So much cake

this cake is covered in marzipan with a marzipan bow. i made the marzipan first.


oh, and these pictures are from after i picked up the cake and the ribbon and bow fell off kinda. it needed a little more royal icing glue.


the inside of the cake is white cake that is gross. it is kind of like gross cornbread with cake flavor. the way the ingredients were mixed together doesn't make any sense, and no one knows why it is in the curriculum like that. i think it has a cherry pastry cream filling.



this cake was better.


the inside of this one is lemon chiffon cake with lemon curd filling.
and then we covered them with buttercream basket weave. i think i need to practice this one more. i can't make it look like the frosting is going under.



i finished it, but then decided to practice on the top. there is probably a little too much buttercream on this cake.

Cakes-- Part 2

merry christmas! i made a buche de noel. it is a rolled up cake with chestnut buttercream and cranberry compote, then iced in chocolate buttercream.

it's delicious, even in september.


it has meringue mushrooms.


and a happy snowman.


i went a little mushroom crazy because i think they are so cute. and my snowy leaves broke, but i stuck them on anyway.


and, yes, i did walk around soho with a yule log in a see-through cake box on an 85 degree day in september. and, yes, a little boy did point at it and say, "what IS that thing??" and he really embarrassed his people even though i said, "it's ok. it's a cake. do you want to see it?" and i wanted to give him the yule log, but you can't really go around offering cake to small children. and then the stumps fell off the cake because yule logs weren't really meant to be hauled around soho on 85 degree days in september.



Fraisier

you know this is a fraisier because it says fraisier.


the top is green marzipan. the strawberries are marzipan. the writing is royal icing.

there are strawberries around the bottom, then a couple of layers of american milk sponge. it is full of creme mousseline, which is pastry cream and a lot of butter.



unfortunately, i made a mistake and made the wrong recipe of pastry cream, so there is half as much pastry cream as there is supposed to be. and that translates to twice as much butter as there is supposed to be.

Petits Fours Test

our petits fours test was to make up four of our own petits fours. these are my four on the right.



i chose a fall theme, since it was almost fall.




this is a sweet potato tart in a puff pastry shell. it is like thanksgiving. (it is like my very very favorite part of thanksgiving, in fact.)


the shells puffed a little out of control, so the tarts are a little crazy-shaped. but they tasted pretty good. i think i should used a deeper mold next time.



pears are for fall, and my favorite pear snack is pears with cheese and black pepper on crackers. this is like a fancy version of that. it is a diamond of puff pastry, a little square of gruyere, a swirl of pear-black pepper pastry cream, and a pear garnish.

of course i love it because i made it, but my chef liked it, too.



maybe i talked to too many boys about this test, but when i mentioned my fall theme, they only said one thing: "football." nothing else. so i decided to make my cake into a football shape. i looked all over for the perfect-sized football cutter, but ended up having to bend out a heart cutter. it worked, though.


this is a hazelnut-gingerbread sponge layered with a little lemon curd. making the sponge was tricky. i adapted a recipe for a chocolate-hazelnut sponge. originally i thought i'd just substitute the cocoa with gingerbread spices, but gingerbread also needs molasses. so i thought maybe i could substitute molasses for part of the hazelnut paste. but then i realized that the recipe doesn't have flour, so if i started taking out hazelnut paste, it would be a sticky mess that fell apart. so, i had to decide if molasses was more like hazelnut paste (texture), egg whites (moisture), or sugar (sweetness). i decided it was all three and took a little of all of them out and put molasses instead. oh, and it worked. i was honestly a little surprised. the flavor was strong, but good.


this one was sort of the dud. it was a caramel apple filling in a sesame tuile. i don't think the apples were caramel-y enough, but that wasn't the real problem. the sesame tuile came out weird. i had never tried it before, and i thought it was going to be more like the almond tuile-- thin and caramel-y and crunchy. apparently you should spread the sesame one more.

. . . Petits Fours

Pate de Fruits

this is like a gummy bear or something. these happen to be made with pineapple. i don't like chewy things at all, but i like this. it is pretty melty and doesn't get stuck in your teeth.


pineapple is my favorite flavor of gummy bear anyway.

oh, and below the pate de fruits is some nougat. i don't like nougat because it is very chewy. i only had nice nougat once, and it was in ice cream, which softens it up.


Petits Fours Glacees

these are cake with buttercream. we made buttercream flavored with pomegranate molasses (we just found that in the cabinet-- i didn't even know it was a thing, but it was delicious), peach puree, and pistachio paste. these round ones have some sugar on top.


in the corner, you can see some that are cake with all three flavors of butter cream and coated with chocolate.


and these are stacked cakes. i glazed the ones that are closer to the bottom right.


that is poured fondant, and it is grossly sweet. i think the color of the fondant makes them even grosser.

More

Coconut Macaroons

i love these. are we seeing a pattern at pastry school?


i used a big pastry tip to shape these into a cone, then mashed it a little to be a pyramid. and a little chocolate never hurt anything.

then i guess i decided to take a picture of the most crooked one.




and i tried diagonal lines for my tray.



from upper left to lower right: langues de chat, opera cake, coconut macaroons, pate de fruits, nougat

More Petits Fours

Opera Cake

i guess i like taking pictures of opera cake, because i took a lot.



this is a hazelnut cake with coffee buttercream and chocolate ganache and a little chocolate glaze on top.


so it is essentially all of my favorite things.


there were a lot of scraps when i was making it and trimming it. and i ate a lot of them. a lot. i finally just had to compost the rest so i couldn't eat any more.




so so so delicious.

Petits Fours

Cherry Pallettes

these are one million tiny cherry cookie-things.



Financiers

these are supposed to look like bars of gold. (i don't think we have that mold at school.) they have hazelnut paste and brown butter (beurre noissette) in them. that is a strip of pineapple on top.


Almond Tuilles

you can bend these while they are still warm.




And every few days we'd put them on trays.

left to right: cherry pallettes, passion fruit curd tarts, almond macaroons with chocolate, almond tuiles, chocolate macaroons, financiers, gebert macaroons


tiny tart shells are a little tricky. petits fours are supposed to be 2 bites. these passion fruit tarts have blueberries on top.



these chocolate macaroons were super hard to pipe. it was kind of like piping water. that is why some of the tops don't match some of the bottoms.

the green macaroons are gebert macaroons. they are green from food coloring, and these just happen to be filled with raspberry jam or passion fruit curd because that is what we had around.


i did not make crooked financiers. we just consolidated all of them at the end of one day and took some for our trays another day. someone else makes crooked financiers.

Bread Test

this is pain au chocolat, croissant, savoy scones, and petit pains.


i am pretty sure i'm not going to grow up to be a bread baker.

So much bread

Bagels

i eat a lot of bagels, and i'm not really looking forward to the day the bagel guy downstairs says, "sesame bagel with veggie cream cheese, right? you want three bean salad today?" i guess i do change it up about every 5 or so trips to the bagel store, usually on a weekend morning, when i get a cinnamon raisin bagel with walnut raisin cream cheese. i like to keep them on their toes. anyway, it never really occurred to me that i could make my own bagels, but i did.

and then i had one for lunch. it was delicious.




Lemon Poppy Seed Muffins

everyone likes lemon poppy seed muffins. these were good, except there was a lot of really tart glaze.



Corn Bread

this was fine. it was more like a cornbread cake than just a cornbread.


it was sweet. (not for dad.) it had a maple glaze on it. (not for mom.)



Pannetone

i'm sure this was incredible and delicious. but i was finally full of bread.


for real. i didn't even taste it.