Wednesday, June 13, 2007

I Have a Job!

This past weekend I had a stage at Tartine Bakery and was offered a job!!! I am so excited as this is one of the best bakeries in the Bay Area! The owners, couple Elizabeth Prueitt and Chad Robertson, were recently nominated for James Beard Best Pastry Chef, and are very talented. I have to admit that Tartine makes the best Croque Monsieur I have every tried, the chocolate-coconut tart is amazing too!

I start full time in a week and a half doing the early morning shift--in by 4:30am!!! Check out their website for more details!

Monday, June 11, 2007

The Mixer Had a Baby

However that mama is old and her baby is huge!

I got the mixer of my dreams, the big 6-quart Kitchen Aid!!! (thank you Terry!) For the past 8+ years I have been using the still-well-functioning 1940's Kitchen Aid model passed down from my grandmother. I have now placed that one into retirement, not to say that she won't come back for a visit once in a while.

Sugar, sugar

This week began by cooking sugar and more sugar. In preparation for several show pieces over the next few weeks each person in class made two batches of sugar, different colors, to share with the entire class. This gives us a large variety of colors to choose from and the sugar only has to be made once rather than everyday.

These photos are of my first sugar showpiece. The base is cast sugar in a circular mold the silver/blue pieces are straw sugar, which is sugar that is pulled until it becomes stiff and then dried--used as the background for many pieces. The flowers are a simple hedge rose with leaves.

We also had to make several calla lilies for the first show piece exercise. The calla lilly and hedge rose are two basic flowers that we made for practice to get the feel for pulling sugar. The sugar is very hot and after one day my finger tips were very sensitive from being burnt by the sugar.


This is my second sugar showpiece. The opaque white pieces are pastlliage, a hard sugar that is like play-dough with a chalky texture due to the cornstarch and powdered sugar. Unlike all of the other sugar we use, this is not a cooked sugar and the only one that doesn't use granulated sugar.

Like the first show piece, the base is cast sugar and the tall pieces are straw sugar.


The new exercise in this show piece was making pulled roses from sugar. These are made much like gumpaste, marzipan or modeling chocolate roses that we learned in cakes class last fall (check back on those postings for photos).

The last sugar exercise this week was creating bows, much like the chocolate bows we made last week. I didn't have much luck in the exercise because the sugar colors were not the same consistency when I began pulling, also the color combination was not very attractive. I hope to be able to try this again with better success.


On Friday we reverted back to chocolate for the morning with a field trip to a local chocolate factory, Guittard. This factory is not normally open to the public, but because we are all perspective future clients they see it as a marketing tool--how lucky we are! This is the chocolate that we used in our candy making in the first few weeks of class. Guittard is a family owned business, which is rare anymore--it has been almost two years since Berkeley local Scharffen Berger was bought by Hersey's.

On the tour we saw how chocolate is made from beginning (bean from the tropics) to end (chip, block etc.). It was fascinating and much more complex than many of us realize. I thought that one of the more interesting parts of the process is even before it reaches the factory. In third world countries around the world (countries mainly Africa and South America) the pods containing the beans are cut from the trees, beans released and thrown on the jungle floor where they sit and ferment for several days before being retrieved. Funny to think that the chocolate we all love was once sitting on the floor of the jungle with everything else that lives there!

With the completion of this week, only one week remains!

Thursday, June 07, 2007

Edible Art

I had so much fun making the marzipan characters we had to make for our marzipan modeling assignment. These character that I made were based off of those in the book Marzipan Animals by Fredy Eggenschwiler, which I like because it has some of the more modern designs and I would love to own, but is impossible to find in the US! There is so much potential for these characters, which could be sold individually, wrapped in plastic bags--they do taste really good, but I love marzipan! Even more likely, they would make wonderful decorations on a themed cake.


The above is an alligator and the following are photos of each character.


Walrus

Duck

Ram (you don't see rams too often! A strange selection, but I thought it was cute!)

Parrot

Whale

Frog with fly in it's mouth

Chocolate Enameling. This is done with coating chocolate piped in a parchment piping bag. An image is placed beneath a clear plastic sheet and the image is traced with dark coating chocolate and then the spaces are flooded with colored white coating chocolate--a lot like coloring in coloring books!
The ladies who wrote the book The Whimsical Bakehouse have mastered this technique. I have been inspired by the book for years and found it to be a good resource for ideas.

Chocolate box and chocolate cutouts. I was very happy with the results of my box, but not terribly fond of the results of the cutouts. This took two days to complete and was way more complicated than it looks!
The bottom and lid (which is removable) are dark chocolate and the sides of the box are dark chocolate with colored cocoa butter colors. The cutouts on top are a mixture of dark, milk and white chocolate. I had a lot of trouble with tempering all of these batches of chocolate, which is one reason it was so difficult. Also, cutting such small pieces from the chocolate and making them look crisp and clean was quite a challenge. I think this would have looked better had I had the time to outline the flowers and leaves in more detail like the worm and bee.

White chocolate box with truffles. This was an exercise in making bows from chocolate. I was very happy with the results of this project and it would make a beautiful gift. The truffles inside were made several weeks prior during our candy making classes.


This is a collage of photos of my classmates chocolate cutout-box projects. I especially loved the castle project!

So, another week has come to an end and two more weeks remain in my culinary school career. The final two weeks will be focused on sugar work. It will be a welcome change after the past 4 weeks of working with and being covered in chocolate!