As I get older I realize more and more how fast time goes by - even as I counted down the slowly passing minutes of my final Saturday pastry class last week. And the final hours of my desk job this week. It's crazy how a year can seem like a lifetime or a blur depending on your point of view. Spending all day Saturday in a kitchen with other students for the last twenty months has been fun, fascinating, exhausting,
overwhelming and many other adjectives that I could take up space with here. But more than anything it has allowed me to learn a lot about myself and what I can accomplish if I put my mind to it. And now I get to put those skills to use in my new bakery job. Bonus: I won't have to adjust to working long Saturdays since I've been doing it for so long already. My learning and fascination won't stop either, so I'll still blog often with updates on my internship/job.
The last Saturday of class was sort of underwhelming as we were all itching to get out of there, but my partner and I managed to put together a pretty nice ice cream cake. Or an ice cream brownie in our case. We made a fairly flat brownie, churned up some vanilla ice cream with Andes mint chunks, and baked some fancy pirouette cookies to place on top with the whipped cream. In the end, the whipped cream's job was to keep the fast-melting ice cream in between the brownies. This dessert works best when everything has time to chill sufficiently, which we've never had the time for on Saturdays. In any case, here is the final course I will produce in the school kitchen.
While it wasn't my prettiest or tastiest work, Greg and I still enjoyed eating it last week. And I will really enjoy not having to set a clogged foot in the school kitchen anymore. I do have ten more weeks of book class (Business Entrepreneurship), but then all I have to worry about is completing my internship paperwork until it's all over in October.
This weekend Greg and I are off on a mini-vacation to West Virginia to visit Greg's grandparents. We are looking forward to a very fun visit and I made a special cake just for the occasion. I hope everyone enjoys this lemon cake as much as I enjoyed making it!
So many things to celebrate, so many things to eat in celebration. What better way to celebrate Mother's Day and Greg's graduation than with a selection of bread, croissants, pies, cookies, creme brûlée and ice cream. We'd better throw a few Tums on the list for good measure.
On weeknights last week, I made my special desserts of creme brûlée (for Greg's dad), toasted coconut chocolate chip ice cream (for Greg's mom) and chocolate drop cookies aka Mama Chokers (for my parents). I considered making Greg a pie for graduation as well, but I was glad I decided to wait on that one after I found out what we were making in class on Saturday.
We started the day with pies. Believe it or not, I'd never made an apple pie before last Saturday. We used the old-fashioned method of not cooking our apples before we baked the pies and we added a variety of spices and chopped up pecans to the filling. I also monogrammed the top with a very versatile letter.
"M" is for Majewski. It's also for Mother's Day. And if you're Greg's dad then it really stands for "Mike's Pie." No matter how you look at it though, this was one delicious pie. I will be making apple pie again this year for sure. I probably won't be making a strawberry chiffon pie again though. This pie has a very light and fluffy texture, but it really wasn't worth all of the hard work. The graham cracker crust was my favorite part.
After the pies were done we started our quick breads. We made simple spice muffins with pecans and biscuits with cheddar cheese, garlic and oregano. Both items were delicious and enjoyed for breakfast several days.
We also made challah bread and croissants and these were baked off after much rising and folding throughout the day. I was very proud of my challah loaf and would go so far as to say that I had the best looking one in the class. The three braid style was a breeze compared to the six braid loaves that we make at the bakery.
My croissants turned out very buttery and flaky and the chocolat au pains were to die for as well. Especially fresh and still warm from the oven right after I came home from class.
But I've saved the best for last. Greg graduated on Mother's Day Sunday, so we had multiple things to celebrate with our parents. After the graduation ceremony and a buffet lunch at one of our favorite local restaurants (where we all sampled the dessert buffet), we came back to our house to continue the sweet celebration. I caramelized sugar on the tops of the creme brûlée and scooped ice cream into teacups.
And I served my mother one giant Mama Choker cookie. Here's her place setting.
There was basically a second dessert buffet in our dining room. Needless to say, the apple pie didn't get eaten until Sunday. But all of my special desserts turned out well and we enjoyed a really great weekend with family. Congratulations to Greg on his new Master's degree - a specialty pie will be in the oven for you very soon!
While I can happily eat bread anytime of the day, our bread specialties in class last Saturday focused on the breakfast variety. The sweet and sugary breakfast variety. We used our Danish dough from last week to make various types of Danishes, including the snail variety that I made awhile back. Let me refresh your memory.
We also mixed together a batch of brioche and sweet dough. These led to a variety of traditional brioche rolls and fancy items, along with some good ol' boy favorites. Like sticky buns for instance.
And cinnamon rolls.
The whole pan of cinnamon rolls above were enjoyed for breakfast on Sunday morning (along with a few of the sticky buns). Sorry Mom, but these babies beat out the Pillsbury cinnamon rolls in the can that I grew up eating my whole life. In a time-crunch-cinnamon-roll-craving situation though, I would gladly go back to my childhood rolls in a can. (Let's just keep that our happy little secret.)
Also, I can't believe I forgot to share my favorite picture from last week. I think these are still the tastiest items I've made all term. These palmiers will definitely be made again soon in my home kitchen.
This week though, I am putting together some very special desserts for some very special people. Greg's parents are coming into town this weekend to visit us and celebrate Greg's graduation and Mother's Day, and my parents are visiting on Sunday as well. It's my duty (and pleasure) to make sure that everyone has a dessert to swoon over. Mission accepted. Photos of accomplishments forthcoming.
As it turns out, small cakes are no more fun for me to make than normal sized ones. In fact, I may now have an even stronger dislike for them because of how time consuming and detail oriented the process of making them was last Saturday. But in the end, these petit fours made my heart swell with pride and my taste buds prickle with delight. They gave me the same feeling that beautiful high priced designer shoes used to in my former life (before Dansko clogs snuck into my closet). Petit fours are the Christian Louboutin's of pastry. And for once, I owned it.
The first half of my grade in our final kitchen class was based on these petit fours. We had to produce and display twelve each of the five varieties of petit fours, three glace (with icing) and two sec (sans icing), all with various fillings, toppings and decorations. The palmiers made with our puff pastry dough turned out to be rather grand instead of petit, but they tasted so good that Chef didn't mind. A side note of happiness: Greg and I also didn't mind and we managed to eat all twelve of them in less than 24 hours.
Without further ado, I would like to present to you my high class pastry display.
This labor of love included many precise cuts with a knife, much drizzling of fondant, careful dotting with melted chocolate and raspberry preserves and fun coloring of marzipan (just to name a few things that gave me an A).
The variety above is an almond cake with mocha buttercream filling, topped with a layer of chocolate ganache and a coating of chocolate glacage. We added a touch of buttercream and a chocolate covered coffee bean for the final touch.
Behind those are the fondant topped almond cakes with raspberry filling that I must say look much better than the last time I made them. Getting the fondant the correct consistency to drizzle over the cakes was still a bit tough, but they definitely turned out better than my previous attempt.
The blue beauties in the middle are made of a Swiss sponge cake filled with diplomat cream (a marriage of pastry cream and whipped cream), topped with colored marzipan. They weren't as sweet or quite as tasty as the others, but they add a nice splash of color to the display.
The almond spritz cookies in the front are delicious and were quite easy to make in comparison to the others. Plus I've had success with these in the past, so I could breathe a little easier while making this batch of petit four secs.
The palmiers were the other petit four sec and my favorite item on display. To make these treats, we folded lots of sugar into our puff pastry dough from last week and rolled it out until thin. Then we rolled the long edges up towards the middle and sliced it all up for baking. The caramelized sugar is what really gives this dessert it's high class appeal - and crunchy delicious taste.
Over the next three weeks, we'll be focusing on bread, pie and dessert presentation. Once that's all over I get to focus on bread full-time at the bakery...Jaime's got a brand new job! No Christian Louboutin's needed.
