Culinary School - Week 7

This week in Advanced Cakes & Tortes we made: Beignets (just a fancy word for doughnuts), Dark Chocolate Mousse, White Chocolate Mousse, Tuile cookies, and a variety of sauces and sugar pieces for garnishing. We spent a large amount of time working on plating and making our desserts look beautiful.

Here are the desserts that I plated up. From left to right: 1) Chocolate Flourless cake with chocolate ganache garnished with a fresh strawberry, sugar piece, tuile cookie, and raspberry sauce. 2) Dark Chocolate Mousse sitting on a sweet dough crust, garnished with a sugar piece, fresh strawberry, creme anglaise and strawberry sauces. 3) Apple Streudel garnished with mint leaves, fresh blueberries, sugar dome, and caramel sauce. I had piped out a pretty design with the caramel sauce but the viscosity was not thick enough so it kind of ran together.



Here are the desserts that my chef (teacher) plated. Aren't they wonderful? Hopefully one day I will be this good! :)



Here are some of my favorite desserts that some of my classmates plated.




Yesterday in Chocolate & Confectionary we each made a flower out of modeling chocolate...


...and learned how to add texture to our hand dipped chocolates. My chocolates were called Minty Lemon and they were oh so good! Here's an interesting tip for you: To add texture to dipped chocolates you can use lots of things from around your house or in a hardware store. I used cut out pieces of a florescent light cover to press into the chocolates right after I dipped them. You can also use things like textured shelf liners. Just pop the {tempered} textured chocolates into the freezer for 2-4 minutes and then the texture pieces will pop right off.


Sugar Class was a ton of fun this week. We learned how to cast sugar, pipe sugar, make sugar twirls and spun sugar, rock sugar, and pull sugar into ribbons! In the picture below you can see the bowls I made out of sugar, spun sugar, my name piped with hot sugar, and some sugar twirls.



We also finished "glueing" the pieces onto our sugar clock centerpieces. Everything in this centerpiece is edible. I airbrushed the clock brown and then etched out the roman numerals with my exacto knife.



At the end of class I added my pulled sugar and rock sugar to my clock centerpiece. It was a fun day filled with learning lots of new sugar techniques!