Last Quarter

I haven't updated in a while, I know. I'm officially one week into my final quarter at the Art Institute. So here's the best of last quarter, and the beginning of this one.

Opera Torte, a traditional French torte with almond cake and coffee buttercream.

Cherry hard candy, which looks simple. You boil sugar to 310 degrees, pull it with your hands until it aerates and gets shimmery, then tell me it's simple.

Honey drops. Same story.

But you can make pretty flowers with boiling sugar. I recommend wearing gloves.

We made a pastillage replica of our building, with air-brushed windows and a royal icing logo. We made a stencil for each color of the logo and spread the icing on.

This is my favorite new candy, the Hot Chocolate. The top layer is a cinnamon marshmallow, then chocolate ganache. Then the marshmallows are dipped and decorated with white chocolate.

We played with isomalt for the last few days of class. It's a sugar alcohol that makes a more durable sculpture than table sugar. And you boil it. Luckily we played with molds to make shapes.

This is a hot-air baloon. Don't laugh.

This quarter is turning out to be much prettier. My final classes are Advanced Patisserie, Artisan Breads, and an Externship. These are gumpaste flowers that will go on a wedding cake.

Rye bread, and lavash crackers. Lavash is served as an appetizer at my family's favorite pizza place in Hammond, Aurelio's. It's just one more delicious recipe I have to make for Christmas dinner.

At home I've been making Cowboy cookies regularly. Weekly. Bakerella posted this oatmeal and M&M cookie recipe this summer, and everytime I make them they dissapear fast. I also made my first ice cream. Thanks Inger and Teresa for the ice cream maker!

Time Flies

Life has gotten in the way of the blog. Well, life and Bejeweled Blitz. Prepare to be bombarded with 5 weeks of cakes and candy!

First, we finish up the Sacher Torte.

Glazing the cake with apricot simple syrup, and then a layer of ganache.

Creating embellishments with tempered chocolate.

Caraibe Torte, another chocolate sponge cake.

Dobos Torte, a sponge cake with chocolate and caramel.

And now for truffles, bon bons and toffee.

Truffles and bon bons start with flavored ganache, then molded to the shape you want. Ganache can "break" easily, especially milk and white chocolate ganache. I had a lot of broken ganache in two weeks.

A true truffle starts as a blob, then is rolled into a ball and dipped in chocolate.

My first truffles! Lemon ganache.

Ganache may also be piped into little logs, and then dipped.

Blood orange logs.

Poodle curls sprinkled on black currant truffles.

It's a bit easier to make molded chocolate. The ganache is still temperamental, though.

Some chocolate molds have false bottoms to allow the use of trasfer sheets.

The leaves on the far right are lemon-mint bon bons.

Cinnamon bon bons, my favorite.

Passion fruit vanilla bon bons with airbrushed color.

Chocolate peanut butter bon bons.

And now toffee, dipped in chocolate.

Then cashew brittle.

I was feeling discouraged during the chocolate candies weeks. I messed up tempering chocolate and several ganaches, and made a mess of a birthday cake. I had to prove that dropping one career and going back to school for another was worth it. Raspberries and cream cookies did the trick.

Who doesn't like chocolate?

Summer quarter started this week, and so far so good. In European Cakes and Tortes, we started a Sacher Torte. It's a dense chocolate sponge cake with apricot filling. Here we are folding a meringue into the chocolate.

We froze the cakes and will finish up next week with filling and ganache glaze.

After a guilt-inducing Nutrition class, I went to Centerpieces, Confections and Chocolate where we will make truffles, marshmallows, jellies and decorative sugar. Very nutritious indeed.

Here we have two different kinds of dark chocolate. The top is 100%, which has only cocoa solids and no cocoa butter. The lower tin has 65% cocoa solids and 35% cocoa butter. What I used to know as unsweetened, bittersweet and semi-sweet is now just numbers. And what misnomers. They should be called un-fattened, semi-fat, and a lot of fat.

To use chocolate as a decoration and maintain its texture and physical properties, you have to properly pre-crystalize it. We used the seeding method, where the majority of the chocolate is melted to 47-50℃, then more chocolate is added until the temperature drops to 30℃. This melts the fat crystrals and then introduces seed crystals to teach the melted ones how to form. Very scientific indeed.

We made plaquettes, small square decorative pieces for plated desserts.

We also poured the chocolate onto transfer sheets to get pre-printed designs. The transfer is dyed cocoa butter, so it's edible.

Now for the Gianduja. If you like nutella, you'll like Gianduja. It's layers of hazelnut and dark, milk and white chocolate.

We molded the layers, then poured dark chocolate on both top and bottom, then added texture to the top.

Sliced and diced.

The other groups tried pistachio paste instead of hazelnut, which was also very good.

And even the spoils taste like heaven.

Just one word. Are you listening? Cannoli.

My uncle wanted me to try making cannoli.  (That is the plural.  If it's just one, you've got a cannolo.)  I'd never eaten them before, but how could I say no?  

I bought the Soprano's Family Cookbook, some cannoli tubes and got started.  The shell is a little bit of cocoa and cinnamon and flour mixed with white wine.  After rolling out with a pasta machine, you shape it with the cannoli tube.

And deep fry it.  Yum.

The white wine helps create the bubbly texture of the shell.

The filling is a sweet ricotta cheese cream with chocolate shavings.  The shells got soggy after a few hours, but there weren't that many left by then!

I'm glad I tried these sweet little guys.  They may have replaced cream puffs as my favorite dessert.  Nah, I have room in my heart for both!