Sugar Rush

Have I mentioned that dessert is my major weakness? Even if I'm really full, I always need to cleanse my palate with something sweet (even if it's just an apple....but something chocolate is obviously preferred). It drives me crazy that Zack isn't a big dessert person. I always beg him to share one with me at restaurants, and then he ends up eating one bite and leaves the rest to me! He'd rather save room for an extra appetizer and is much more tempted by bad-for-you salty food like french fries and chips. Me, I could easily pass on the fries and often do. But put something chocolatey in front of me and it doesn't stand a chance.

This week in B&P, we've been doing mostly sweet stuff. We're going through the kitchen's supply of sugar like crazy: light brown, dark brown, confectioner's, granulated, molasses, honey...you name it. The resulting sweet treats have been pretty impressive, if I do say so myself.

Though not technically a dessert, muffins are one of my ultimate guilty pleasures. A while ago, I totally ruined them for Zack's mom, Candy, when I let her in on the little secret that muffins (even bran ones) are far from health food--they're really just big cupcakes minus the frosting. I still feel bad about that! Though it's certainly not great to eat what is essentially cake for breakfast on a regular basis, I treat myself to a muffin once in a while--usually when I have to fly somewhere early in the morning and get breakfast at the airport. I always thoroughly enjoy them, but a fresh bakery muffin really is a big step up from the Starbucks variety, as was evidenced by the ones we made in class:

Miles of muffins

Strawberry, Banana-nut, and Blueberry

From there, we moved on to cookies: we've done classic chocolate chip, fudgy double-chocolate, peanut butter, oatmeal-cranberry, almond macaroons, icebox cookies (rolled in a log, a la slice-n-bake), gingersnaps, spritz cookies (those little butter cookies that are often topped with sprinkles and served at teas). As you can imagine, with a batch or more of each kind, the number of cookies coming out of our bakeshop was pretty ridiculous.

Here are our double chocolate cookies waiting to be baked--truly a chocoholic's dream. How much do you want to lick the bowl from that cookie dough?! Not so appropriate in class. Portioning out the cookies with an ice cream scoop produces beautiful results. The cookies bake up round and uniform in size, but still look rustic and "homemade." Below, cookies fresh from the oven.

Over the past few days, we've also worked on a number of pies and tarts in several stages. One day, we made pie dough and pate sucre, a sugar-cookie-like dough used for tarts. The next, we made a bunch of fillings. Yesterday, we baked the shells and filled them--a more complicated process than one would think. Some pie shells are fully baked and then filled once they've cooled (like lemon meringue), others are par-baked and finished in the oven with the filling inside (pecan), and some fillings are baked start-to-finish in the raw pie dough (apple). Finally, today, we got to put on the finishing decorative touches. Check out the spread from Chef H.'s demo:

From left: chocolate tart, pear tart, key lime pie, apricot tart

Now here's our group's effort. Despite my lack of artistic ability, they turned out pretty well! Naturally, when it was time to split up our group's duties, I focused on the chocolate tart. It's a sugar crust filled with a rich dark chocolate batter. I decorated it with a layer of chocolate ganache--made from cream and more dark chocolate--and a pretty swirl of caramel. Then we covered up most of the tart and gave the edge a light dusting of powdered sugar. We'll slice into all of these next week--I hope the chocolate one tastes as good as it looks.