The art of plating...

So we started off Term 4 learning about the art of plating.  How to use the space well, but not overcrowd your dessert.  How to compliment your dessert with different textures, flavors, and garnishes.  How to decorate your dessert but not hide it with the decorations.  It was a lot of fun, though a lot more pressure on the plates.  We got marked off for various things, but it was definitely a way to get us more conscious about little things that we were not concentrating on quite as much!  

I forgot to take pictures of a few of my desserts - like the souffles - but here are pictures of the ones I remembered to get!  Some are pre-Chef tasting and some are post-Chef tasting, so that is why sometimes there is a bite or two in them.  :)

This is my Creme Caramel aka Flan.  I have never been a big fan of flan, and still am not.  The taste is quite yummy - then again I love most things caramel - but I just don't like the texture of it at all!  Too slimy for me, eew!  I decorated this plate with a caramel twist with whipped cream, blueberries, tiny caramel garnish dots, and kept the original caramel sauce from the flan.

This is the Panna Cotta.  Another slimy-ish dish, but a little better than the flan, but still not a favorite for me.  This plate has chocolate and raspberry sauces with a tempered chocolate garnish.

Our Fruit Mousse had a passion fruit mousse with a raspberry fruit glacage (we also made a guava glacage too).  We got feedback (not just from Chef) that the flavors were quite tart together, but personally I did really enjoy the tartness, but I can definitely see that it wouldn't be for everyone.  This plate has creme anglaise sauce with a little raspberry sauce in the dots, and a small rosette of whipped cream and a mint leaf.

This is my Chocolate Honey Mousse in a Chocolate Cage.  The cage was the main decoration that needed to be used for this plate - though I could have made a chocolate cup instead.  The plate has a chocolate cage, chocolate sauce, honey, and a mint leaf.

This is my Chocolate Marquis.  I loved this one, it was so yummy!  This plate has caramel sauce, whipped cream, a tempered chocolate garnish, and a bit of caramel batter on top.

We then got to make ice cream and we made a little vanilla, a little mocha (more coffee than chocolate), and pecan ice creams.  This is the pecan ice cream, which was incredibly yummy!  I plate it with a tempered chocolate garnish, strawberry slices, and some chocolate dots.

Our sorbet was a White Peach flavor and also super duper yummy!  I am sometimes not into some fruit flavored items, but this sorbet was really good.  It is plated by stacking three scoops of sorbet with a tuile piece pressed into the side, some raspberry sauce with a triangle of mango in it.

And those were the easier desserts to plate!

One week left...

School has gone by SO fast.  I cannot believe it is almost over!  We have been working on our chocolate, pastillage, and sugar show pieces this last week, as well as planning our buffet.  We will work on all those the rest of the week and the buffet is on Monday, followed by our last test on Tuesday, and a luncheon at the restaurant with the current T3 culinary class on Wednesday, and that is it!  

My chocolate pieces... well, my first one didn't set up right, so I redid it with another design.  I was worried about it not setting up right still, so I actually did two more designs this weekend.  They set up okay, but the kitchens were warm, so some of the top design came off as I peeled off the pattern, but I should be able to repair it today.  I will take pictures of them and put them up with the rest of the pictures I have saved after I get back from school tonight.  

I cut out all my pieces for my pastillage project yesterday, so hopefully they will dry okay.  I am trying to make a lighthouse, and they should hopefully be dry by tomorrow or Wednesday so I can glue the pieces together with royal icing then.  

Today I am hoping to start on my sugar pieces, which I am not positive just what I am going to make.  We do have requirements for that one, we need at least 1 flower, 3 leaves, 1 cast pieces, and 1 blown pieces.  I have a few ideas, but still have to see how working with the sugar is for me.  Hopefully I will have a concreted decision made by tonight about it.  

I am hoping to have most of my sugar done by Wednesday so I can focus on my buffet pieces the rest of the week.  I am once again stuck on ideas for "pastry" items, as I seem to come with the same ideas as everyone else.  What to do, what to do...

Wedding cake and candies

And on to my last two projects in Term 3!  My wedding cake was a lot of work, but I actually really enjoyed making it!  With more time, I probably would have kept working at it, but for my first big cake with all kinds of new mediums to work with, I really enjoyed it!

And onto the pictures!

This is the purple fondant that I originally colored.  A nice bright, vibrant purple.

This base shows the original fondant color with the color on the sides, which have faded.  A lot.  :)  But it is okay, it still works.

Since I flipped my cake upside down,  These are the flowers that were "squashed" when the cake "fell".

This picture was supposed to better show how the drop lace is hanging away from the cake, but not by much.  You can kiiinda see it, but not quite so well.

This is Dan, checking out my upside down cake.

We had specific requirements for the cake, but the design was all ours as long as it incorporated then specifications.  We had to have a band of some sort along the base of all layers (mine is the pink band/ribbon), we had to have drop lace on at least one tier (mine is on all three tiers on the pink band), and we had to have at least 5 flowers (mine are supposed to be lily of the valley and I have at least 6 on each tier).

A view from below.

Ta da!  And here is the full picture of the cake!  Each layer is off-set to make it seem as if the cake fell off of a table and that is how it landed.  I decorated each layer as if I was building the cake the correct way with the larger layer on the bottom, so that all the decorations would look as if they really belonged (eg. the drop lace hanging the "correct" way before I flipped it).

After the wedding cake, our last project in Term 3 was the candy platter.  We had to make 10 different types of candy and put 6 of them on our platters.  60 candies, just for the platters!  And there were plenty extra too!  

In the picture, on the middle left, the brown round candies are curry truffles, and the white inside is nougat.  Looking at the large number 6 type shape, starting in the right corner, the dark hearts with white lines in it are dark chocolate candies filled with peppermint fondant, next are milk chocolate candies filled with Grand Marnier ganache, next are milk chocolate candies filled with soft caramel, and the end curve of the 6 are chocolate caramels.  In the middle of the 6 is peanut brittle.  Below the bottom of the 6 are blackberry sour jellies (like sour patch kids), and to the right of the 6 at the top are cashews, pine nuts, peanuts nut clusters coated in white chocolate and drizzled with dark chocolate, and below those are pralines.

Yummy!

Finally! Pictures...

Okay, so here is the start of my attempt to catch up on pictures from the last... almost month - eek!

This is the chocolate honey mouse cake.  It has a roll sponge base, a striped jaconde cake around the side, and is filled with chocolate honey mousse and topped with sliced almonds and cocoa powder.  Mmmm... though the cocoa powder came out a little faster than I'd hoped so there is a touch or two more than needed on there.

These are the normal desserts being plated for the restaurant right now.  I only got pictures of two of them, one being the chocolate dream torte that has always been on the menu, just with new chocolate filigree.

The other dessert is the rum baba, which is a yeast cake soaked in a rum simple syrup, served with whipped cream and fresh fruit.

These are 2 of the 3 other people in my group in Term 3, Daniel and Danika.  Daniel will be working at the ranch with me this summer.

While I am not very good at playing chess, this is the cute chess set we have in the restaurant.  :)

Term 4 is already almost over!

I know I promised pictures of my wedding cake and they still haven't come up, but I just downloaded them this morning!  I just have to crop them to size and they will be up soon!  Things have been pretty hectic since the wedding cake and candy platters.  We started Term 4 and have been going, going, going.  I have been going into the restaurant to help out at lunch this term again, which I enjoy doing.  I never really thought I'd enjoy waiting tables, but at the school restaurant it isn't so bad.  At the start of the term we got the info on our next big project, which was to design our own dessert menu, order all the ingredients, cost it all out, and present it all plated to Chef.  Along with all of that, one of the desserts has to be enough for 16 people so that it can be served in the restaurant to customers.  This - for me - was a pretty stressful project.  At the same time as doing all of this, we were practicing other plated desserts (we made a poached pear, ice cream, sorbets, souffles, fruit mousse) and I was also taking an extra class with the culinary students to get my Serve Safe certification, which is a nationwide food handlers card.  That meant I was going into school early, early and staying through the culinary class, through lunch, and then through my class, plus staying late and going in every weekend to prep for my desserts!  Whew!  It was super busy but a really good time once it was over and I can look back on it.  

My desserts went well, and I will write more on that as I put up the pictures.  Now that the desserts are over, while I still have a big project to finish for the end of school, it does not seem nearly as daunting as the last.  Our final project is to make three showpieces, one out of pastillage, one out of chocolate, and one out of sugar.  One of the three pieces has to be part of our buffet platter, which will have 3 pastry items, 3 petit four items, and 3 candy items - with 3 of each of the 3 in each category.  There will be 27 desserts total as a minimum for the buffet project plus one showpiece, so I am working on that now.  I just poured my chocolate piece last night, but I need to go back and smooth out the back of it today.  I am hoping to start on my pastillage piece today and get it finished drying this weekend to put it all together on Monday and then spend next week on my sugar piece and the buffet items.  

I did make some yummy thai tea ice cream base last night and will hopefully make a tamarind ribbon for it tonight so I can churn the ice cream.  I need to make my mashed potato ice cream this weekend as well too!

AND I ONLY HAVE A WEEK LEFT IN SCHOOL!!!  

It has gone by so fast that I just can't believe that I am almost done!  I am super excited to start my new job, but bummed to be leaving Portland.  I really like the area and have made some good friends, so I know I'll definitely be back to visit!  I am heading home on April 13th and start my job at the ranch April 16th, so it will be time to pack again before I know it!  Too soon!  :)

Pictures to come...

I know I promised many of you that my finished and stacked wedding cake pictures would be up by now, but i need to download a few more pictures that I somehow missed - and they're the most important full shots that are actually clear shots!  :)  So give me one more day to get it uploaded and you can see them!  But I did get it checked off on Monday and from then on it was candy all day every day through til Wednesday!  Then we had 10 candies on platters for our candy presentation, with 7 of each candy.  I had nougat, blackberry gummies - tasted like sour patch kids!, milk choc hearts filled with Grand Marnier ganache, milk choc hearts filled with soft caramel, dark choc hearts filled with peppermint fondant - think york peppermint patty "skiing down the alps" yumminess!, curry ganache truffles dusted in the traditional cocoa powder - mmm!, chocolate caramels, pralines, peanut brittle, and white chocolate nut clusters (with pine nuts, pistachios, and cashews).  WAAAAAY too much sugar in one evening, but suuuuuuper yummy!!!  :)

Okay, I will finish downloading the photos and get them up tomorrow, so you can see my finished wedding cake and my candy platter!  

Consumer class & flowers

So today I helped Chef Hammer with her consumer class for Pies, Tarts, and Quiches.  It was fun because Sally, who is my family up in Vancouver, came down to take the class.  It was a lot of fun, they got to make an apple pie, a lemon curd tart, a ganache tart, a pastry cream and fresh fruit tart, and a quiche.  So much yummy food!  Mainly I got to go around and help as needed and then help with the clean up as well.  There were about 14 people there and they mainly worked in teams of 2, and it looked like everyone had a good time!  Two guys were there who are thinking of taking the baking course soon too.  I had talk to one of them when he came for a tour of the school last week, and they're coming to eat the restaurant for tomorrow night, so it looks like they're pretty interested and seemed to enjoy themselves in the class.  Sally said she had a good time, which is great, since I was kind of wandering all over the place helping out and tried to stop by to see how she was doing when I could.  Overall it was a great class and I had a lot of fun helping with it.  I'll help in Hammer's next class on Artisan Breads in two weeks too, so that will be fun!

I worked on my cake a little more today after the class got out.  I forgot to take pictures though, so I will tomorrow take lots of them when I stack the cake up.  I mainly just fixed a few pieces of drop lace that broke when I had set it down to dry yesterday - they're suuuuper duper delicate!  I fixed those and then glued the flowers on with more royal icing so they would dry enough by tomorrow.  I decided not to do vines/leaves/or branches for my flowers, because the lily-of-the-valley stems were difficult to place on the cake in an eye appealing fashion, so I just placed the flowers on in pairs at the edge.  I also put on the smushed flowers I made the other day too.  I mainly just made a few more flowers just like my other ones, but then smushed parts of them with a measuring cup, so it looks like the cake fell on top of them.  Because, really, if a cake was falling off of a table, the flowers would not all sit perfectly on the top even as it sat on the floor!  :)  So tomorrow, when I flip and layer my cake, the top tier (purple) will have smushed flowers sticking out of the bottom showing at the edge.  

I had also made yesterday a lace "plate" that will hopefully have dried hard by tomorrow (I didn't check it today) and will hopefully peel off the parchment perfectly as well without breaking.  I had planned on more lace work holding it in place on it's own, but the royal icing is so hard to pipe, I just couldn't do such a big plate (about an 11" diameter) with enough to hold it's shape well, so I flooded it with more royal icing instead to make it solid.  I used the same light pink for the lace work for the lace design and my fake couple's initials on the place.  A little brighter pink color to flood some small hearts, and an even brighter hot pink color to flood the entire design.  Cross your fingers for me that it comes out tomorrow!!!

Lace work galore!

I hear talk of more snow coming my way... YAY!!!  :)  It isn't here yet, but I will keep my eyes open for it!!!  I don't want to miss it since we haven't gotten good snow since Christmas - it all keeps melting too fast or just not sticking.

Okay, back to cakes again...  So I went into school today - even though it was  a Saturday - at 8am to work on my wedding cake.  I knew how long the lace work was going to take me because I had so much of it to do, so I came in early and planned to stay all day if needed, which in the end it was, but that was okay.  So I started off piping lace lines into all the non-bunny ears.  It was veeeeery time consuming, but I like how it came out.  I tried to make them all straight up and down from the base of the cake, but the royal icing is so hard to pipe out, my hand would cramp up or get stuck in the piping bag position, that when it came time to move the cake I had to wait a few minutes for my hand to open up wide enough to hold on to the cake edge!

This isn't the best picture, but if you look closely you can see some of the effects of the fading from the sun.  The left side is darker than the right, but still even that isn't as dark as the original color.  The brightness of the blue tier, that is how bright of a purple I had on the top tier!

Lace work on my blue tier...

And more on my green tier...

And now onto my drop lace!  This lace work was one of the requirements for the cake.  The other lace work was my choice to do as an embellishment, but I like how it connects the drop lace to the rest of the cake.  First you have to make a "post" for the lace to hang from.  I will try to take a better picture tomorrow of the drop lace, but it is actually hanging away from the cake itself, whereas my lines are lying right on top of the fondant.  Once the posts are made, you put a little royal icing on the post to attach it to the post, then draw the icing out away from the cake (think of it as pulling it from the cake towards myself) so that it is suspended in midair.  Once it is the correct length, you move it to the next most and attach a little icing there as well.  This goes on all around the cake.  

I could have done a double strand drop lace patter or an alternating strands pattern, but because I have a lot of lace already on the cake, I kind of liked the simpler one strand lace on mine.

In this picture you can kiiiiind of see the gap between the drop lace and the cake itself.  Kinda.

And here is a close up of some of the lace work.

So far this cake is extremely frustrating, but each day I go home super happy with how it's progressed so far.  I am mainly frustrated with all of the tedious work, but it was of course my choice to put it all in there.  The requirements were only ONE tier of drop lace, a band/ribbon on all three tiers, and 5 flowers.  I wanted to do a little more, so it was my choice to do so much, but I am liking making the cake so far.  It is sometimes just so hard to work on it in class because there are so many people in the kitchen and you worry about being bumped.  Today I did all this lace work out in the student lounge area on big round tables because I could have a lot more room to work and it wasn't busy out there, so that was a nice environment to work in for the delicate lace work!

Tomorrow I am helping Chef Hammer with her Pies, Tarts, and Quiche consumer class and will probably stay a bit after to at least get my flowers glued on and on Monday I can (hopefully) stack my cake and get it checked off!

And onto candies

This week was mainly all about our wedding cakes, though we did start candies today.  The candies were yummy!  We made chocolate caramels, peanut brittle, and pralines.  I really liked the pralines more than I expected and now see why Chef was offering to take our extras off our hands!  I have had them before but remember them being a lot harder of a candy, but ours came out fairly soft.  We are going to be doing a candy platter next Wednesday on the last day of class, so we are keeping 7 of each type of candy for that.  But there is of course plenty extra to take home!  :)

So here is a picture of our actual work kitchen.  I had some pictures before of the service kitchen where we plate desserts for the restaurant, but this is the main kitchen we do our work in.  I took it after class so it is all clean and pretty looking, but usually it is much messier as we are working with all the flour and such.  Daniel and Ashely are working on their wedding cakes in the picture.  Each set of tables is a different group.  The closest tables (by where I am taking the picture) are the service group and behind where I am are the large ingredient bins of flour and sugar and such.  The empty group of tables are the bread group, with the ovens off the picture to the right.  Daniel is working on his cake at the prep group tables, and Ashley is working on her cake at the furthest back tables, which are the service group tables.

And on to my wedding cake!  So here is the start of the cake.  I first covered all three foam rounds with a colored fondant and a pink band at the bottom.  Then I decided to make these pink loops (which Chef says are bunny ears, but they are not!) and I am going to fill them with royal icing lace.  My colors had originally all been bright, bright, BRIGHT colors, buuuuuut over the span of one day, the (little) sunlight in the room they're kept in bleached them somewhat, but the blue seems to have made it through fairly bright the best so far.  If you look closely, you can see the purple one has spots of darker purple - the original shade - in this picture.  The purple tier was the one hardest hit and most faded.  It still looks pretty, but definitely faded from the original color.

This is the cage where we keep our project items (eg. petit fours, cakes, candies) so hopefully no other students will bump into them accidentally.  Unfortunately, now my cake has the tan lines of the bars on the cage from the fading in the sun, so now I keep mine by the emergency exit door next to a solid wall where not much sun hits it.  I like to say my cake is a vampire now!  :)

I also made a large egg carton full of little flowers that are supposed to look like lily-of-the-valley flowers.  I know they're a poisonous flower, but they're super pretty and I just didn't think big roses would look good on this cake design.  Originally I was going to do johnny-jump-ups or lilacs, but we didn't have an ingredient in to make gum paste and the sugar paste (fondant) just wasn't working for them.  I am happy with the lily-of-the-valley though!  Now just where to put them on the cake at...  

Well, tomorrow will be spent filling in all the non-bunny ears with lace and doing my drop lace too.  A long day probably, but it will be closer to being done!  :)

Cakes, cakes, and MORE cakes!

I am very over cakes now.  One more week of school to go and I am so ready for cakes to be over!  Cake is of course very yummy - don't get me wrong - but cake after cake after cake after cake after cake after cake AFTER cake gets a bit old after awhile!  This past weekend I went into school with Ashley and I got my Dobos torte and my L'Opera cake done (pictures to come).  I also got my charlotte honey moose started, but not completely finished just yet.  

Yesterday we started our last two cakes, our celebration cake.  It is a chocolate chiffon cake with a Kahlua syrup on it.  It has an Italian buttercream frosting thats is flavored with Kahlua and coffee.  There are roses on them that are the same frosting, but with cocoa, which to me is the more dominant flavor.  The piping of roses took a bit getting used to, but I did okay.  We could pretty much do whatever we wanted with the rest of the decorations as long as we had two rows of shells on the edges and at least 3 roses and 3 leaves on it.  Mine ended up with so much brown coloring mainly because of my flavor choices, but I liked how it came out.  

Today we started our - dum dum dum - wedding cakes!  I was going to do a trial cake for Ashley and Kyle in MT, but with the things that we have to be sure to have on it, they didn't really go with my design.  Plus, with fondant, red is a hard hard color to get to without leaving a red color in the mouth of everyone who eats it and it is also super hard to duplicate any color perfectly if I needed more.  The requirements for this cake are 1) I have to have a band of some sort at the base of each layer, 2) I have to have at least 5 flowers, and 3) I have to royal icing drop lace on at least one layer.  Sooooo, I decided to do a bright green and purple cake.  Unfortunately it was taking so very long to get the green to the brightness I had hoped for, that I just did a little lighter shade, but still bright.  The purple is a great bright shade though!  Originally the green was to be the base for all 3 of my layers with purple stars cut out for the "band" on the bottom edges.  Then Chef Hammer came in and suggested one of us do our cakes upside down, so I said I would do it!  Chef said it was fine, so Chef Hammer said I should, so now I have to redesign my cake.  :)  At that point I had only put fondant on one layer, the 10" base, but that was now going to be my top, so I had to put fondant on the bottom as well.  I wasn't left with much extra green, so I used my purple to cover my 6" layer, which is now my base layer.  I am trying to decided what color to do the center 8" layer, but I am thinking a vibrant yellow perhaps.  I will have to rethink my design and really think more in general on this tonight...

Though tonight was a good night because the Culinary class next door gave us some of the food they prepared - all different types!  A little mediterranean, latin, asian, and indian food.  A mix of it all and suuuuuper yummy!