Ending the Year with Chocolate

Last class before Christmas break! Right away we started Chocolates class with making the Eiffel tower. Ready or not, you better wake up! :P

Although the tower itself wasn't difficult, it took a surprising amount of time to build simply because pieces kept breaking! It was frustrating at times, to say the least. But at least it all came together in the end. "Pretty good for a first time," said Chef.

From there we moved onto chocolate bars. SAIT sells two chocolate bar flavours: passionfruit and salted caramel. At the end of last year, when I was a first year, we all had the chance to design the wrappers for the chocolate bars. But in the end, the school just decided to use the previous design again! What a disappointment. I know there were some really awesome wrapper designs.

To make chocolate bars, or any chocolates, you start with tempering chocolate. The nice cold marble of the chocolate room makes it much faster to temper the chocolate, but it also sets the bowl of tempered chocolate really quickly too! (Partially set chocolate leaves you with chunkies - not fun to work with.)

Colouring the moulds

After tempering and preparing the moulds, chocolate is poured in. The sides of the mould are scraped for cleanliness and then the whole mould is flipped upside down to pour our the excess chocolate. The mould is then left upside down so any excess can drip off.

Tapping out excess

Once the chocolate sets, it gets filled and then topped with more chocolate. After each filling of chocolate, the moulds get tapped to get out all the air bubbles.

Tap it pretty hard!

All the bars get put into the freezer (to speed up the process) and then they get popped out. Look how shiny they are!

Passionfruit

Salted caramel

On Thursday, we split into groups and started making bonbons. The flavour was entirely our own choice. My group chose to make a green tea white chocolate shell filled with a strawberry coulis and a vanilla bean ganache. It turn out really well and tasted really good.

Next week my group will also be making dark chocolate bonbons, milk chocolate bonbons, and cappucino bars. It's gonna be busy!

The Last of the Bread

We finally finished our last class of bread for the entire program! It was a short week and I'm already missing getting up early in the morning to make some fresh loaves of fluffy goodness.

This week my group switched from the layered flakiness of croissants and danishes to the satisfying bite of bread! Almost constantly throughout the week there was a bag of cheese on our table (both for the bread and a little for ourselves).

Epis, aka wheat stalks, got rolled up with combinations of cheese, ham, herbs, and garlic butter.

We topped our fougasses with generous handfuls of cheeses, olives, sea salt, and garlic powder.

Fougasse come in all shapes

Quiches got the special treatment with bacon along with carmelized onions, and a cheese and herb medley.

And who could forget the classic baguette.

We also made a rye sourdough with bread flowers. I was planning on taking pictures of the flower rolling process on Friday, but class was cancelled due to our Chef catching a cold.

Tasty, but watch out for the pointy ends

Only one class left before the end of this semester. Time, you fly by way too fast sometimes. Before I know it, school will be done and I'll have to go back out into the working world full time. No more four month long summer breaks!

But before any of that, I'll be heading into chocolates class this coming Monday. I hope we get to eat some! :)

Croissants Galore!

This week was filled with flakey goodness. Once my group switched to doing croissants, we found ourselves with lots of time to be creative with fillings and flavours.

About 180 croissants!

The first day I whipped up a basil and walnut pesto and a caramel apple almond filling while my group members were all about the bacon and cheese. When we ran out of filling, we made chocolate croissants.

A table full of fillings

Then on Friday, my team-mate M really wanted to make a green tea croissant with red bean filling - a mash-up of Asian flavours with European pastries.

Roll them up

How did they turn out? Delicious! I personally would have preferred a stronger green tea taste, but it was all there - the creamy bitter green tea balanced with the sweet red bean. There was only one issue. Their appearance turned out a little squat and the layers separated. We found out that this particular dough recipe can only handle a certain percentage of butter. We added the green tea by mixing it with additional butter and folded that in. The extra butter actually squished the layers we already laminated into the croissant! Chef told us that the recipe we are using, while good for learning and teaching purposes, is not one that would be used for croissants in industry as it is more of a danish dough. 

Green tea and icing sugar dusting

The inside is a little bit green!

I also learned one more key technique when rolling the triangles into the croissant shape. Do not stretch! When I first learned to make croissants at the downtown campus, we were taught to pull the triangle to make it longer and then roll it. But doing so actually destroys the precious layers that you worked so hard to create. It also alters the thickness of the dough, making thinner parts of the croissant bake faster than the thicker parts. Stretching can also make you prone to rolling the croissant too tight. One that has been rolled too tight will burst open while baking. Perhaps it is the dough recipe we are using that is sensitive to stretching, but it is interesting to see how every establishment has their own methods.

Croissants was a fun station and I wish I could spend more time on it. But alas, everything must continue on, so next week is bread! What am I thinking this time? Mushrooms!

Artisan Breads and a Sculpture

I hope everyone had a nice long weekend. I actually took some time off so I could visit lots of friends and family. It was a busy week followed by a busy weekend, but here are the pictures from last week.

We started Artisan Breads running. As soon as we came into class, Chef informed us that we were only going to have two days to complete a bread sculpture. This included rolling, cutting, and shaping all your pieces the first day so it could bake and dry overnight. Eek! No time to plan, just make a bunch of things and hope it all comes together. :P

I more or less had the idea of a doing a night and day themed piece so I made a sun and a moon. I also chose a colour palette to fit the theme (darker colours for night and lighter colors for day). As for the rest, I made some stars, some flowers, some leaves, and a bunch of swirled stick-like pieces.

The sun!

The moon with shooting stars

It turned out amazingly well! I was so happy with the result. I do think my piece looks better without the random buns at the base (a requirement), but for two very rushed days and bare minimum planning, I am happy!

The entire piece is made of bread but only the little buns have yeast in them. The sculpture part is made of dead dough, or dough without any yeast. It was then coloured with various powders like beet, tumeric, and spinach.

After finishing our sculptures, we dove right into our rotation. My first station is danishes - the station with the most work out of all four. We only make four danishes, but each one has so many additional pieces, like fillings, that it takes a lot more time than any other station. Friday was a huge scramble to finish everything, but today went much better!

This is a Triple Crown danish. It is an orange cookie bottom with a swirl of flaky danish on top with a little bun of orange brioche hiding inside. While delicious, especially if you like oranges, it feels a little dense because of all the dough, so I whipped up a batch of chocolate ganache and we added a little to the inside. So good! Just like a Terry's Chocolate Orange but in flakey, crispy, buttery pastry form!

Inside of a Triple Crown danish

Just pulled out of the oven

All prettied up with apricot glaze, icing sugar, and a bit of zest

We also make a Rising Star danish which is filled with almond cream and an apple cranberry compote.

And finally, a Pistachio duo danish. I really like this one because we laminate pistachio paste into the dough just like the butter so there is a layer of bright green in the dough. This beauty gets filled with cream cheese and raspberry jam.

Green!

Green, red and white!

One more day of danishes and then my group and I move onto croissants. I feel the urge to make pesto! Pesto swirled croissant, anyone?

Halloween Buffet

This past week was tiring. We spent all Monday and Tuesday making and finishing not only our desserts, but also any additional products required for our action stations. And in the middle of this, I was working on another special project which, unfortunately, didn't work and couldn't be included in the buffet. :( On the bright side, we got in specially ordered black chef jackets and paired them with bright orange neck ties. We looked good!

The buffet itself was quite successful! We set up a few tables just at the entrance to the 4Nines cafeteria. When potential customers rounded the corner, a few of us would greet them and draw their attention to the buffet and its plethora of enticing delights.

The chocolate class made us a super awesome chocolate show piece.

Beside the buffet was the ice cream action station. Little hotel pans of ice cream were kept cold by placing them into a block of ice. A pretty cool idea for keeping ice cream nice and cold.

The cotton candy and deep fry station were inside the Marketplace. Despite the success of the buffet, these stations were neglected by the lunch crowd. It was too bad especially because the cotton candy was wound around puff pastry filled with either raspberry jam or cinnamon and sugar. Such a tasty combination!

We only did one buffet but I was beat! I can't imagine doing a buffet every single day like many hotels. I won't say I'll never try working at a hotel, there are lots of different kinds of jobs there afterall, but buffet work is definitely not on the top of my list right now. :P

Oh yes, I never explained what this extra project I was working on was, did I? I was attempting to recreate a dessert from a famous restaurant in Chicago. It is a piece of taffy that is filled with helium, making it float just like a real balloon! You can see a youtube video of the dessert in action here. Unfortunately, I never did get the formula just right and the restaurant never replied to my inquiries. Either way, it was a lot of fun to experiment and I was so happy our Chef was willing to go out and buy us a tank of helium. We don't always get a lot of creative freedom in this program, but when we do, we gotta run with it!

Next up, bread sculptures!