But! As promised, I have one cute little photo of our spare-time Meringues from Day 9. After sitting in the just slightly warm oven overnight, these crisp little treats were quite yummy. Because this exercise wasn't actually written into the curriculum, and we just had the spare time to get creative, Chef gave us the option to use any sort of flavorings we had on hand. She came prancing into the room carrying bottles and bottles of extracts. Among our class, the most common flavors were a lovely peppermint chocolate, a mocha (coffee and chocolate) and a straight vanilla. I was very interested in the coffee extract (which! fun fact - Coffee is one of the hardest flavors to concentrate), and wanted the addition of vanilla to round out the coffee and the sweetness of the Meringue. Just before plinking some vanilla extract into my bowl of whipping Meringue, I stopped, and decided to use vanilla bean seeds instead. That way, the vanilla was even more pronounced, and the best part is that it added a teeny little black fleck here and there. Because there was no color in the Meringue, the black vanilla seeds really contrasted against the white shine of the Meringue. This photo is only of a rosette (but a quite pleasing one, if I di say so myself) but we piped a few other fun shapes as well. Such a lovely way to spend an extra hour in the afternoon. And so fun to eat. The way you bite into these crisp little cookies, and then they just begin to melt on your tongue as the sugar dissolves. Divine.
As the class progresses, techniques build on each other, and slowly begin to introduce different mediums. On Tuesday, we will make our first batch of Caramel. On Thursday, we made our first Meringue. Friday greeted us with our first Creme Anglaise, and our first chocolate work. Creme Anglaise is essentially the mother-sauce of pastries. Its a simple cooked custard, but thin enough to use while plating desserts, and is also the base of ice cream. But for our uses, it thickened a wonderful Bavarian tart.
Friday was a great day in school, because we had total creative freedom on each project, just with a few parameters. Our Bavarian tart had to have some chocolate piping and some piped whipped cream as well. If I were the boss (one day! teehee) I would leave off the whipped cream. The tart is so rich - its a Creme Anglaise, with gelatin and chocolate melted into it, and then finished by folding in lots of whipped cream.
Now. I'm pretty sure I never saw a tart like this the whole time I was working at Pernsteiner Konditorei in Regensburg, Germany. Regensburg is the epitome of Bavaria, and I fell in love with it. In fact, I often ache for Bavaria. Here's why -
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| The beautiful landscape.. |
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| Drinking beer and playing cards... |
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| Picking apples for American apple pie after mass... |
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| How charming it is...old and beautiful... |
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| The farmer's market... |
So many reasons to miss Bavaria. And, as my homage to this Bavarian tart, I thought I'd put a little love in it. Well, on it.
Again, I apologize for the iPhone photo, which made that little glare spot. This one, I don't love, mainly because of the whipped cream. But I think the hearts turned out kind of neat, when paired with the low wide script. And when it all comes down to it, I just love Bavaria. By the end of my time there I felt Bavarian, born and raised. And that's how my tart got a heart on it.
Next were the most decadent little chocolate tarts you can imagine. A very traditional chocolate tart, Tarte Aux Chocolate, it is a tart shell, filled to the top with a 1:1 Chocolate:Cream ganache filling. So it's a tart shell, filled half with chocolate, and half with heavy cream. Quite indulgent, and quite divine. The filling sets up to a consistency similar to a warm pudding - thick, but still silky, dense, and rich. Oh man. This is the good stuff. It's always exciting when I can get really worked up about chocolate, because given the choice between butter, fruit, and chocolate, I will almost always got for the flaky, buttery pastry, or the fruit pastry before the chocolate. If I'm freaking out about these adorable little tartlettes, you know they have to be incredible. Again, we had total creative freedom, aside from having to use white chocolate, which looks beautiful against the darkness of that fine chocolate ganache. I particularly enjoy making tartlettes because we do four at a time, so it's a good outlet for really challenging myself. I try really hard to make one in my style, that looks like me, and exudes my taste as a pastry chef. But then with the other three, I try to do things I wouldn't normall think of right away. It also makes it kind of fun.
Here, the tart in the top right-hand corner is the most true to my style. I like to think it looks homey, pleasant and cute. But as an effort to try things, and work different techniques, I created the other three. The tart in the top left-hand corner is much more modern than I would normally tend towards, but was practice in straight lines, and a sort of geometric component that I often stray from. And straight lines are stinkin' hard. Probably the hardest of almost any design. You can really psyche yourself out while making a straight line. You sort of have to pick a starting point, look at your ending point, go fast, and hope it doesn't look wiggly. The only thing harder than straight lines are parallell and perpendicular lines. Wheh!
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| Sorry for the iPhone glare.. |
The bottom left-hand tart was an exercise in a circular design, which are tricky for keeping the same distance from the shell, all around the tart, while turning the design, and making it all meet up nicely at the end. The tart in the bottom right-hand corner was an exercise in uniformity, and the tapering dots, which are very good practice for control. Here's a close up of that one.
And that was our Friday! Quite a wonderful day. And now for the rest of a lovely three-day weekend. Farmers market, bike rides and sewing here I come.
Cheers.
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