"The Original Sacher Torte"

Yesterday was busy with making bread for the restaurant which was full.  Time just goes by so fast once bread is done, and we usually only have about an hour and a half to work with.  We did get our celebration cakes baked for us to use on Monday.  After the celebration cake comes the wedding cake decorating!  That is pretty much all we are doing next week because they are somewhat bigger projects.  

I also finished my Sacher torte.  Actually it is "The Original Sacher Torte" - such a fancy name!  Haha, but there was a court fight and everything over what the real Sacher torte actually was, and now this version is the only one that can technically be called "The Original" or else it has to be titled something like "The Sacher Torte at the Big Sky Inn" or they can get sued.  

So yeah, this is a Sacher torte.  It has two layers of Sacher sponge/cake with a thin layer of apricot jam in between.  It is frosted with dark chocolate ganache and decorated with continuous white chocolate filigree and the obligatory "Sacher" word.  Yummy!

Let's backtrack a bit...

Okay, so I have definitely been slacking with the posts and I apologize.  Let me backtrack a bit.  So as you can see from my pictures, I did end up getting my carrot cake done.  Unfortunately, this did not happen until AFTER the third batch of cream cheese frosting and the second batch of carrot cakes.  Blah!  The lucky thing is that by the time we got to our cakes, we had gotten in some more orange food coloring, so we actually got orange carrots!  :)  Everyone else had purple ones, which I did think were actually quite cute and I probably would make other colored ones for an Easter season cake actually.  My carrots were a bit big, but I was happy to see them finally take shape as the marzipan was originally waaaay too crumbly, even after adding a bit more oil to it.  

After the carrot cake we've also done a lot of prep work for other cakes and then put them together.  We next made a tiramisu, which was cute and looked somewhat like a fence on the outside.  It had a layer of filling, a layer of ladyfingers, and another layer of filling.  I actually have not eaten mine yet, and it is in my freezer waiting til I want it!  Which probably won't be until after we are out of the cake section, haha.  Next we made a charlotte royal, which was a roll cake layered with bakers jam (I used raspberry).  This is then cut into 1/4" slices and layered into a charlotte mold.  The mold is then filled with bavarian cream and topped with a bottom of cake layers.  I forgot to take a picture of this one though, boo.  We then made a chocolate chiffon cake and frosted it with a whipped ganache frosting.  Then we put out a strip of plastic and drew chocolate filigree on it with dark chocolate and covered that with white chocolate.  Once it was allllmost set, we pulled the ribbon around the cake.  I really liked that one! 

The last few days we've been making layers and the putting together a few cakes.  We had to make meringue discs and genoise cake layers to put together the kirsch torte.  We also made the sacher (pronounced soccer) sponges and ganache to put together the sacher torte.  Today we made the opera cake layer and the dobos (pronounced dough-ba-ch) layers to be finished - hopefully - tomorrow.  And on Monday we are making a celebration cake!  Yummy!

It is official!

So I got a job offer on Tuesday, but the papers for it came today, so it is finally official - I have a job set up to start the week after I get out of school!  I will be a Baker/Kitchen Assistant at the Bar W Guest Ranch in Whitefish, MT (about 30 mins from where I live in MT).  It sounds like a really fun job, and you should all check it out (www.barwguestranch.com) and come see me!  :)  SOOOO for those of you asking, I start work April 16th and work through the end of October, so that means I will be back in Kalispell a few days before work starts.  Yay, I'm so happy that I have a job set up for after school ends!  It sounds like a fun place to work, so I am looking forward to it!

Yay!  :)

Yummy yummy yummy...

I have had so much cake in the last couple of weeks, and now I have 3 whole cakes sitting my fridge - aggghhh too much!  :)  I don't have much time to write right now, but I wanted to put up some pictures of yummy cakes!

To start off, here is the yummy tiramisu with fresh made ladyfingers!

Next is the chocolate chiffon cake with a whipped ganache frosting.  It is decorated with white chocolate shavings and a white chocolate/dark chocolate ribbon.

And lastly is the carrot cake.  I forgot to have someone take a picture of my carrot cake before I came home, so these were taken on the computer camera, which since it is built into my computer screen, somewhat awkward to maneuver.  But it has a cream cheese frosting and marzipan carrots with walnut masking.

Yummy!  And today there will be more!  :)

Oxidation?

Today was somewhat frustrating when we tried to frost our carrot cakes that we baked last Friday.  Our whole group had some problems with our cream cheese icing.  Danika and Nicole got their icing made, but it for some reason was too soft and so it "melted" off the cakes when they tried to frost them.  They ended up adding more cream cheese (or perhaps more buttercream) to thicken it up, and it ended up finally working for them.  Daniel and I had the problem of our icing turning grey!  We thought we had it all mixed up perfect and turned it out into a bowl so we could frost with it, but as we got to the bottom we got about a 1/4-1/2 cup of really grey icing.  Daniel (daringly) tried some of it and said it tasted like licking a pencil, ewww!!!  I took off the grey part thinking what wasn't grey was still good, but as I was wrapping it up so Daniel and I could have some dinner, Chef came by and saw it and said "Why is your icing grey?".  It hadn't seemed grey anymore to me, but I guess it was.  Chef said he thought it was probably from oxidation and that while we washed the paddle and bowl well, we didn't dry it well enough.  So we tried making it again and took plenty of time to wash and dry the equipment extra well.  We hadn't even gotten halfway into the recipe and we started getting the grey stripes in the icing again!  We showed it to Chef again and he asked us about cleaning the equipment - which we had - and then as I was composting that batch, he saw the bottom of the bowl showed marks that it had been scraped.  So the problem was that the paddle was scraping the bottom of the bowl, which is probably why the taste that Daniel tried tasted metallic - yuck!

But even after two bowls of bad icing, Daniel and I did manage to get our angel food cake checked off, a batch of lemon curd made, and our roll cakes made as well.  Tomorrow we will try again with the cream cheese icing and attempt to finish our carrot cakes.

And so we begin Term 3...

So the end of Term 2 was fast and crazy.  We had a petits-fours platter due on the last day of term, plus a test, so we were busy, busy, busy!  The test went well and I got an A in the section again, so that is good.  The platter ended up having 10 different petits-fours, with 6 or each of them, so the platters were chock full of yummies!  I did enjoy making fortune cookies and the petit-four glacee's the best, so I think I am going to try to do some of those for my final buffet as well depending on what is require for it.  We also got a surprise right before the test and found out that we had yesterday off, because there was a new batch of culinary students starting so they had orientation all day.  That was nice to have an extra day off.  I went downtown and wandered around with Ashley and bumped into our friend Jessica - who just graduated from from OCI's culinary program - and she took us to her new job at the restaurant 10 01.  It's a nice restaurant and we had a yummy dessert!  :)

Today we started Term 3, and once again we got put into new groups.  This term I am with Daniel, Danika, and Nicole.  This term is going to be a lot of cakes and icings.  Our big project this term will be the wedding cake at the end, but we also are going to be making 4 layer cakes as well, and I'm excited about that.  We'll get to make all kinds of cakes and today we started with making butter cakes and chiffon cakes.  We also had to make some Swiss Buttercream frosting and it was taking us F-O-R-E-V-E-R to come together.  It is made with lots and lots and LOTS of butter and Swiss Meringue.  Tomorrow we will make it all into Boston Cream Pie's and layered Chiffon cakes too.  We also get to start making some candies this term as well.  Chocolate caramels, nougat, toffee, truffles, and more - yum!

Crunch time again...

So the end of term 2 is now almost here and things are getting a bit craaaazy again.  This week has gone by SO fast, I can't believe it is already Friday tomorrow!  We started this week on petit-fours and are preparing a platter for presentation on the last day off term.  This past Tuesday, Glacier Nat'l Park outside of Kalispell came to do some recruiting.  They have lots of positions open, but only a handful are actually pastry openings, so I got my application in that night!  Pretty much they have one Head Pastry Chef and one Assistant Pastry Chef at each of the lodges in the park, and they also are hiring for the Prince of Wales Hotel in the Waterton Park in Canada.  I am not sure if I can request where I am placed, but any of the lodges in the park would be great!  

I have made so much this week that I can't even think what it is.  I updated my "What I've Made" list on the right, but had to cheat and look at my check off list to see what I've don that was missing from the list.  There are a lot of small things being made and unfortunately I haven't gotten many pictures of them.  Things get so busy in the kitchen I forget to take pictures and I am not bringing all of the goodies home all the time.  I did get a couple of pictures of my cream puffs and my swans though. 

These are two of my swans.  They were so much fun to make!  I want to try to make some other animals though.

And here are the yummy cream puffs!  We got to make them pretty high, and the smaller ones looked cuter really tall!

And this is a picture of some basic chocolate work I made for Carly's birthday.  I drew it all freehand as a last minute thing for birthday cupcakes the next day at school.  I didn't have very good chocolate so it was hard to pipe out because it wouldn't stay thinned out very well.  It was late and I didn't have any other color to put for the background color, so I used the last few peppermint Hershey Kisses that I had from the holidays and they swirled together to make it pink.

So I started a small business class on Sundays all through the month of February last week.  It is a really great class and Chef Maxine really knows her stuff!  To pay for the class I am working in the school restaurant as a server and am actually really enjoying it!  I have worked there 3 times this week so far and (cross your fingers!) I have not spilled anything on anyone - myself included - as of yet!  It is a little slower at lunch time some days, and so Chef Wilke (the school's Exec Chef and Director of Education) goes out on the street and invites people in for a free lunch once in awhile so they get to know the restaurant, the school and the quality of service and food provided.  What is hilarious to me is that Chef Wilke will go across the street to Starbucks and Subway and convince people to dine with us and have a yummier lunch on our side of the street.  And so far he is pretty convincing because he brings over a few groups each time!  Yesterday he even started running next to a lady who was jogging down the street, trying to convince her to have her water break with us, but unfortunately she didn't stop.  So now, for those of you coming to visit, you can come at lunch time and have me serve you!  :)  Or you can tell me ahead of time and I won't serve and can just go to lunch you!  The best part of serving though, is that I get lunch and get to taste all that is one the menu, yummy!