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..
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.