Baking Wrap-Up

When I bit into the chocolate tart mentioned (and pictured) in my last post, I wished I could Fed-Ex a slice to Wally, Zack's dad. He's my partner in crime when it comes to desserts, especially chocolate ones, and this tart was so simple yet decadent: a thin, buttery crust topped with fudgy dark chocolate and a light coating of silky ganache. Easy to make, too...I might have to whip one up just for Wally the next time they come to visit. It's so dangerously good that if left to our own devices, the two of us could probably polish off the entire tart ourselves!

Yesterday we showcased the baking and pastry skills we've learned over the past three weeks in our practical exam. In four hours, each group had to produce six baguettes, two dozen cookies, an almond tart, and a fully decorated layer cake. It sounded pretty daunting at first...when I explained the practical to my mom, she remarked that it would take her a week to make all of that! In reality, it was pretty straightforward. We actually had a lot of downtime while things were baking and setting up--nothing like the chaos of the Skills 2 "mystery basket" practical.

On Wednesday, we each decorated our own cake to practice for the practical. I toiled over cutting my yellow cake into three layers, applied even layers of buttercream between them, iced the thing, and piped roses on top with a pastry bag and rose tip. My cake looked pretty decent, but this is definitely not my thing--the process really stresses me out. After sweating over my imperfect buttercream roses, I now have a great respect for all of the wedding cake designers that used to harass me to get onto the Washingtonian's wedding guide!

So, needless to say, I was up for doing anything my group needed during the practical as long as I didn't have to go near the cake decorating. Fortuntely, one of my group members had decorated his cake perfectly--and calmly--so he volunteered. I made the pate sucre crust for our tart and assembled it, lining the crust with a layer of raspberry jam, then a thick layer of frangipane (almond) filling, and then decorating it with cherries and almonds in a pretty circular pattern. I loved how it turned out, and I may or may not have brought the leftovers home that evening to share with friends, who loved it too.

Our photogenic cherry-almond tart

The chocolate chip cookies were another story. We thought this would be the simplest task of the practical, but it turns out that the easy recipes are also easiest to mess up. Our cake and tart were nearly perfect, but the simple baguettes and cookies had some flaws. For some reason, none of the groups in our class ended up with great cookies that day.

When we got our batch into the oven, I noticed immediately that they weren't spreading enough. I took them out when they were getting very brown around the edges, but they were still slightly dome-shaped and golden on top. They tasted good--it's hard to make a chocolate chip cookie taste bad unless you burn them--but the cookies that we'd made in class previously had been flatter and less cakey. It could be that the batter was undermixed, or that an ingredient was scaled incorrectly, or that we had to use the convection ovens to bake them because the other ovens were full of breads, cakes, and tarts. Anyway, not thrilled about the cookies, and our baguettes were a bit too dense (from not bench-resting them long enough, probably), but we still felt good about the practical overall and came away with a good score from the chefs.

Our spread for the final practical: iced yellow cake, baguettes, cookies, cherry-almond tart

Next week, I move past bread and cake and on to...meat! My next class is meat fabrication, so I'll be writing about butchering and cooking all different cuts. Hopefully after three weeks of this, I'll know exactly what to do with an untrimmed rack of lamb if I ever get it again in a mystery basket. Seafood is involved too, apparently. Stay tuned.