You can now purchase my handmade candy bars and marshmallows at http://www.bonbonbar.com/
Mignardise are fun little bites, usually at the very end of the meal. It was interesting to make these because it was the first time that I realized how much recipes guide you to a certain result. I think that when I started in January, the class that worked on the other side of the kitchen was at about this block. At the dessert buffet, these desserts seemed rather advanced because they are so small and delicate and exact. But after doing them, it wasn’t all that hard. Sure, there are pitfalls and mistakes, but if you follow each step, it’s almost impossible to come up with something that looks completely wrong. Of course, as always, though, the skill is in the details. So, we produced them as they were produced before us.

On another note, I used to like apricot, almond, and fondant — together or separately — but we’ve done so many desserts with that combination that my tastes buds hardly respond to them anymore. The combination of fondant and pastry cream, as well as almond and chocolate, are also on that list. It just makes my eternal quest for new flavors and textures all the more important.

We started off with macaroons. From left, Hazelnut Macaroons, French Macarons, and Coconut Macaroon. French Macarons are one of my favorite cookies (perhaps b/c I was lucky enough to stumble upon arguably the best in world at La Duree in Paris years ago as my first ones), but ours were over-folded so they didn’t get the feet or puffed shiny top. It’s a tricky cookie — here’s an excellent blog entry on perfecting the technique for it… and with a mouthwatering finished product. A cool part of our recipe was to pour a small amount of water btw the parchment and the sheet pan when they were fully baked. This created steam and released the macaroons from the parchment (macaroons are notorious for sticking to parchment).

I don’t much like hazelnuts, but I’d like to sub cashews for the hazelnut macaroon recipe… and to try out making fruit flavored ones with jam in the middle.

Clockwise, Sebastopol Cookie, Harlequin Cookie, Linzer Cookie.

The Sebastopol Cookie had a short dough crust, brandied cherries raspberry jam filling, and an egg white/sugar/almond topping, and tastes very good, especially for such simple ingredients. The recipe said to roll the dough to 1/4 in thick, but it’s probably better thinner, like an 1/8 in — or else there’s just too much crust.

The Harlequin Cookies are made from a short dough that’s rolled 1/8 in thick, and then chilled before using round cutters to cut them to 1.5 in. They’re then baked, and half are glazed with apricoture completely, and then red food coloring is added to the apricoture, and is piped on to half the cookie. They are then sandwiched to a bottom with apricot jam. Then we hold the cookie upside down by the bottom cookie and gently dip them in thin fondant. The cookies are extremely fragile, so a few got broken along the way. They make for quite a sprightly cookie, though. I would just try to find a natural replacement for food coloring… and a flavor different from apricot.

The Linzer cookies are cut out from hazelnut dough, and half of them are cut out in the middle. Then they’re baked (on separate sheet pans, b/c they take diff’t time to bake), and a small ring of raspberry jam is piped around the edge of a whole bottom cookie to help the top adhere. Then the middle is completely filled with jam. Our cookies were a bit dark and bitter since they were overbaked — they’re supposed to be quite light and taste light, but the powdered sugar hides the color pretty well (which is probably unfortunate for unsuspecting cookie eaters)

From top, Lace Tuiles, Almond Tuiles, and Florentines. The tuiles are kind of a rough because you have to pretty much work from the oven to pick up the tuile and immediately roll it over a rolling pin or into a mold with halfpipes. And the almost tuiles, maybe because they’re un-uniform, seemed to finish a few at a time on the sheet pan. We also dipped the sides in a little chocolate. They had a satisfying crunch and a pleasant enough taste.
The Florentines are also made with a thin nut batter (plus some rolled oats) that is spread to 3.25 inches. We made a parchment with the circles already drawn as a template, and then put that under the parchment with the batter. We could then slide the template out and use it again. After they’re baked, they have to cool just little before they are trimmed with the same round cutter and allowed to cool. They were then laid on a sheet pan of melted chocolate, and then cut out again. Then, they were given a dollop of chocolate on the bottom and scraped through with a cake comb.

We also tempered chocolate for the first time for this. Books have been written about this, so I won’t go into much detail — here’s a link that does. The larger amount of chocolate that you temper, the easier that it is, because small amounts lose their temperature much faster. We also used a laser thermometer to take the temp while mixing (so that the whole bowl represented), and it’s just about the coolest culinary toy I’ve come across recently. And if one group had it, they could shoot it to another team’s bowl across the table and give a reading.

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Next up were Banana Milk Chocolate Truffles (top) and Coconut Cointreau Truffles (bottom). The Banana Truffles were very good, and I liked that they have sauteed bananas blended into the ganache. We used pre-molded spheres with a hole in each (like empty eye balls) in which to pipe our ganache. Then we gave a pre-coat and a final coat by rolling them in some chocolate in our glove-covered hands, and then rolled them down a rack to get a spiky look. The Coconut Truffles were done similarly, except they were rolled in a pan of lightly toasted coconut to finish. They had to stay in the coconut for a little while after they were rolled so that they could set round without being disfigured when moved. We have a whole section about chocolate this summer, so we’ll do more with chocolate eventually.
We also did Rochers, which I’ll talk about with the practical next week.

And finally, we did Petits Fours. The trickiest thing was pouring the fondant over the little layered cakes because the fondant likes to run away from the corners. It helps to pour a lot on one corner and then move to each in turn. It’s also hard to cover a side of it was cut inward at a slight angle, because the fondant has to go inward from the top. We’re still doing piping homework (but with piping chocolate instead of shortening), so we practiced some patterns the night before. The one above was one of the easiest, but we were pressed for time and I just wanted to get them out. The minimalist in me was satisfied, too.

We arranged them all on a mirror for presentation, and used a ruler as a guide for each line, moving it as we arranged each new line… because once you put something down on a mirror, you can’t move it or else it’ll leave a mark. The chef also told us that it’s weird to pipe on a mirror (as for a border), because you’re distracted by looking at yourself the whole time.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 10th, 2006 at 4:40 pm and is filed under Culinary School. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.