Week 11: Fruit Flan Tart

This week was fruit flan tarts.  The class ran a little differently since we had a substitute instructor.  Our instructor for the day usually teaches apprentices and ran the class on a much stricter schedule.  She had set times for demos and was very particular that our tarts look professional.  Here's how it went...

We actually started this a few weeks ago during cookie week.  We made the tart crust in advance so it would have time to chill.

A trick the instructor taught us is when you are going to put anything in the freezer that you want to eventually defrost, flatten it out first so that it'll thaw out quicker.

While the crust was thawing, I started on the pastry cream.  I boiled the milk, sugar and vanilla bean for a while.  To start, I used a rinsed saucepan since the water helps the milk not to burn.

I tempered the eggs and cornstarch with the hot milk then brought everything back to a boil while continuously whisking.  Once it had thickened, I cooled it in the fridge and started rolling out the dough for the crust.

I rolled it fairly thin and placed it into shells.  I covered it with plastic wrap and filled them with navy beans.  The navy beans could be replaced with almost anything dry.  They are there to make sure the tart shell doesn't collapse on itself while baking or puff up too much.

Once the shell had finished blind baking for a few minutes.  I removed the beans and chilled the shells briefly and then coated the insides of the tart with melted white chocolate.  The white chocolate helps prevent the bottom from becoming soggy.

I whipped the chilled pastry cream again and filled the tarts.  After slicing fruit, I arranged them on the top then brushed some apricot glaze on the top.  There was an option for sliced almonds as well, but I decided to go simple this time.




 

Toronto Blue Jays Birthday Cake

I was asked by a friend to make her birthday cake and she requested a Toronto Blue Jays Cake!






So, I attempted my first frozen buttercream transfer.  After watching a lot of youtube videos...here's how it turned out:










I printed out a mirror image of the Blue Jays logo, covered it in wax paper and started to trace it in icing.  The layering or order of colours needs to be done so that the details aren't lost when doing larger sections.










If attempting to do this, it is important to use a buttercream that is at least 50% butter to shortening or it will not freeze solid, making it difficult to remove from the wax paper and transfer to the cake.






The cake was 3 - 9 inch layers of swiss chocolate cake, filled with an italian chocolate buttercream and covered in an italian vanilla buttercream.  The buttercream was made by whipping egg whites to stiff peaks, slow adding sugar that has been cooked to a soft ball stage and then whipping in butter once the temperature has come down.  The timing in making this icing is critical as you don't want to over whip the whites as you are waiting for the sugar to cook.

After the cake was torted, filled and masked.  I covered the sides in some coloured sugar.  Then it was time to take the frozen buttercream transfer out of the freezer and place immediately onto the cake.  It is important not to let the transfer sit out more than a few seconds as it will start to melt and may warp the image as you take it off of the wax paper.

I finished with a simple shell border around the logo and bottom and that was it :)

Week 10: Chocolate Swiss Roll

It was another busy week with the chocolate swiss rolls.  I had a substitute partner this week, who was there from another class, so it was nice to share the workload.


The cake part of this recipe was fairly simple with only 4 ingredients: eggs, sugar, cocoa and flour.  We started by making an egg foam with the eggs and sugar, this was whisked until it really increased in volume.  The flour and cocoa was folded in by hand to ensure the egg foam didn't deflate or over mix.

With an egg foam batter, it is important to work quickly as the batter is continuously deflating until it is in the oven.

The batter was baked on a large sheet pan covered in parchment paper.  Baking a thin cake allows for easy rolling but I also think it leads to the cake baking slightly dry, but this can be fixed with lots and lots of simple syrup.

Next was the chocolate glaze.  We boiled some heavy cream with glucose and added that to dark chocolate.  The glucose was added to make the chocolate glossy.  This was set aside to cool while we made the Italian chocolate buttercream to go inside the roll.

The buttercream was my favourite part!  I'm never going back to the standard American Buttercream made with just butter and icing sugar again.

With Italian buttercream, since the sugar is cooked and slowly added to the whipped egg whites, the icing turns out much smoother.  Adding lots of butter, makes it very silky.

Before spreading the icing, I brushed a heavy amount of brandy flavoured simple syrup over the entire cake to keep it moist.  The buttercream was spread fairly thinly over the cake, but next time, I will spread it even thinner since it makes the rolling much easier.

I sprinkled a few raspberries and toasted hazelnuts inside, then rolled up the cake.  Once I made the rolling as tight as possible, I masked it with more buttercream :)  Last step was to drizzle chocolate glaze on top and decorate with chocolate accents, raspberries and hazelnuts.

Since I made the mistake of piping buttercream onto chocolate glaze that wasn't fully cooled, my buttercream rosettes slipped off of one of the swiss rolls and I had to redecorate.  This is how it turned out...

Week 9: Black Forest Cake

This was a busy week, since it was our first week making an entire cake.  We baked the cake, torted, filled, masked and decorated it. 

I found out that my partner has dropped the class, but another person was partnerless for the day, so we paired up.  As a pair, we made three devil's food cakes.  One each and a spare incase something went wrong.

Devil's food cake is just a special name for moist chocolate cake.  The recipe was straight forward and yeilded 3 - 7 inch rounds.  Once the cakes were baked, we immeditely flipped them out of the pans onto cake rounds and put them into the
blast chiller.

While the cakes were cooling, we made the whipped cream for the icing.  We had the choice of using commerical grade whipped topping (what we used in Week 4), whipping cream, or a mixture of both.  I chose to use mainly whipping cream with a little bit of whipped topping for sweetness and stability.

When the cakes were sufficiently cooled, we leveled the top of the cake, cut it into 3 layers (torted) and brushed each layer with a kircsh flavoured simple syrup.  This helps keep the cake moist and adds more flavour.

We piped multiple concentric rings of icing on each layer and filled the gaps with cherry filling.  This was done twice and the top layer was inverted to get a level top.  We used a ready made cherry filling, but if I was to do this again, I would make it from scratch.          

Then it was time to mask the cake.  We didn't actually spend too much time on this step as most of the cake was going to be covered anyways.  A big block of chocolate circulated around the room and we each used our knives to make chocolate shavings.

Since our spare cake turned out well, we decided to decorate it as well and each take home half.  Here's how it turned out:

It's too bad my half didn't last the drive home...oh well, I think it still tasted good. 

Week 8: Cookies

This week was all about cookies.  I showed up early to class to scale the ingredients, just to find out into the class that my partner wasn't coming, so looks like I'm doing double the work, but that also means double the cookies for me :)

We learned how to make spritz cookies, which are named after the German word spritzen which means to squirt.  The cookie dough is made but then piped(squirted) out of a piping bag.  The dough was pretty basic, a mixture of butter, shortening, icing sugar, flour, vanilla, eggs and lemon zest.






We learned that icing sugar often contains corn starch which helps make whatever you are making, melt in your mouth while preventing it from caking, which is good for this shortbread like cookie.  Also, letting any type of zest sit in sugar before incorporating helps bring out the flavour and oils in the zest.


If I was to make this again, I think I would add more lemon zest or some other flavouring and substitute all butter for the shortening as that gives it a better flavour.






With this dough, we piped it into various different shapes and once finished, decorated with chocolate different ways as well.  We also had the choice of making sandwich cookies with jam in the middle and obviously I decided to make some of those too :)  When I got home, I made some more sandwiches with Nutella, who doesn't love that stuff!