Reminder to Click

B would like me to remind all of you once again that if you click on the pictures on this blog they will pop up in life size, or larger than life size depending on your screen I suppose. He believes you can only truly feel my genius when viewed in large scale. I agree.

Pacific Opera

This cake is beautiful. Am I right? It's a hot cake. (Not temperature hot, hot looking.) I am awesome, or at least I was on Wednesday. We had a two cake day, the Pacific and the Opera. Let's begin with the Pacific.

This beauty is composed of Jaconde Biscuit (a not-as-dry cake) imprinted with multicolour cigarette paste (stupid) and layered inside with strawberry and lemon mousses, both of which were extremely delicious.

I do love fruity desserts! Then I did a magical job of piping some waves on it (it made sense being Pacific and all. Those colours on the side are supposed to be tropical by the way). I bought chocolate and practiced my piping on Monday night when I got back from the cottage. How's THAT for devotion to this cake? The chef has been telling me that my piping needs to improve, so I've been practicing. It's clearly paying off...or so I thought until the Opera cake later that afternoon.

Ah the Opera cake. I thought it was going to be disgusting and at one point during demo asked the chef if we would have to eat it with a spoon. It was SOAKED. And I'm not exagerating, SOAKED in coffee syrup. Chef says that when they make it in big slabs in pastry shops they just pour a bucket of coffee syrup over each layer of biscuit and let the excess run out the sides.

So the layers are (from bottom to top) soaked cake, coffee buttercream (french buttercream, which uses egg yolks, as opposed to Italian buttercream, which uses egg white and italian meringue) wet cake layer, chocolate ganache, we cake layer, coffee buttercream, chocolate glazing. I hate hate hate soggy cake. You can ask anyone who knows me well and they will tell you that my least favourite dessert is.....anyone? Yes, Tiramisu. Blech. Oddly enough, this cake is so over the top with the soaking and all the layers that once it spent a little time in the fridge and the chocolate outside got a bit hard and snappy I thought is was delicious. It was a tasty surprise. So I made sure to give both cakes away.

The piping on the Opera cake...certainly not my best work. But then the chef tells me that it's the best he's seen me do. The border, I will admit, for the first time doing that border, actually went all right because it's also really tiny piping, which is so hard to do. But I was offended because my writing on my Fraisier cake was CLEARLY the best I've done. But he wasn't there for that. So I had to send him a picture of it to show him what I can really do (I'm such a jackass). This Opera crap was just that. AND I put the accent the wrong way to boot! hahahahha. That actually made me laugh really hard when he pointed it out and then proceeded to give me a French lesson. Too funny. All that planning and work and I just casually put the wrong accent in there. Hyster. I'm not even that bad with French, I can understand some and I understand accents so it cracked me up that I was so blase with this one. (and yes, blase should have and accent on it, the same one the opera cake needed...I think).

Duck with Orange Sauce

Why does gastrique sauce have to be so damn impossible to do? Forget that (as Annabelle pointed out) gastrique sounds totally unappetizing, it's also damn near impossible to get right. Mine, apparently had the right taste, but I can't seem to get the consistency of it right. Bah. I give up on it. I made a really good gastrique last session, but asking us to deglaze with jellied Grand Marnier? That is just wrong.

Why is the Grand Marnier jelly? Because chefs are notorious for having drinking problems, so all of our hard liquor is jelly (it gloops out of the bottle) and all our wine is salted. This might just be me, but if I wanted to get drunk bad enough I would likely shoot some of that jellied booze back like I was at a Stag and Doe. It makes controlling your salt in your sauce hard because you can't separate sodium from wine flavour. So you want to add more wine to have that flavour, but then you end up oversalting the sauce. I say let them drink and let their fates befall them. And let me deglaze my caramel for my gastrique with liquid Grand Marnier.

But anyway, we just served that annoying sauce on the side of this duck breast. What the point of the exercise was I'm not sure. They also made us sear foie gras, which I found to be annoying because my pan wasn't hot enough and it didn't get enough colour. My pan was smoking, but apparently it has to be on the verge of bursting into flames before foie gras will sear and get colour and not just melt. The grape sauce we had to make for the foie gras turned out really well for me, but I was bitter about having to peel the grapes. I mean, do the French not have good strong teeth? The skin is part of the grape. Just chew it.

Another Esoteric Dish

I love my clear tupperware container to help me set up a good picture of my tiny stuffed birds. They look suspended in mid-air, just like the osso bucco did in this same container. Look at that one spread-eagling (spread-quailing?) in the top right corner, hahahaha. It looks like a cartoon. A sick, sick cartoon.

So these little quail get deboned with your fingers. Yes, too small to use any tools, you have to feel around inside their little chests to separate the muscle from the bone, slowly turning them inside out like you're balling a sock on laundry day. Getting the skin off the spine without ripping it is the hardest part. Once inside out you remove the femur (scraping the meat down and off the bone, again like you're pushing your own socks down your legs to your ankles) and then you turn them right side out and stuff them with a chicken liver farce and serve them on a little toast raft smeared with chicken liver pate.

They were actually quite delicious. I have eaten quail before, but a deboned quail experience will change your life. Seriously. I will never eat quail with bones in ever again. What is the point? There are so many tiny bones, how does one even begin to but to find meat? But deboned? They're like little sausages with leg and wings. Yum!

Stupid Dover Sole and Stupid Croutons

Yuck.



I stared at this post for 10 minutes and debated just leaving the work yuck to describe it, but then realized I had to explain the title a bit better.
So my loyal followers may remember a post way back in January about Dover Sole (but there was no pic, so don't waste your time going back to look, devotees). ANYWHO, we made a Dover Sole dish similar to this ugly piece of creamy crap way back at the beginning of basic. Dover Sole (which is only fun because it's a flat fish and you can literally just pull its skin right off with your hands in 2 big rips) is gross. This has shrimp, mussels, oysters and some veggies in it. Not to mention that big beautiful N-shaped "crouton". Stupid. This dish was mucked around a bit by the chef but it didn't look that good going in, I have to say. I kind just threw it on the plate and served it up, soup kitchen style.

5 more posts to catch up on

I still have 5 more to catch you up on, but need to catch ZZzzzzs tonight first. Will finish updating tomorrow and will be sure to add in tomorrow's Beef Wellington to round it out to 6! Yay reverse puff pastry!!!

A week of Sausages

So last week in cuisine we had two practicals that involved sausages. This first picture is the first round. Any sausage whose official name is "White Pudding" is no sausage of mine. We had to mix a lot of cream into pork and pork fat. Blech. Then we poached them (natch) and then finally sauteed them fast in butter to brown them a bit. It didn't help though. The flavour was ok, but the texture was disappointing. Pudding-like meat inside an intestine casing. Mmmmmm. We served it on apples and onion compote-ish things and had to make a port reduction of some kind to go with it. Mine was kind of a port caramel that I cooked my apples in. Good times.

But the next practical we made REAL sausages. And by real I mean garlic sausages. They were straight up meat and fat and garlic and they were delicious. We made them with a side of yummy green lentils. Very rustic. Very delicious and full of butter. Making sausages is easy enough, but cleaning out the parts for the KitchenAid SUCKS. I would recommend all you home sausage maker wannabes get a manual one that clamps to the country. Jamming meat through the KitchenAid thing is stupid and gives you a lot of air bubbles in addition to hanging your sausage way too high...

Tradish

Ah the croquenbouche, the traditional French wedding cake. For as fussy as they are, their wedding cakes aren't near as fussy as North American ones. This little tasty may look familiar, we seem to make pate a choux every 5 minutes and fill it with various creams, dip it in caramel, then assemble it in different ways. So this is another one, but bigger and fancier.

The chef said the rule was that we had to have 50 choux balls on our cake. But we could also fill the cone with choux balls if we had them and didn't want to stick them on the cake. The point is to have 3-4 balls per serving (small wedding). So I made the calculated decision to make a much smaller cone, fill it with choux, and then it would fit in my fridge and I wouldn't look like an idiot carrying it home. What does the chef say to me during my evaluation? "It's small." Yes. I know. I did that on purpose. But my choux were so small and perfect who could really complain? So these are filled with good ol standby pastry cream, then coated in caramel, then stuck together with same caramel onto a nougatine base (think sesame snaps but with almonds....definitely the most delicious part of the cake) and to each other. The sticky outy things are nougatine "dents de loup" which means wolf's teeth, a name the french apply to all things with any kind of a point.

The chef also took great joy in waiting for us to burn ourselves on the 180-degree Celsius sugar as we dipped. Did I? You bet. Did I give him the pleasure of even watching me flinch? Hells no. I can take a burn, grit my teeth and assemble choux balls like a man. I only got one tiny burn on my fingertip. I've definitely suffered worse in cuisine grabbing the handle of a pot that was in the oven.

So these closeups show my ingenius caramel decoration. I just drizzled leftover caramel on parch and let it cool. Fine. It's not my best work, but in a pinch, it worked. It wrapped around and looked cool. I had a big Dr. Seussian caramel thingamajig to stick in the top that was twice the height of the cake and it cracked us all up, but I didn't present it with that because the Chef didn't know who Dr. Seuss was, so the humour was lost on him. He kept asking me who Dr. Yes was.

Long Time No Blog

Sorry folks, I know it's been a long long time since I've posted. School has been crazy and I've been slacking in the remembering to take home my camera department. Luckily I haven't been slacking in the picture taking department (not too much at least). So let me go back to where I left off.

It's been a while, so why not start with something hardcore French, like aspic? We had a garde manger workshop, which is basically all cold preparations. Normally in a resto the person in charge of this does all the salads, cold apps, and terrines...which means jelly and lots of it. More than even that trout was jellified. I have a photo here of the whole buffet we did, but I don't really have closeups because the chef was standing over our dishes - all of which were so shiny that his reflection was peering back at me with every picture I tried to take.

We were a bit taken aback by this workshop because the way they do workshops is to give us the name of the dish, the list of ingredients, and then let us go at it for 5 hours, or in this case, 10 (spread out over two days) with absolutely no instruction or explanation. So we had all these terrines and fish mousses and salads and canapes and just had to do our best. No one ever went over the true French meaning of garde manger which means you have to gloss EVERYTHING to a high sheen with jelly. Slice your fish mousse? Brush those slices with jelly. Plating a terrine? Make a mirror of jelly on the bottom of the tray. I don't know about you but seeing the reflection of fmy ellow buffet eaters as I'm trying to serve myself a delicious slice of fish mousse is sure to help curb my appetite.

So our group was really well-prepared and we thought we were doing awesome until we realized last minute that everything had to be coated in jelly. We were then forced to quickly use gelatin leaves to finish the glossing because we ran out of meat gelatin. Gelatin helps, you see, to make sure than nothing dries out. The French think they're so logical. Is your cake dry? Soak it in boozey syrup. Will your pork pate dry out on the buffet? Preserve it in jelly. Why not just solve the problem at the source? Why not make a moist cake to start? Why preserve something in jelly after the fact? Why not just avoid putting foods with a tendency for dryness on a buffet table for hours on end? Anywho....the fish mouse, that lovely item with the spinach spiral in the middle, was truly the hit of the show. And it was done by Yours Truly. It's Tilapia (yuck) and scallop mousse on either side and salmon mousse rolled up in the spinach in the middle. Heidi's monkfish terrine (in the picture with her proudly displaying it) was a piece of art, truly. Monkfish, cherry tomats, parsley all suspended patiently in layer after layer of jelly. The chefs were super impressed. It's funny because the chef kept warning us to put plastic wrap in the molds to be sure that our masterpieces would unmold....and Heidi forgot. Then she panicked and the chef was being a pessimist. He didn't think it would come out. I reassured her - a decade's worth of jelly salads unmolded in the 1970's without any plastic wrap. Heat a towel, loosen the outer layer of jelly and SHLOOP! out it comes. Voila! Magic. Housewives 1, French Chefs 0.


We were also smart enough to buy some pansies

(edible) and put one on each plate of our buffet to tie them all together and make them beautiful. It was fantastic. Allison's gallotine (cold deboned poultry rolled in a log and stuffed) was also a work out art, though I don't have a closeup shot of that.

So due to the lack of my photos without chef-face reflected back, I only have these few to show for now, but my friend and groupmate Allison has pics of each dish individually and when she finally gets around to sending them to me, I will post them, each with a description of what they are. Yay jelly!

The Marquise

I'm going to start this post by saying that there were only 2 cakes that were presentable and sellable for this class, and mine was one of them. He thought the piping was a bit messy (it looked just like his) and my glazing was a bit off temperature, but my design was tempered and lovely, even if the sides were a bit blah because of the glazing. I have mastered tempering chocolate. Do I still need to use a thermometer? Yes I do. Do I care? No. I don't have the time in class for trial and error of tempered chocolate. I have time to get it done right first time, make a decoration and dress that damn cake.

So this one is thin chocolate cake (biscuit) on the bottom, them chocolate mousse, a thin layer of hazelnut and milk chocolate praline with feuillantine (think cornflakes), then more mousse, glazing, decoration. Not too shabby. I was just so excited that my decoration turned out. Yay!

Today in cuisine we did a garde manger workshop where they gave us 12 recipes and we had to prep and make a bunch of stuff (terrines, fish mousses, various other gross things) and then tomorrow we plate it all now that it's good and g and assemble our canapes, etc. I will take lots of pictures tomorrow to show you our wonderful work. Spoiler alert!: all I'm going to say is I made a salmon mousse spiral with spinach INSIDE of another fish mousse that I hope is going to knock their socks off...but that's all I'm going to say. Patience (as the pastry chef always tells me).

Also, we had our cuisine evaluations today. Rocked it. He had nothing bad to say really. Everything can always be better, but that I'm doing very fine. He went through our marks and told us which classes were our worst ones (but didn't tell us the marks) and one of mine was this most recent trout with the noodles. I was SHOCKED. Though now that I think of it, it was one of my lowest marks....maybe I'm doing THAT well in everything else. I thought I rocked that one and chef had nothing bad to say about it. But it was a different chef that we had for practical that day, so this chef couldn't tell me why it was lower than some of the others. Meh. I'm still awesome.

Edible Trout

Today we had two practicals. We did a turkey rollup this morning where we opened up a turkey breast into a flat sheet, stuffed it with more ground up turkey breast mixed with saffron and almonds, rolled it up, tied it, browned it, braised it and served with a really delicious couscous that had dried fruit and cilantro in it. I didn't take a photo of that. Sorry. But I did eat it for dinner tonight.

Then we made another trout this afternoon, but this one we could actually eat, meaning it wasn't jellified. This was deboned but left whole (not easy and involves much crouching and squinting) and stuffed with wild mushrooms and shallots and baked. We also made noodles to go with it. And it was with the noodles that my life changed...

...We had Chef Daniel, who usually teaches the superior level, but seeing as a bunch of chefs are visiting and travelling around to other schools, we had him for demo today. He was AMAZING. Watching him make pasta honestly changed my life. We've made pasta about 3 times so far and every single time it's rubbery and impossible to roll out. It's always super thick and chewy and almost oily and dry at the same time. Well today we watch him make it and he just like, how to describe it....fluffed the ingredients together and it was supple and soft and rolled out like a dream. So I did it just like him in practical and it was magical. The clouds parted and the culinary light shone down on me. Magical. I can actually see making ravioli or tortellini with it. Past pastas we've made? No way. But this, this was a life-altering. Aren't they a beaut? (Beuts?)

Here's a picture of the inside stuffing. Doesn't look so appetizing, but it was mushroomy and deelish.

Delice Caramel

This is the delice (French label for a fancy cake of no particular origin or type, just fancy). It consists of yet another weirdo combination of coffee-flavoured lady fingers (bottom, sides and layer in the middle) caramel mousse (burnt caramel if you ask me, but the chef says "no, is caramel", and pear mousse (which the chef says like "peer" or "pier"). Not awful. I just scraped the pear mousse off the top and ate it. It was the delice part if you ask me. Not too shabby. They made us glaze it (yuck) and smear it with caramel just like the blood clot cake. And we had to make chocolate cigarettes and chocolate fans to decorate.

I've asked the chef if we can do a whole seminar on chocolate decorations and tempering so that we can practice more because it's definitely the hardest part or all of this. I did manage to do the bi-colour cigarette, but barely. The single dark chocolate one is no problem, but the double...needs practice. As do the fans...

Check Out My Rack

So this is from last Friday I think...the pork rack...nothing too special. We just frenched the rack, made that little hat for the bones...made some ratatouille (not a big fan of eggplant, but it wasn't awful). That's about it. Sliced open a different finger, it seems to be one every day. One finger cot begats another. They make your hands so slippery that you make more mistakes. My hands were so hot that morning and I didn't have coffee (don't ask). I was foggy and I was melting the pork with my meaty hands.

Quick Note

B wanted me to tell you all that if you click on the photos here on the blog you can see them blown up big. He thinks it's a much better way to see the precise details you might miss with the regular shots. Thought I'd let you all know.

We made pork rack today and I left my camera in my locker, will try to get it tomorrow and post the pic. My rack came off the pig ugly, so there wasn't much hope for it. But it WAS delicious. The pretty ones were dry. The ugly fatty marbly ones? Deelish.