joyous day
I got to work alone tonight in class! The focus this evening was on crème anglais, semifreddos, mousse, pâte sucrée, parfait, and assemblages. Because there were so many recipes and each group had to do two, we were allowed to decide if we wanted to work on both together or work on one each. Guess what I picked! I made a White Chocolate Espresso Semifreddo and my partner made a Chocolate Mousse Torte. I’m happy to say that years of experience (read: years of tanking recipes) has really given me a good feel for whether a recipe is right or not. The chocolate crust of my semifreddo called for 1 tablespoon of butter, but I told Shan it was far too dry and he agreed, so we bumped it up. The mascarpone mixture was supposed to be chilled, but I knew this would make it difficult to incorporate with the Italian meringue – so I kept it out of the fridge. I’m pretty confident that I can deviate from the recipe with good results.
shan shows ribboning while making crème anglais
my partner mixes the chocolate mousse
baked pâte sucrée cut for the strawberry semifreddo
shan helps another team with their chocolate torte
I was done early, so I went ahead and made the batch of pâte sucrée for our team as my partner was struggling with her recipe. I think she had to do a few things twice. Oy vey! When Shan came over to observe her final assembly, she was so proud of herself. Then she said, “What’s this for?” It was her chocolate syrup. She was supposed to have soaked the genoise layers with the syrup… but they were now layered with and buried under the mousse. Oy vey again!
I really felt like I was on a roll. I got to play with a Viking mixer. I still like my Kitchenaid better, but the Viking is definitely heavier duty. I also saw some of the *amazing* knives that the Pastry Arts students have. That 16-inch Wüsthof cake knife is something to covet… We were supposed to go over how to price your products at the end of class, but some groups went all the way up to 10:30. So we’ll cover that next week.
