Parisian Macaroons

Aging gracefully... the Parisian Macaroon. Here we have an almond meringue, piped into circles and baked. The colors represent the flavors, but there is actually no flavoring in the meringue. The flavor comes from the ganache center which is piped onto a cooled meringue circle and topped with another circle. Then they are put into the refrigerator to soften and soak up the flavor of the filling. Heavenly!

The flavors here are caramel raspberry, chocolate, pistachio, coffee, and lemon. This is absolutely the best possible thing to do with leftover egg whites. It's easy and makes a stunning gift in a cellophane bag tied with a gold ribbon. And they only get better with age!

The Ultimate Challenge

So we had the lecture on chocolate. The secret to tempering chocolate is never do it in a room hotter than 70 degrees or cooler than 60 degrees... unless you are doing it at SFBI on the day they are stoking up the hearth oven for bread and pizza. Oops, sorry this is the real world.

Brian had set the chocolate to melt overnight in a special chocolate warmer so we had a headstart. And even though the temperature of the kitchen was increasing, we began the process of tabling (cooling part of the melted chocolate on a granite slab then stirring it back into the remaining melted chocolate). We also seeded a batch (adding unmelted chocolate to the melted chocolate to align the crystal formation to produce the "right kind" of crystals... the ones that make chocolate shine and snap.) Brian showed us how to test the temper on a piece of paper so we'd know when it was ready for use.

We poured the melted chocolate into rigid plastic molds, let it drain out to form a thin (not thick) shell, and then set them on a rack to cure in the molds overnight. We could see already that the temper was right in spite of the less than perfect conditions in the kitchen. There were no white bloom streaks or grainy gray areas where the cocoa butter rises to the surface. Brian has spent a lot of time with chocoate and knows how to coax those crystals into alignment.

The next day we piped our fillings into the chocolate shells--coffee, lemon, pistachio, raspberry caramel, and dark chocolate ganache leftover from the Parisian Macaroons we'd made earlier in the week. We let the fillings sit to settle and develop a crust on top. The final step was to close them with more tempered chocolate. This was an incredibly messy job that required a bit of finger licking prior to hand washing at the end.

When the bottoms were set, we tapped the molds on the table to release our perfect chocolates. I gave everyone little boxes I'd folded the night before to put their candies in.

Final Touch

My classmate Vivien is putting the final touch on her Strawberry Pistachio Tart. The other tarts were done by my tablemates, Wendy and Randy, and Vivien's tablemate, Michele. This is just the beginning!

SF Baking Institute - Pastry III

Okay, here they are, the pictures I promised... a few weeks later, well more like a month.

When I arrived home Shaun and Kris saw the array of mini mousse cakes I made in SF and we switched to mousse cakes for the wedding. So it's been wild and crazy trying to order the forms and ingredients and work out the recipes and decorations. Plus I'm putting in work experience hours writing web content for The Berry Man, a local produce distributor, so I have spent my writing hours on that... up until today.

This is a pistachio cream tart. It's a pistachio pastry cream on the bottom with fresh strawberries and sugared pistachios on top. The pastry for this tart was made the night before and allowed to rest. It's very rich. Then we cut out fairly thick circles of pastry and put them into 7" cake pans to bake. The sides of the tart actually rose up as it baked to form a perfect tart shell... well, my second one was perfect. I got a little carried away with the pastry sheeter so my first one was unsatisfactory. This one I rolled out with a rolling pin to exactly the correct thickness. Trust me, it was delicous. This one didn't make it home to Santa Barbara. 

The Final Display

"Get it all out and display it," said Brian as he walked away. This is just a portion of what we had ready to take home on Friday.







Here we are looking a bit worn, but pleased with our results.














I'm quite excited about this next week, where we will be making even more complex finished pastries. Keep watching the blog for new photos.

More Pictures

Here's my Bavarian Cream. It's decorated with a baby pear, baby pineapple, and two miniature apples (that look like golden cherries). We also had raspberries, blueberries, and brandy-soaked cherries to work with. Each piece of fruit is coated with a gelatin glaze to give it the shine.













And here is my Chocolate Mousse Cake. We encased a layer of chocolate cake in chocolate mousse. Then we refroze it and prepared our ganache glaze--brought it to the proper pouring temperature.

This is the good side. I was trying to get mine done so that other people could glaze theirs. Glazing a frozen mousse is not a good thing to do in a hurry... so mine is a little more artistic than those with the smooth perfectly-covered sides. A hair dryer would probably fix this, but I'm happy to leave it as is to illustrate the process. The trick is to get the ganache to flow down over the sides before it freezes in place.

Our final job was to decorate the top. Brian had made the chocolate cigarettes and the transfer sheet pieces to use. We choose what we wanted to use and arranged it to taste (so to speak).

Raspberry Mousse

This raspberry mousse is still frozen and I didn't take the acetate strips off the sides before I photographed it. Oh well.

Brian described the pattern on top as pick-up sticks. I need to practice my stick piping a little. The fresh raspberries sit nicely on the really wobbly parts.

There is a layer of chocolate cake enclosed in mousse at the bottom and a puree glaze on top. It's more difficult to see the difference when it's still frozen and has the acetate strip fogging up the side view. A couple of hours in the refrigerator and it will be perfect.