Week 4 (Intermediate Patisserie)

Practice exam dish week!

This week we had two of our three possible exam dishes. We started on Monday with a demo for the Fraisier cake. The Fraisier cake is a genoise sponge cut in two (or three if you count trimming the top), with a gigantic layer of strawberries and crème mousseline in the middle. The top is adorned with a marzipan disc, royal icing piping and a marzipan rose and leaves. The chef made two really nice cakes. The genoise has very little butter added, so to keep it moist it’s soaked with a syrup laced with lots of kirsch. The chef encouraged us to use a lot of the syrup as they wanted to taste the kirsch flavour in the final dish – no arguments from me there.  He also showed us a slight variation on how to do the marzipan rose (which I preferred to the other way we were shown), he’d clearly done this a lot because they looked very realistic. I grabbed a piece of cake and ran out the room with it as we had to get ready to go straight into the practical, in hindsight though, I wish I’d stuck around another couple of minutes to get another piece, it was very nice indeed.

Straight into our practical and we had the same chef from the demo, my favourite chef. It really makes a difference which chef you have, we were lucky this week, to get two chefs that try and push you hard but keep you calm under pressure, a very difficult balancing act which both seemed to have mastered. I think that went some way to help prevent this week being a disaster! You also want to push yourself harder to make sure you impress them. The feedback from all the chefs is usually really valuable, it just means that little bit more from a chef you really like. We also had an interloping chef, a new chap that had started only the week before and was learning the ropes. He went around and helped give advice, very useful advice, but do something he didn’t like, or if anyone didn’t listen to him, you knew about it!

We started by making the genoise sponge, by hand. It went on the bain marie and came up to temperature quickly, so it was then a case of whisking hard and fast to get lots of air into it (that’s the only way the cake rises and achieves volume). I’m sure one day I’ll manage to whisk it by hand enough to leave a trail of the mixture for 5 seconds, but I can only manage 3 (counting a little quicker than would probably be right!) so far. Still, it seemed fine though, my cake actually rose really well, to the point I could have trimmed more from the top when it came to cutting it. While that was baking it was on to the pastry cream for the crème mousseline. We’ve made that so many times now it almost comes as second nature, and luckily the days of it taking 25 mins to thicken and be ready are long gone (it baffles me now how it ever took that long now!). That was set aside to cool and the syrup for the imbibage made quickly. Then it was onto the marzipan. We were given a chunk which we had to divide into two, one was to be coloured green (leaves) and the other pink (disc and rose). The colouring was strong stuff, so the trick was not to add too much. Mine seemed to take a little while to get to the right colour, I think I was being a little overcautious with it, you can always add more but can’t take away! This disc was rolled out first, then marked with a special ribbed rolling pin, first rolled one way, then the other, to leave miniature squares over it, it looked a lot nicer than if it had just been left plain. The rose was done next. I was pretty happy with it, it looked more realistic than my previous one, and was far more delicate, so hopefully progress was being made. This was set aside while the cake was assembled, firstly it was trimmed on the top, then cut equally in two. The crème mousseline was made by knocking back the pastry cream and adding butter in slowly, with a good glug of kirsch. Next the strawberries were cut so they were all the same height – precision is the key to this cake looking good! The bottom layer of the cake was soaked well with the kirsch syrup, the strawberries lines around the edge of the ring on top of the base, then the mousseline was piped in. The trimmed top part was added as an insert (again, soaked well with syrup), with a few more strawberries on top, then the rest of the cream piped over. The last layer of the sponge was place on top and then pressed down. I think I pressed down a bit too hard because after un-moulding it some of the mousseline had shot up the side and masked the sponge a little, leaving it a tad out of proportion – a good lesson for next time though. The marzipan was added to the top, and leaves were made and added with the rose, then it was on to the royal icing piping. I could have done that a lot better, it looked like I’d got a case of the shakes, I think a lot more practice is needed, plus in hindsight the icing may have been a tad too thick. I got good feedback from the chef though, and some useful tips for when I practice the dish, so it was a good lesson. It would have passed the exam so that’s the main thing! Frustratingly though, the chef gave the same feedback on my rose as he did in the skills test the week before, “its almost there” But what else do I need to do to get it “there”!? This weeks was a lot more delicate (a miracle considering how big and fumbling my hands are usually!), but I guess I just need to keep practicing it.

Over the weekend I had designed how I wanted the top of my Fraisier cake and Opera gateau to look. Free-styling doesn’t really work for me I’ve discovered, I was never the most artistic at school and trying to come up with something that looks really good straight off the bat is not within my ability…yet! So I researched various designs and made a drawing of something that I could copy in class. During both practical lessons I was really glad of these and the chefs gave me some good tips on how to improve them.

Tuesday was the Opera gateau, although we weren’t in until 3pm for the demo. The chef warned us that this one would be tough and he wasn’t wrong! It took the chef a while to do everything, a sheet sponge had to be cooked, a soaking syrup made, along with butter cream and ganache. A lot of the work was making sure each layer was perfectly even and flat – not an easy task, as the chef demonstrated. I really like the demos, watching the chefs do their thing and seeing how impressive the results are is a real treat, however my concentration wavered somewhat seeing the layers being assembled. It was a lot of painstaking work. Well worth the wait though, it was one of the nicest tasting cakes so far!

Once again, we were straight out of the demo and into the practical (it’s a theme this term!). We had to dash around to get the room fully set up, had the debrief with the chef and then got cracking! First job was the joconde sponge, the dry ingredients had to be beaten with the egg yolks, while the whites were whisked up with sugar (half of which I ended up throwing over the worktop!) into a French meringue. These were then folded together and spread on a flat tray. The first challenge! Getting it completely flat was quite difficult, especially as I found out in a recent practical I’ve been storing my offset palette knife incorrectly and its got a slight bend in it! I managed to get it reasonably flat though and then it was into the oven. The next cock up, because my oven felt cold as I put it in, I checked it and it was only blowing round cold air. Fortunately I could put it in my partners oven (for which I was very grateful, thanks again George!), then the next 30- 45 mins or so was a bit of a blur, we had to make the chocolate ganache. At which point I found the kitchen thief had struck again, my half silver tray, which we were supposed to spread the ganache out onto to let it set, had mysteriously gone. I’m narrowing down the suspect list so justice can be served swiftly and without mercy! I used a bigger tray, it wasn’t such an issue, its just irritating though. Then a syrup had to be made for the sponge, the coffee infused into water, to complete the syrup. Another sugar syrup had to be cooked to softball stage for the buttercream and then beaten with egg yolks before butter was added. Eventually it was all done, then we had to push hard to assemble it. The sponge was cut into 3 pieces, soaked with syrup, and the bottom layer spread with a chocolate glaze. The ganache was applied to the bottom layer of sponge, then another layer of sponge, then the buttercream, then another layer of sponge, then ganache, then the final glaze and finally piping! Each layer had to be spread very carefully to make sure it was level, which is very difficult when you want to make it perfect but the chef is vocally counting down time to when it needs to go into the chiller to set. You’re also pressured with the buttercream because if it’s overworked it splits and goes grainy, lots to go wrong! Despite the time constraints I managed to get it done on time and to a standard I was happy with. I had a lot more success copying my design in chocolate than I did royal icing! In fact I was really quite proud of it. I’m glad to see all the practicing is paying off and marked improvements are being made!

Got some good feedback from chef, not quite fully balanced, some areas a little thicker/thinner than others, but nothing a bit of practice with the palette knife shouldn’t be able to help with. It went down very well with everyone that tried it, so flavour-wise it was a roaring success!

I finished the Opera practical completely elated. Yes it was tough, yes we had to push hard and no, there was barely a second to think, but hearing that the dish would have passed the exam and getting some useful feedback from the chef was great. The marking took a while, so we were late getting out. I wasn’t getting on the coach home until around 10:15pm, and then with the journey home added on I ended up getting to bed past midnight, slightly dreading the early start!

After only three and a half hours sleep the alarm went off at 4am on Wednesday morning and I was awake again! Surprisingly I felt pretty awake all morning. Made my way into London and we had a demo/lecture on tarts and tortes. The chef made a linzer torte (a traditional Austrian jam tart), a caramelised walnut tart (would have been better with pecans or hazelnuts in my opinion, the walnuts were a little bitter), and a fruit galette. My favourite was the fruit one. It was a nice lesson, we had most of the method with the recipes so it was only a case of writing a few notes here and there and listening to the chef. We usually have a 10-15 min break in the middle of a class but this one was 30 mins long to allow the tarts to cook, as there was nothing else to do in the meantime. I took the opportunity to query a couple of things with the chef regarding the forthcoming theory test, so it was handy to have a bit longer than usual. We finished the class quite early and then it was a case of hot-footing it back to Oxford to go to work.

This was the week where everything seemed to fall into place, my chocolate piping has improved considerably, I finished both exam dishes on time and both would have passed. Just need to keep up the momentum now, and carrying on getting as much enjoyment from the course as I can, its flying and I’m scared that if I blink I’ll miss it!

One more exam dish to go, the Alhambra cake next Monday, our mid-term review, I think its bread as well on Tuesday, so I’m really looking forward to next week!

The Fraisier cake. I think the icing needed letting down with a little more lemon juice, to help get a more steady flow. Apart from that though I was happy with the cake. The marzipan just needs a bit of work too!

I was really happy with this one. Need to work on improving the chocolate design to help it really stand out, and the layers need to be a tad more even. Overall though this tasted amazing!