Pastry week 2

This week, we made the infamous Baba Au Rhum Vieux  - it's essentially a brioche recipe baked very very dry, and soaked in syrup and rum till it puffs up so much and so wobbly!  The one in the grey background was my baba (I used a lot of rum in mine!).  Using (more or less) the same brioche recipe, we made the Alsatian Kugelhopf, and a sorta puff pastry tart.  In Italy, you will have the Panettone.

And more creative tarts!  omg, I've never seen a diamond shape mini-tart before.  It's lemon mousse with an apricot jelly centre, sprayed with pink chocolate and resting on a crunchy pistachio tart base.

The ones we made in class, Eskimchococassis, (quite a mouthful, and when you bite into one, it's quite a mouthful too, lol), are made to ressemble an ice cream stick resting on crunchy choc tart bases sandwiched with choc mousse.  The "ice cream" - eskimo - are made from freezing a blackcurrant (cassis) jelly centre in a tube filled with delicious! choc mousse, dipped into dark choc glaze, and ends dipped into either almonds or pistachio.  

Magnum, anyone?  Eva Longoria, this might be your strongest temptation yet!

Continuation:  The end of the week saw 2 more variations of creative tarts. One was coconut mousse tart with pineapple topping, the one we made in the end.

Another came as a rectangular block of pistachio mousse on a Bretonne shortbread, you might ask what is so 'tart' about this, shouldn't it be a mousse cake?  No, because like a classic tart, you have a crunchy base, and pastry cream (or its variations) has been used.  You can see a cross section of the apricot jelly 'buttons'.

More puffs.......

One of my earliest recollection of French pastry was.... the classic marbled millefeuille!!  Din and Moira had the (good?) fortune to taste it last weekend during they trip over here.  Sorry for the rest of the guys, it should be consumed within a day for better taste!  Another variation is the hazelnut praline type.

Next, chocolate souffle with orange ice-cream, and a type of brioche popular in the south of France in replacement of northern France's King's cake, eaten during Epiphany, which you see here in a golden disc of puff pastry with crème frangipane (almond and pastry cream) -Pithivier.

Soups, Croissants, Brioches

Last week, we had a week of French soups - classic consomme, french onion soup, and a fish soup, in Pastry, we finally attempted Croissants and Brioches.  I made my own croissants!!  How proud am I of that!?  But it's not easy, I think it's even tougher than the puff pastry that I've done earlier.  The difference is that the dough is fermented (like a bread dough), coupled with butter lamination (like puff pastry), so it's really elastic, and hard to roll up to stretch them to workable sheets

.  So the next time you bite into a well-down croissant, thank your lucky stars.  Mine didn't turn out too bad either!  With a narrow strip of dough, we made pain au chocolat - chocolate croissant, most call it.  There're those squarish icing sugared ones you see in the pictures.

Brioches on the other hand, are not typically my favorites, but Tr

opezienne, a large flat brioche filled with orange flowered water infused cream filling is simply delicious!  The rest of the brioche pictures are as follows:

All in all, it was pretty good.