decoration on the top. I was trying to do a little sweet asian theme..I think I should have designed some with mini chocolate fans to replicate those old style chinese paper fans...

We also learnt how to make inverse puff pastry, where the butter is combined with flour to make a beurre manie dough, which goes on the outside of the detrempe, giving it a much more flaky texture and less susceptibility to shrinkage. Chef showed us how to roll out the pastry and give it its required turns really nicely by hand, and I got a really super flaky pastry, so I was very happy. This puff was also made with cocoa powder which was quite nice..a little bitter, but I really like the taste when it is accompanied by grand-marnier flavoured chiboust cream. Sadly though, my chiboust cream didn't hold because I didn't cook out my pastry cream properly and my Napoleon dessert went poof. No excuses that it was Friday the 13th. I just did this one badly, period.

The chocolate and orange mille feuille above is made by Chef Joseph and I really like his decoration on the side. The lovely chocolate line design on the top is made by a technique called feathering, where we palette a layer of fondant on the gateau, pipe lines of chocolate across and then run a skewer through quickly in the opposite direction of the chocolate lines. You have to do this fast as it will not work once the fondant or the chocolate sets.

Moving on the more delicate stuff...we made some marzipan roses and leaves as mise en place for our Le Fraisier gateau. The first rose I made (on the left) - it turned out like a cabbage hahaha..second one turned out better but not enough petals..the third one on the right is the best one...just like saying goes, practice makes you better...and then one day perfect. But I still wasn't pleased with the third rose, so I went home and made some more roses and some different flowers..

...which subsequently went onto my gateau for presentation.

Le Fraisier is a French strawberry torte made with genoise soaked in kirsh, kirsh-flavoured mousseline cream and strawberries, then decorated with marzipan. I didn't really like green on my cake so I asked Chef if I could do a brown marzipan sheet for the cake top, but Chef said it had to be a traditional colour ie. either pink or green...so I chose to do a dullish, more natural green one to resemble grass. I then used my fork to make a grass-like design over the marzipan. Chef also had a cool patterned roller which you could simply roll over the marzipan but I didn't use it as I wanted a more abstract design. As to what I thought of the cake? Genoise is not too bad a sponge: I think it soaks syrup better than joconde. But I don't like this cake..it just has too much fattening mousseline cream inside with little texture. The Napoleon was a thousand times better.

Welcome back to Superior Patisserie.

First week of school was tiring but good. We have to attend early morning classes just slightly after dawn all the way till dusk, and morning temperatures have dropped drastically to about 10 degrees celcius as we are approaching winter. Nonetheless, we always have cakes and sweet treats to keep us company, don't we?

First up, we made a buche de noel, which is basically a christmas log cake (buche means log). Traditionally, the log cake takes the form of a roulade with a filling like jam or buttercream inside, and decorated outside with ganache to make it look like a fallen tree log. However, the modern approach to making the logcake has changed, incorporating different flavours, textures etc. We did ours with an almond dacquoise, chocolate mousse and cointreau mousse using a bombe mix, and a layer of strawberry and raspberry jelly sandwiched in between, and then glazed with dark chocolate ganache. I still had marzipan leftover from last term so I decided to make a little elf figurine as my decorative piece.

A Brasilia gateau was next on the  cards. This gateau is very similar to the Opera cake we made last term. It is made up of alternating layers of cocoa-based joconde soaked in rum syrup, and caramel buttercream (omg, buttercream again...terribly fattening), then finished off with a shiny caramel glaze and decorative nougatine piece. The caramel glaze was a little tricky as it is best seived through a mousseline cloth twice to get a smooth glaze, and you have to be careful not to aerate it otherwise the glaze will have bubbles in it. Also, if the glaze is too cold, it has a dull look and becomes lumpy; if it is too hot, it runs off the cake and looks too thin/transparent (and probably cause you a headache by melting your buttercream at the same time). I did a simple scroll nougatine piece for my gateau instead of cutting triangles like many others did, as chef did triangles during the demo. Chef said he liked it alot...I like it too but I kind of think this whole cake looks too brownish...I'm going to try doing coloured nougatine if I have a chance next time. Might be a little wierd 'cos of the naturally brownish colour of nougatine but worth a try anyway.