Did i hear somebody say.... macaroons?

Yes, finally!!  The second other reason for having to choose to take up Pastry... the perfect macaroons!!  (The other reason, if you're curious to know, was to know how to make rich flavorful, flaky and light croissants!  We did that in Basic last term).

Is it difficult?  No!  Are there many ways you could go wrong, YES!!  But luckily for me, we made a good mixture and respected all the parameters to make a good macaroon, and the result is fantastic!!  We went back to puff pastry again, this time with the inverted method, where the butter is outside of the dough.  The result is a surprisingly light and flake texture , less puffy, but still flaky, and it has a more melt in your mouth taste.

Cuisine, we looked at rhubarb and vanilla cream with shortbread cookie, and a "Hello Kitty" cake, I shall stick to that name.

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.