high class pastry

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.