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!