it was egg-tastic

This weekend I discovered that I like cream puffs and éclairs more than I thought I did. We had our first of three classes on pastry creams, custards and mousses yesterday and it was very interesting, albeit a bit overwhelming. Pate choux, pastry cream and crème anglaise are items that a pastry chef makes in literally every kitchen, so these are definitely important items to learn and master. My first stab at it went well, but it will definitely take some practice. Including a lot of practice separating egg yolks and whites, as pretty much every cream, meringue, frosting, etc. uses one of these and/or whole eggs.

Pate choux is the dough used to make cream puffs, éclairs and similar pastries and it is piped like frosting onto a cookie sheet. It was fun to pipe the dough into different shapes, although I'm a bit nervous about our practical exam. We have to make a swan - that actually looks like a swan. The pastry cream was a bit more complicated to make, but fun to pipe into the puffs. Here are the finished delectables.

Another part of our egg-tastic day was making Italian meringue. This is the hardest type of meringue to make, but it's also the most stable. You have to caramelize sugar to add to the whipped eggs whites and sugar. I had never cooked sugar before, but ours went well and we managed to get two pans done without crystallizing the sugar in either one. If your sugar crystallizes then your whole product will be ruined. That's the thing with these items. One little mistake can affect the entire product and you have to start over. Or you can also burn the skin off of your arm if the hot sugar gets on it while you add it to the egg whites. Hopefully I won't be blogging about that experience anytime in the near future. Or ever for that matter.

Along with the meringue, we also made an Italian buttercream icing that didn't quite turn out, and a chiffon cake that was okay, but not fabulous. (Possibly because we didn't have any icing to put on it.) It was pretty like a soufflé, but then fell after we took it out of the oven. And it took a TON of eggs. This is a chunk of it.

Next Saturday we get to take a crack at chocolate souffles, Bavarian cream, chocolate mousse and creme brulee. Mmmm. Bring on the eggs...