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.

Tarts, Beef Stroganoff, Duck

In pastry this week, we went back to sweet short pastry - for tarts and such, with different fillings.  Earlier this week, we touched on flan caramel, and creme brulee, sorta desserts.  Tmw, we'll make some millefeuille - puff pastry! - groan!

For cuisine, we made a roast duck, however, I don't blame you if you mistook it for the Chinese soya braised duck.  It tastes quite similar too!  Actually, the color comes from caramelising, and thickened veal stock to make a sauce.  It did come out kinda crispy from the oven, but I guess you have to eat it right away.

Beef stroganoff - I always thought it to be a stew, well, apparently not, it's briefly sauteed tenderloin cubes with a savory spicy paprika cream sauce.  Delicious with pilaf rice.  The other is a picture of a warm souffle with cointreau flavoring.

LCB second week - Shortcrust

This week, we started on basic dough.  Out of the basic break dough, we made Pissaladiere, as you can gu

ess from the name, it's very close to pizza, it's basically an onion tart (on dough bread), and some garnishing.  Onion lovers will like it.  Whatever it is, don't say it's a French pizza, at least not to a French!

Apparently, this name came from the old verb pissaler - which means to salt, and it's from Nice.

However, we will pick up the bread dough lessons in a separate workshop - to be organised, as it is more extensive.

We also went further into shortcrust pastry, 

where you can produce Quiche Lorraine, for savory, and fruit/apple/pear/almond tarts for sweet.  The magic of working shortcrust pastry is, to work it as little as possible!  It should give you a brittle, crunch texture which is 'short', as in shortbread.  The more you work it, the flour has time to become elastic and upon baking, the pastry 'shell' will shrink and the patterns on the rim become non evident.  

That is a picture of wild 

mushroom quiche and Quiche Lorraine.  

In Pastry,  we made Tarte aux Pommes (classic French apple tart, and its variations), fresh fruit tart (with pastry cream in centre).