I spent the weekend leading up to this week practicing all three of the potential exam dishes;
- Tarte aux Citron (Lemon meringue tart),
- Genoise a la confiture de framboises (sponge cake with buttercream and raspberry jam),
- Coffee eclairs.
Previously, in class and on a number of practice attempts, the pate brisee (shortcrust pastry) has domed in the middle and shrunk quite dramatically. I researched it a lot, spoke to the chefs and other students and no matter what I tried differently I still got the same result, extremely frustrating! Resigned to my fate and clearly cursed, I set about making the pastry shell first. I did everything as I had before, but rolled it a tad thinner before lining the tart shell, let it rest in the fridge and then it was in to bake. I checked it periodically while I was making the lemon curd and candied lemon rind decoration, took the baking rice out once the case was dried out (so far so good, no shrinkage or dome in the middle), then back in to finish cooking and go nice and golden brown - its at this stage it usually domes and contracts when I'm not looking. 10 - 15 mins later it was ready, and finally, FINALLY no dome or major shrinkage! It was a real confidence boost before the exam, because I'll all but given up hope on it! The cake and the eclairs went fine as well, which reaffirmed what I thought about the exam dishes, in that I really didn't mind which one we get.
Monday came round and a number of the group were a bit apprehensive about what we'd get. We got up to the room early and couldn't resist a peak in, there were lemon juicers and graters in the set ups so there was a whisper of excitement that it could be lemon tart. That was short lived though when the chef came out and promptly announced we'd be doing the eclairs! We were warned not to do the meercat thing at the window as they put various bits of equipment out to fool us! We were allowed in early and did the bon d'economat, which is a recipe with various bits blanked out. We had to fill in the blanks of quantities, ingredients and methods and draw a top view and cross section of what they were supposed to look like. I've never been good at drawing so it looked a tad suspect, thankfully we had to label it as well or else if could have easily been mistaken for a nicely decorated turd! Then it was a case of getting on with it. I felt quite calm and relaxed overall, everything seemed to go fine and I was making good time. I can't claim to have ever enjoyed an exam before, but there was something different about this one, it felt like a good kitchen session and I enjoyed myself. The only slight issues, in my opinion at least, was the fondant being a little bit overheated and it lost its shine slightly, and the chocolate piping. I practiced the piping on the baking paper first to get a feel for it and settle on the design I wanted. I got it looking really nice (even if I do say so myself!), or at least to a point I was happy with it, went to pipe the first eclair and the chocolate in the bag seized up and it went uncontrollably squiggly, typical! The first couple were a bit dodgy so I'll lose marks for consistency, but I was happy with about 8 of them (we had to present 12). Finally we had to pipe 10 consistent shells and rosettes on a separate cake card, the rosettes I was really happy with, the shells were ok but I didn't quite have the lined up as neatly as I'd hoped - they were consistent at least! I'd kept my station really clean, and myself, so I'm hoping to have got good marks for that. We find out about the exam, pass/fail, what went well/wrong and how we did overall next tuesday. Not too long to wait fortunately.
After the exam we went out for a drink, unfortunately at the bar we went to it was buy of get one free cocktails, needless to say it was quite a bit of a struggle getting up for work the next morning!
Thursday morning and a 4am start! I got the bus as normal and all of a sudden the motorway came to a complete stop. Now, I haven't missed a single lesson this term, and I was determined to make sure I had 100% attendance. However, 40 minutes later, when we hadn't moved an inch, I started to get worried that the 100% attendance wouldn't be achieved. Fortunately the traffic started moving again slowly and once we were past the accident we were well on the way. I arrived in time, luckily! The demo was on chocolate truffles, three varieties; Muscadines (milk chocolate with praline paste), white chocolate with kirsch ganache and dark chocolate with a rum laced ganache. The chef was in a bit of a bad mood so it wasn't the most enjoyable demo, it was interesting though. He warned us that he would be picking 'volunteers' to help him at the front, unfortunately I was sat in the wrong seat and was one of the four people picked to help out. My job was to smooth over the white chocolate on the bottom of the white shells - harder than it looked, but I did ok. Scurried back to my seat at the earliest opportunity! The muscadines tasted really nice, the white chocolate ones tasted nice, the dark chocolate ones had a bit too much rum in though. Having said that, they had a lovely texture so it wasn't all bad!
It was a long break between the demo and practical - 8 hours. It was filled with a trip to a mexican food place for nachos (nice, but not the best I've had), a wander around London and then a nice long sit in St James' Park, watching the world go by and fending off the grotty pigeons with sticks.
The practical finally came round and it was good fun, we had my favourite chef, which really made the last Basic Patisserie lesson great. We split off into groups of 3's and 4's and each worked on one truffle mix, the group I was in hard dark chocolate to do. First job was melting the chocolate to make the ganache with. The ganache was made and a little less rum added than the recipe called for, this was then left to set and then piped into rough rounds (although in reality they came out more like little turdlets!). Again, these were left to set and then rolled into balls, now it was time to temper the chocolate. This was a lot harder than it looks. You first have to raise the chocolate to a temperature of 45-50 degrees, then cool it to 27 degrees, then raise it again to 32 degrees, then its ready to use. The reason for the up and down in temperatures is because of the various fats and getting them to melt and control the crystallisation properly. We got it roughly right and then it was time to dip the chocolates before rolling them in cocoa powder. We had quite a good production line going! It was quite slow going though because the chocolate kept solidifying too much to be able to coat the balls evenly, so we had to reheat it very gently to get back to the correct temperature. Chef then came along and showed us a quick way of coating the rounds - coating the latex gloves in chocolate, fondling the balls a bit, to coat them, and then straight in the cocoa - it got a much thinner chocolate layer than we were getting using the chocolate fork/prongs and was a lot quicker. So we finished the second half in about a tenth of the time it took to to do the first half! The feedback was good and they tasted nice. We then had a share out with the rest of the group, so we all had some white ones, muscadines and others had some of our dark ones too.
It was a really nice last practical together because there was a lot of people missing from the other groups, but Group D (the best group) were all present and correct. However, practical 20 of 20 now signals the end of Group D as it stands. Very sad, but very happy with everything we achieved together.
Next week we don't have any lessons, we just have the exam debrief on Tuesday. Got to get into school for 8:10am, so its a 4am start for a 10 minute chat with the chef. I half wondered about whether it was really worth going in for, but I'd really value some feedback and learning what I did well or could have been done better. These chefs are amazing and hugely experienced, so I want to take every opportunity to learn from them. I'll find out whether I passed the exam or not - that's not a guarantee of passing Basic Patisserie as a whole, but its a good indication at least! Plus it's useful for knowing whether its worth turning up for the graduation ceremony on Thursday or not, because if we don't pass the exam we can't pass BP!
Thursday will be the graduation ceremony where we'll get a full breakdown of marks for the exam (45% of final grade), the written exam (10% of final grade) and all of the practical lessons (45% of final grade)...oh and we'll also find out if we passed the kitchen safety/hygiene thingy we did in the first week. I haven't heard about needing to retake that exam, so thats an encouraging sign! I can't wait to get the final grades for everything, it'll be good to see how I've done, and where I may need to up my game for Intermediate Patisserie (as long as I pass BP!). Fingers are firmly crossed!
The chocolate truffles! White, dark and the milk chocolate muscadines covered in icing sugar. These were good fun to make, and we had enough time to wander around and see how the others were getting on (and sample the half made ones covertly!). They all tasted really nice, my favourites were the muscadines though.
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