Because one night this week, I came home at 7:00 after school, work, and errands, and after googling “sweet napa quick puff,” made a double recipe of Quick Puff Pastry (found here) for an Alsatian tart because it’s so “quick”… Only involving tossing butter and water into the flour and salt, rolling and folding it twice, chilling it 20 minutes, repeating the last two steps again, and then repeatings those steps yet again… while preparing some toppings, and then finally baking it and eating it. I didn’t take pictures… because I was hungry and ate it quickly.

BUT now I have a couple pounds of quick puff pastry wrapped in small pieces in my freezer, which, given the extreme heat in the Napa valley this summer, will defrost in no time for a truly quick dinner or dessert any time I want.

For our current block, we are essentially making plated desserts that you’d find in a restaurant, or at a catered event. So, instead of putting our baked goods out at the dessert buffet at some point before lunch, we plate up about 8 servings of our dishes at the end of our production time and deliver them individually to tables with people finishing up lunch.

The block is divided into two sections — cold desserts and hot desserts…  So, in the mix this time are Red Wine Poached Peaches with Chilled Syrup, Warm Chocolate Pudding with Nuss Sauce, Little Fried Pies, Coconut Crusted Bananas Tempura with Tropical Fruit Salad, French Toast with Pineapple Flambe, Crepes Normandy, Rum Babas, Peach Crisp, Lemon Souffle with Lemon Sabayon…  and then Saffron-Cardamom Bavarian Cream, Apricot Yogurt Mousse, Peanut Flour Panna Cotta, Tuile Cookies, Bread and Butter Pudding with Warm Raisin Sauce, Butterscotch Pudding Trifle, Hazelnut Parfait with Roasted Hazelnuts and Chocolate, Apple Cider Granite, Oreo Cookies Ice Cream, and Apple Sorbet.

Instead of a normal practical exam at the end, we’ll be working with a partner to design our own dessert menus for a fictional restaurant and serve the desserts to invited guests.   Our theme is Overpriced Napa Bistro…

We had an excellent four day mini-course in sugar work at school last block, so we learned how to cast, pull, and blow sugar. For all of these uses, we all made a basic sugar stock out of 10# granulated sugar, 5# water, and 2# glucose (which inhibits the formation of crystals).  It was skimmed, brought to a boil, and then cooled until it was needed for use.
For casting sugar — that is, pouring it into a mold that gives it shape — only powdered coloring needs to be added before bringing the sugar stock to 320F and then pouring it into greased molds on silpats or aluminum foil. We stored these on baking sheets with little canisters of limestone inside to keep moisture away from the sugar. Even so, sugar pieces generally last 3-4 days, or longer if isomalt is used or you have a humidity-controlled chamber.

For pulling sugar, we want it to be more elastic, so before it is brought to 320F, tartaric acid is added, as well as coloring. The acid gives the sugar pliability, but if too much is added, it will infinitely pliable and won’t set up. For 5#, we used 14 drops acid.  Before it cools, it needs to be pulled (literally, the whole thing, pulled and twisted and folded, again and again) for a while so that air is incorporated and it will be shiny and opaque. It is then cut, cooled, and ready for use once it is heated again.

Our station for pulled and blown sugar work involved a plexi-glass foldable box with an open side and a spot for a heat lamp on top. This kept the sugar warm and melted it, though we also used the microwave for faster results. Sugar cools down and gets hard relatively fast, so you always have to be aware of its temperature and usability. Pulled sugar can be used to make flower petals (and ribbons, etc), and you take a hunk in your hand (wearing latex gloves), and spread apart one side with two hands so that the edge is thin. Then you pinch and pull, pause to let the sugar set a little and then snap it off and onto a silpat to set. When you want to put all the pieces together, you can wave an end of a piece over an alcohol burner so that it melts a little and will adhere to each other.

For blowing sugar, you also want a flexible sugar, so we used about 18 drops acid for 8# stock and brought it up to 320 until we cooled it in silicone molds.  We then reheated it the next day so that it can be manipulated.  We used a hand pump with a wooden spout attachment, and simply encased the end in a piece of sugar before carefully pumping air into it and supporting it with one hand.  The trick here is get the whole shape even and with uniform walls without it deflating or shattering (if it cools too much while you are still pumping in air — it’s just like shattered glass).  You can make spheres, or other shapes depending on how you pull it and if you can make it set without collapsing.  Using an air dryer meant for pets with a fan setting helps to cool and set the sugar.  We initially blew sugar that had not been pulled because that kind is opaque; instead, our sugar was clear, so we could see how the air was shaping up within the chamber of sugar.
It was a lot of fun working with sugar, and I regret that I was sick on the last day when we made sugar showpieces; I even had a candy motif all planned out.  You work with the sugar when it’s very hot, but you just work fast and it cools pretty fast anyway, so it’s not frightfully hot, and you also put it down as often as possible.  Blowing sugar and casting sugar require minimal contact anyway.  The red light of the heat lamp can be a little headache-inducing, so it’s important to look away as much as you can.  Your ability to create shapes that you want is only limited by your imagination with how to work with sugar.  I liked bubble sugar, for which the sugar was poured over a parchment paper brushed with alcohol, and the end result is a bubbly look, almost like a sheet of sea spray.
I didn’t have the time to quite perfect my technique, but check out Ewald Notter for true sugar genius.

As part of our curriculum, we had a wonderful one day Cheese Course last block. The day before, we researched cheeses, and our Chef went to buy what he could find at Dean & Deluca in St. Helena. On the day of, we got a Cheese Course binder all about cheese, and after a lecture and preparing some cheese accompaniments (toasted baguette slices, proscuitto, breadsticks, sliced fruit, reduced balsamic and port, armagnac-soaked cherries), we got down to tasting.

I like this kind of learning about products from the outside world in school, and since I love cheese, it was one of my favorite days at school so far. I want to try to incorporate cheeses into the way I think about desserts/late courses in the future, and if I can try a cheese a week, that’d be a good idea.

Here are a few things that I found interesting:

• Cheese is curds (coagulated solids of milk) in whey (the liquid component of milk).
• Guidelines for a cheese plate - serve at room temp (62F-75F) so take out of fridge a few hours before; start at 6 o’clock on the plate and go clockwise for placement, mild to complex cheeses, from diff’t animals or regions, if desired; cut cheeses as close to original shape as possible; the pointy end of a wedge should face outward; have complementing, contrasting, and/or regional garnishes on the plate.
• The bloom for bloomy rind cheeses, like brie and camembert, are introduced by spraying mold spores onto the cheese and allowing it to grow under humid conditions in a ripening cave.
• Washed rind cheeses are often especially stinky. They are washed with water, brine, wine, beer, or combo to stimulate growth of bacteria and molds
• Ammonia is a by-product of the chemical reactions that occur during maturation. If a cheese smells like ammonia, unwrap it and let it breathe. If it doesn’t go away and is rancid/soapy/runny, it’s over-ripe.
• Cheeses should be stored between 45F to 60F and with 80% relative humidity.
• When they are lactating, cows produce 120 pounds of milk a day, while sheep produce 4.5#/day and goats produce 15#/day.

We tasted:

• Fromage D’Affinoise
• Abbaye de Citeaux
• Montbriac
• Comte Bodaz Tunnel Reserve
• Sharp Manchego Aged 14 months
• Montasio
• Humboldt Fog
• Goat’s Leap Goat Cheese
• Cheshire Appleby Cheddar
• Gorgonzola Fiore di Latte
• Roquefort
• Cabrales

I was only able to get pictures of them after we all had a go at them, so they’re not the prettiest pictures in the world and my apparently shaky hands have blurred a couple… but, since this blog serves as my culinary memory, I’m putting ind’l cheese pic’s after the jump. Look at them only if you dare.

Also, I was inspired by Cheese Day, so from something I read in The French Laundry Cookbook, I cut away the rind of a wheel of brie and mixed it in my mixer, as if I were creaming butter. After about 10 minutes on medium, it was white and light, just a bit denser than whipped butter. I liked having the taste of brie with such a light texture. It was great on toasted bread, with roasted garlic and black pepper.
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For this practical, we had to decorate a 1/4 sheet cake; decorate a 1-layer fake wedding cake (the base was styrofoam); make 12 each of chocolate decor such as chocolate cigarettes, curled triangles, and squares; and make a marzipan rose. We made our 1/4 sheet cake in advance, so no ovens this time — mostly just icing, chocolate, and marzipan to play with. I ended up with a 92, so that was nice.

We had 45 minutes to do the flood work the day before; flood work is sort of like tracing from a coloring book, while using melted chocolate out of a parchment cone. We had to have at least 3 colors (with oil-based colorings, so the chocolate wouldn’t seize from water-based ones), and we used white semper chocolate for the colored parts and dark semper chocolate for the outlines. When I first started the block, I thought that the dark outlines might be too overpowering so I experimented with white outline lines and none at all, but my conclusion is that the dark outlines give the most desirable clean and crisp look.

Icing the corners can be a little tricky. You have to start at the corner and scrape in to the sides of the cake, alternating on both sides of the corner until it’s sharp and even.

We had to decorate this styrofoam base as if it were the top layer of a wedding cake, using a variety of borders, design, and buttercream roses with leaves. The styrofoam only needed a crumb coat-like layer of buttercream, but it was probably the hardest thing on this practical. Maybe I’m not used to perfectly straight lines and a hard, very light base, but I tried for so long to get it right that eventually my eyes hurt a little from trying to tell the white icing apart from the white styrofoam. And I just couldn’t ice the top of the sides properly — you can see the styrofoam pretty clearly — the icing just kept getting scraped off there. Otherwise, I did swag, string work, bead border, shell border, and the roses and leaves. The swag is done with a petal tip, with the fat end toward the cake as you pipe — which I did for a couple of them — but at some point, I rotated the bag so that the fat end was pointing out. I think that it looks okay either way, but consistency is the important thing.

Those are my roses and leaves. We make the roses on something like a screw with a metal round on top, which can be twirled around; then scissor blades are put under the rose to lift it, and then when it’s placed on on the cake, the blades are closed and pulled away. Design-wise, it might have been nice to create a dome of flowers on top of each other, rather than just a flat circle of them.

We tempered dark chocolate to make these decor pieces. The key to success for all of them is to spread the chocolate flat and even to the correct thickness on the surface (we used our marble table-tops). Then, it’s just a matter of what you are going to do with them.

The chocolate cigarettes are made by spreading about a 4″ wide strip of chocolate, and waiting for it to set up just enough to curl, and you scrape at about a 45 degree angle about 1″ from the end of the strip to get the right shape.

The squares and triangles are both spread onto acetate (the squares on a transfer sheet with colored cocoa butter). They’re cut when they lose their gloss. The squares are topped with parchment and a fiberglass square so that it doesn’t curl up. The triangles are cut out of a rectangular spread of chocolate, topped with parchment and rolled around a PVC pipe. I spread my triangles a bit too thick — which I realized once I started cutting them — and some chocolate splooged out from under the parchment when I was rolling it. Luckily, I was still able to get enough triangles.

This was my marzipan rose. It turned out that I was making my petals too thin, so they curled down a little too much; they should only be a little tapered right at the edge. The leaves should also be scored with veins.