Beef cheeks, Duck breasts, and "Hello Kitty!" sugar

In Cuisine this week:

a)  Starters:  1)  White fish ceviche guacamole.  b) Marinated herring mixed with cream and caviar, served in little cucumber cups.

b)  Mains:  1) Duck breasts baked in salt crust dough, vegetable "tagliatelle" and crispy potatoes.  2)  Beef cheeks "Miroton" style with cumin carrots and stuffed turnip

The duck breasts came out nice and rosé, perfumed and flavoured by coarse sea salt dough studded with chopped herbs.  It was also a delight to crunch into the wafer thin potatoes!

The beef cheek stew is a rather traditional dish, the meat was so tender by the end of our 3 hr class, nicely gelatinous in the middle, flavoured with red wine and herbs, sliced and breaded with light herb seasoning.  Very heart warming when you bite into a piece.  Also, an ingenious way to serve turnip in cups filled with mushroom duxelles and ham.

C)  Dessert:  Warm strawberry soup flavoured with ginger, served with yoghurt sorbert (made during class, of cos')  2) Light tiramisu-style mousse and sugared raspberries.

Golly! Giant Macaroon!

We looked at more innovative logcakes this week, and a macaroon cake.  Ok first for the logcakes, don't you love the pretty sight of what I call a "Chanel bag" square logcake?  I thought the patterned indentation reminds me of an expensive fashionable purse or bag.  Sitting on a sweet tart dough, the inside houses a disc of vanilla pear cream, and a smaller disc of fleur de sel caramel, suspended in vanilla mousse, then encased by praline biscuit, and then, the outermost with coffee caramel mousse!  *pant pant*  Needless to say, we didn't make it, it would have taken us maybe 5 hrs!

Instead, we made the mango raspberry logcake which you can see mine in the pale yellow creamy logcake.  We laid some dacquoise, which soaks up nice and moist, in between layers of mango and raspberry cream.

Another demonstration was a vanilla apricot mouse cake, while for practical we made the technically more difficult macaroon.  This recipe uses Italian meringue.  While it holds up the batter more easily, it also gives a more chewy texture to the biscuit. I know the soft crumbly texture is much desired in the 'usual' macaroons, but I think it will not work in this recipe, as the minute you pick up these 18 cm discs, it would have fallen to bits or you would have given it undesired cracks.

Last of Intermediate Pastry

This week, we had a bread-making workshop, we made some baguettes (of cos!), country bread (part rye), some sandwich loaf and foccacia.  It's another reason to want to go into French culinary - the bread!!

It's not easy at all, making good bread, it's a lot of chemistry and adapting to your current environment.  There needs to be a lot precision.  Afterall, a dough is a living, breathing, eating, reproducing organism until we chuck it into the oven.

Other pastries we made were the Orange Flower Mousse log cake, an Earl Grey tea mousse cake with milk choc covering.  A cheesy lemon tart and a warm raspberry tart.

This is the last of the term, see you in Superior Pastry!!!  Oh by the way, in Superior pastry, we will have to come out with our own recipe of a cake.  We can use anything under the sun.  So if you guys have some sentimental flavors and tastes you would like to suggest, please feel free to drop a line!  And no, I don't think durians quite strike the right picture.... 

Pastry, last for Intermediate Course

Although there will be just maybe 1-2 cakes this last week, as well as a workshop on breadmaking, last week sees the last of the cakes to be entered into the exam.

Blackcurrant mousse cake, caramel and hazelnut mousse cake, a raspberry and green tea mousse cake called Zevert.  

And the last you see here, the elaborately decorated 'fruit cake', is actually..... drum roll..... a cheese cake!!  We envelopped the whole cake with whipped cream and laced the top with various fruits. American recipe, French presentation!

Return of the killer cakes!

Killer cakes are what I call cakes that takes a lot of preparation and time, that if you ever get them in your exam, they will 'kill' you.  You heard of the Opera already, this week is the Passionata - a mousse cake of passion fruit and raspberry, with intricate sponge deco for sides, centre of coconut dacquoise.

Slightly easier from my cuisine class, we had a taste of the traditional brittany crêpe, with home made ice cream and caramel sauce, you can make all sorts of fillings with these versatile sheets, from sweet to savoury.  
Fruit jelly, today was apricot passionfruit, but we can replicate the formula with other fruits.  

Another cake we looked at was the Dome cake (doesn't the spikes reminds you of a durian?? but no, it's not a durian cake)   with chestnut mousse and cream, protected by a fine layer of dark choc from (an industrial) spray gun.  It has 3 layers of hazelnut dacquoise in between, it gives a warm feeling in your heart when you take a bite.   

The first cake we made this week was quite a mouthful, some dacquoise with coconut mousse, topped with pineapple slivers, seasoned with (open your eyes and ears) sprinkle of black pepper and chopped coriander leaves!! Not kidding!  I had a shiver when I first stated it.  Chef said we are free to opt out the black pepper and coriander, which I did.

Pastry and Desserts- Week 2

Check out the labels for this post and guess which is which....

Pastry this week....

Some of these pics might look familiar to the guys who had them at Rumia over last weekend!

We started to work more on mousse cakes - sigh of relief, after all that butter creams and chocolate!!!  Finally something light!  Raspberry and vanilla bavarian cream mousse cake, casino - a bavarian mousse cake studded with mini swiss-rolls-ish pieces, poached apples with meringue, flaky pastries from last week, we touched on puff squares with raspberry jam and almond in caramel sauce, and a rather extra large portuguese egg custard tart.