Week 12: Strawberry Shortcake

It was the final week :( I'm really going to miss class and baking every Wednesday.  I've learned a lot, so I'm definitely going to take more classes, just not sure which ones yet, maybe Cakes I, Pies or Pastry?

The "Strawberry Shortcake" we made this week was really more of a yellow sponge cake with strawberries and cream, since traditional strawberry shortcake is more of a biscuit with the strawberries and cream.  Even though we made a simpler version of the traditional cake, it still turned out pretty nicely. 

We started out making the cake, which was an egg foam batter, similar to the swiss roll recipe.  I learned from the swiss roll that egg foams can tend to be a little dry, so I made sure I remembered to use lots of simple syrup when layering.

While the cakes were baking, we made whipped cream, sliced strawberries and dipped strawberries in chocolate.  Once the cakes were baked and placed in the blast chiller for a few minutes, we cut each cake into 3 layers and started layering.

The layers were yellow sponge covered in rum flavoured simple syrup, a thin layer of whipped cream and then an even layer of sliced strawberries.

We decorated the cake similarly to the black forest but learned to use a comb on the side.  The metal comb was used to create ridges.  The comb is kind of tricky to use as you need to have a thick coating of cream on the side so when you pull the comb through, you don't see cake, but when there is too much cream, it makes it a little difficult to the make the ridges look even.

Since class has ended and it may be a little while until I take another one, I will keep baking and posting about what I make...so feel free to make suggestions on things you would like to see :) Thanks for reading!

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.




 

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!

Week 7: Eclairs and Cream Puffs

This week we got back to sweet stuff by making eclairs and cream puffs!  They are both made with the same batter just piped and decorated differently.

They were fairly simple to make, just very time consuming as you actually cook the flour mixture before piping it and putting it in the oven.  The flour is cooked in a boiled butter and water mixture until it forms a film on the bottom of the pot, then transferred to a mixer where the eggs are added slowly.  This mixture is piped out into either rosettes or lady finger (cream puffs or eclairs, respectively).  The batter has a very eggy flavour, but that doesn't matter since it's really all about the filling or chocolate on top :)


Once baked, the rosettes and lady fingers are hollow and easy to pipe.  You can either pipe it into the side/bottom or just cut off the top and pipe inside.  With the eclairs, we watered down pourable chocolate fondant, dipped the lady fingers inside and filled with whipped cream.  For the rosettes, I filled it with raspberry jam and more whipped cream :)











I think I will be making this recipe again!

Week 6: Bread

This week we did something different, we moved away from sweet things to bread!  We learned how to make different types/styles of bread with the same dough.

To make the dough, we used fresh yeast, something I'd never seen before.  It has a crumbly, slightly gross texture that comes in blocks like butter and smells not so pleasant.  This yeast can be found at many bakeries, but not readily in grocery stores.  Fresh yeast has a better flavour than dry yeast, but they can be substituted for each other using a formula.

To keep the yeast alive, it's important to add the right temperature warm water and have some kind of fuel for it, in our case, sugar.  Once the dough was mixed, we kneaded it for a while and covered it with plastic and a metal bowl to seal in all the warmth.  Once the dough had doubled in size, we pressed some of the air out, cut it up and formed it into balls.

We then used about 7 of these balls to make cheesy monkey bread :)  This is done by placing the formed balls in a greased cake pan, covering it with cheese and herbs, proofing and then baking.  It bakes together but pulls apart easily.

With the remainder of the dough, we made various rolls.  We learned how to make buns, knots and braids.  Since these were smaller and were going to be baked individually, they didn't need to be proofed and went straight into the oven after a covering of poppy, caraway and sesame seeds.

There's a lot of ways to experiment with this dough and mix it up to make different flavours.  It can be made savoury with cheese or sweet with cinnamon sugar.  Lots of different things to try :)

Week 5: Custards

This week we learned how to make custards.  Custards are a cooked mixture of milk/cream and eggs.  We made two this week, one set in the oven with eggs (Creme Caramel) and another with gelatin (Bavarian Cream).

We started with the Creme Caramel.  We made caramel to coat the bottom of the foil cups and drizzled extra on a cookie sheet to be used for garnish later when it hardens.  We made a wet caramel which is easier to make as it is less likely to burn.  The only difference is as it sounds, there is water added to the sugar at the beginning of the cooking process.  Adding the water gives it extra time before it browns as the water has to boil off.

The instructor taught us a good trick for cleaning caramel off the pot once you are done.  Just boil water in the same pot and the steam will loosen up all the hardened caramel.

The key with a custard is not to curdled the eggs.  This is done by slowly increasing the temperature of the eggs by adding the hot liquid incrementally.

We baked the Creme Caramel in a water bath as this helps to evenly bake the custard.

As that was in the oven, we made the Bavarian Cream.  For this we hand whipped the cream to stiff peaks, a first for me!  It helps to have your cream, bowl and whisk as cold as possible.

The Bavarian Cream came together pretty easily, just mixing the ingredients and doing the same slow heating of the yolks with the cream.  We had the choice of three flavours:  coffee, strawberry and chocolate.  I picked strawberry :)

To plate them, we unmoulded the custards from the foil and flipped them over.  With the creme caramel, we just ran a knife around the edge and flipped but with Bavarian Cream, it doesn't pop out as easily, so we had to rip the foil away.  

Once again, lots of food for sharing!

Week 3 of Baking Arts: Bran Muffins and Tea Biscuits

Photo Credit:  Jerome Callender

This was a very busy class!  Lots of scaling ingredients and multiple recipes.

We started off with the bran muffins because the batter for that needs time to sit before going in the oven.  The baking soda and baking powder required time to react and the bran needed time to soak up liquid.

While it sat, we learned about the difference between baking powder and baking soda.  They are both leavening agents used in baked goods to help them rise in the oven.  Baking soda requires an acidifying agent in the recipe for it to react and release carbon dioxide to cause the leavening.  Baking powder contains baking soda but also another acidic ingredient (cream of tartar), so it does not require an acid in the recipe.  Baking soda is often used in recipes with buttermilk, chocolate or yogurt as these are acidic.

After leaving the batter for about 20 minutes (not longer or the leavening agents will no longer work), we scooped it out into muffins trays using a #10 ice cream scoop.  Using an ice cream scoop for the batter ensures that all the muffins were uniform size and cook evenly. 

 Once the muffins were in the oven, we started on the tea biscuits.  These were surprisingly easy, the key is not to over mix the dough.  Always err on the side of caution, opting to under mix with the mixer and finish it off by hand.

We rolled these out about an inch thick with the roller and cut them out with cookie cutters.  To get a nice shaped biscuit, you must get a clean cut and not touch it too much while setting it on the cookie sheet.  As you touch it, the warmth in your hands melts the butter and alters the way it will bake.  Also don't reuse the scraps around the cuts too many times as the more you work the dough, the more tough the biscuits will become.

Lots of food for the family this week!

Week 2 of Baking Arts: Apple Pie

Week 2 of Baking Arts

Photo Credit:  Jerome Callender

This week was a continuation of last week's class, we made the pie filling, rolled out the dough and learned to assemble it all.

Arriving early to the class, I started peeling the apples, coring and quartering before the first demo by the instructor.  Although the class starts at 6:15p, the instructor expects everyone in class by at least 5:45, so that there is time to get all the equipment you require to your station, scale all of your ingredients and be ready for the first demo at 6:15p sharp.  There wasn't too much scaling required this week, so that went quickly.

The first demo showed us how to slice the already quartered apples, fairly thin, a little less than a quarter inch, zest a lemon and juice it.  She explained when apples are bruised, it is ok to continue to use them if the bruising does not go too deep, as it shouldn't affect the flavour, but anything deeper should be discarded.  The lemon zest was added for flavour and the juice to keep the apples from browning.

After mixing all the apple pie filling ingredients, it is key to let it sit for about 15-20 minutes to let all of the moisture from the apples drain.  The last time I made an apple pie, I made this mistake and ended up with a soupy watery pie.  During this resting time for the filling, we rolled out our pie dough from the previous week.

Tips when rolling out the dough:  do not over work the dough!  Once you start rolling it out, do not keep rerolling to get it perfect, as you will lose all the fat pockets and therefore lose all of the flakiness. 

Straining out the filling and placing it in the bottom pie crust, it is important to egg wash the edge of the crust before placing on the top, to get a good seal for the pie.  The only place we left for the steam to come out was a little hole in the top center of the crust.  We egg washed the entire top to help it brown and used excess pie dough for garnish, I made a little apple :)

Week 1 of Baking Arts

Photo Credit:  Jerome Callender

Week 1 was pretty exciting!

As soon as I arrived in class, I was sent away to the bookstore to pick up my uniform and return wearing it :)

The uniform package consists of a chef coat, pants, hat, half apron and 2 side towels.
  
Returning to the kitchen all suited up, I got to get comfortable at my new work space and meet the person I will be working with for the rest of the class (he seems nice enough).  All the recipes are written for 2, so we work in pairs each week, but still get to take home full portions of what we are making.

Feels so good to be in a professional kitchen looking like pro!

After general housekeeping stuff, a tour of the kitchen and going over what tools we'll need to buy for week 2, the instructor gave us a demonstration on making pie crust.  I've never made pie dough before, so this was a first for me.  I learnt about the fat and moisture levels you need and how breaking up the fat will determine the flakiness of your pie (larger chunks = larger flakes).

We mixed up our pie dough, both using the professional grade mixer and by hand.  The professional grade mixer was massive, like 10x the size of my Kitchen Aid at home!   We then bagged the dough and left it to be refrigerated for the week.

Class ended pretty early, but that's ok, lots to do before week 2, mainly shopping :)