The Oven Wall: January 2012

So my whole rationale about the 'cute' thing. Not totally wrong. But kind of wrong.

First text I get from Moozh tonight: "Look at the cute little pear guy I made."

Totally cute pear guy. With a leaf carved right into the skin.

Then there was a fruit salad for the appie. Oranges, melon, tomatoes, and cucumber with zest. Good palate cleanser/amuse-bouche.

Apparently a raspberry vinaigrette was part of the theme for today.

So the veal was served with a raspberry vinaigrette reduction and later the dessert was poached in the same raspberry vinaigrette.

I'm so impressed by the plating that Moozh is learning. I know that we will likely learn plating once we get to advanced but I kind of wish we were focussing on presentation more now. In pastry we learn a lot of the technical stuff so maybe that's why we're not learning presentation yet. Figure it out first, THEN you can make it look pretty.

Really though, my most stressful day is simply an exercise for someone in culinary. We will be the enigmatic pastry person huddled in a cranny in some restaurant somewhere fixing a tart tatin or something custom for dessert while everyone else in the kitchen scurries like mad people. They are preparing us for our future dynamic.

Make something pretty and purely ornamental to go on your plate. It will make you feel like a chef.

Labels: culinary, January, Moozh, School

I need a drink

We were all sayin' it at the end of class today. Today. Was. Stress. Full. Stencil cookies: totally gorgeous, in the end somewhat worth it. HOWEVER, stencil cookies + 12 PEOPLE = chaos. I swore at full volume numerous times. I body checked poor Karin at least once. I kissed my fingertips goodbye early in the day. And then I came home and had a drink. We're cool. (I know it's a coping mechanism okay?!)

For those of you who don't know what stencil cookies are, they fall in the category of "cookies made primarily to be a component of, or garnish for, a plated desserts." Meaning they are a sidekick. They are secondary. Robin to the Batman ice cream. Bullwinkle to the Rocky mousse cake. They are spread free form on a pan and then formed once they come out of the oven. In our theory lesson this morning, my chest was already getting tight. Stressful cookies. Oxymoron. Nope.
Timing is a big component of stencil cookies. As you know, timing = not my gifting. Movie references, butchered accents and even voices = totally my gift. I can make quotes from Aladdin or Princess Bride work for ANYTHING*. Can I remember that I have high fat cookies that are slowly smouldering to their death in the oven? Apparently not.

One helpful development today is that we utilized the three extra conventional ovens in our kitchen today. ("He CAN be taught! *See?)
Of the teams of six, four were designated a conventional oven each and then the remaining two teams were designated one of the two convection ovens each. We were a convection team. This helped me with my oven skills more than you can imagine. Our almond tuile still came out a little…bronzed on the edges. But after that we really stepped up and the rest of our stuff came out with a really beautiful colour. Our cigarettes (cookies, I swear) came out a little under baked but it was a good exercise to determine how cigarette batter was supposed to look, post-bake.

One of the (numerous) aspects of stencil cookies that makes it stressful is the shaping. Stencil cookies are baked flat and then shaped directly after they emerge from the oven. And when I say 'directly' I mean, when they are still hissing. Again, timing. So we set up a little "Shape Station aka Jane Fonda" on a rolling trolley next to our oven with wooden dowels and other shaping devices so that we could do our shaping in a warm environment instead of running our trays from the oven to our chilly work station by the floor to ceiling windows while they whine and become frigid in the travel time. Numerous time I would pull our tuiles from the oven and put them on the trolley only to shriek, "Shit, I forgot my effing offset spatula!" Step one would be to body check someone. Second would be to call my offset spatula, which had done nothing to deserve it other than remain where I put it, a nasty epithet. Step three would be to try and form my cooled tuile into something akin to a cylinder and watch it snap under the pressure. Step four: swear, under my breath this time, stuff some of the cookie carnage into my mouth and portion out a new tray. Yeah, they cool THAT fast. Talk about killing the mood.

Given their high butter content, tuiles bake very fast. About 5-7 minutes, I found for mine. But because of their high fat content, along with the high sugar content, when they emerge from the oven they are very flexible. You can drape them, crush them, fold them, crease them. If you do it in time, there is almost no limit to what you can do to the shape.

The texture, which is a brisk 'snap', and the toasty sugar flavour of the cookie is totally worth the work but only if you want to make quite a few. Tuile keep well when stored in an airtight container. You can bang off a huge amount of the cookies or you can make the dough/batter and keep it in the fridge until you want to make more. These would be great around Christmas and New Years when desserts abound and sometimes you figure you've got a dress on so why doesn't your ice cream. You think that right?

Florentines are a bit different. They are technically a 'biscuit' or a 'cookie' but ours, being a tad under baked, came out more like a caramel square. Which is an awesome mistake to make. Florentines, in their addition to a dessert plate or as a garnish are usually finished with a cream or chocolate on them. They have a really warm nuttiness to them. This recipe had candied orange peel, which normally I would never question but this time it only contributed a bitterness. Weird.

We also made shortbread, which were really good. And a necessary reprieve from the chaos. Although the recipe called for a hard-boiled egg yolk instead of a standard raw egg yolk which was strange. The PM chef said it was 'very southern'. And I trust southerners with anything associated with cornmeal, pickles, sauce and chicken really. To be honest, I don't really question southerners when it comes to food. This is blind trust. But then you add hard boiled egg to cookie dough. And my cookie dough smells like a sulphur leak. But then -BUT THEN -the cookies become the most tender shortbread sammies I've ever had and I revert to my former wisdom. Southerners. God's gift to food. (Hush puppies? Am I right?) During the decoration phase, numerous people made a comment regarding my love of jam. Maybe it's excessive. I definitely love jam more than cookies. Twisted? Probably. But these cookies are a good mediator. Cookies: 1 point.

These are the gingerbread that I promised. The decoration segment of the class time became stranded in an icing session bordering on the grotesque. There was a lot of neon icing going on. A couple decapitated John Does. And a lot of lederhosen going on. I managed to salvage a couple of undressed ones, naked if you will. They look like they're wearing choir robes which is fun. Ginger dames.

Tomorrow we do macarons. Parisian macarons. I know I'm going to be excited because I love macarons. They are elegant. And colourful. And playful. And French. And then I will likely become stressed in class and leave saying gin's not gonna cut it and I'm going to snort coke or something. But right now, macarons are a giddy thing.

Mine will not look like this. But I'm curious to see how they will turn out. I want to make crazy flavoured ones like strawberry and basil or coconut and lime. Lemon and chocolate. Endless possibilities. Tomorrow we also do meringues and macaroons, which are not to be confused with macarons.

Macaroon:

via The Shoebox Kitchen

Macaron:

Via Project Foodie

Meringue:

via A Taste of Koko

So much whipping. Which I am straight up not doing by hand. It's probably possible. My grandmother probably did it for her lemon meringue long before KitchenAid came in pistachio. But I'm Gen Y. And that's why people hate us. I console my laziness by telling myself that no one in the industry would tolerate me if I pranced in saying I wanted to do it the 'old fashioned way'. And post-apocalyptic, I foresee meringue falling to the wayside. That's a luxury you just can't include when you are trying to make a fire like a boy scout.

Pies come on Friday. I will be bringing home at least one FULL SIZE PIE every day. This is nothing like loaves of bread. This is ferocious.
Anyone want a pie?

Find a cookie you love. Find comfy pajama pants. Eat. Enjoy. Repeat.

Labels: baking, cookies, School

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

"Entertain and scar people with your lack of filter."

I have absolutely no pride hurt in admitting that my husband, even prior to his training, was an exponentially better cook than I am. He is more creative, he works better under pressure, and he genuinely likes it. I am a lethargic eater at best and therefore, really not a very good cook. With baking, the intention is never to eat everything you make in one sitting. You bake a cake, or a dozen muffins and then you incrementally chip away at it. Sometimes you eat it all in one sitting but we don't talk about those times. To anyone.

So when you husband, who is your companion culinarian that you tote around everywhere, begins culinary school, you know you're in for a good time.

Like this.

Or this.

Caramelized Shallot Puff Pastry? Yeah.

Cute ice cream?! In a lace cookie. Yum.

This is when you realize that struggling through six months apart from each other so that this can be the man you sleep next to every night is totally worth it.

I find a caramelized shallot tart somewhat more accessible than frogs legs, or 'rubbery chicken'. I do think I need to come up with a more endearing adjective when Moozh sends me pictures from school. The default is 'cute'. When your man has built you a fire after a rain when you're camping. When he's just gotten dressed to go out with the boys. When he's made you a majestic meal. HE DOESN'T WANT TO HEAR 'CUTE'. Respect. But when you grunt and say 'Dude, so B-A", they see right through that. Work in progress, guys.

Labels: culinary, ice cream, Moozh, puff pastry

A trayful of handicapped gingerbreads

I got my fun day. I kind of feel all sticky though. Today we worked on piped cookies and icebox cookies which meant we christened the piping bags that came in our knife kits. It also meant that I spent the same amount of time trying to dig out the remaining cookie batter from my piping bag and tip to avoid washing it (because that would waste so much time ya know?) as I would have spent washing it out and drying it so that it was so fresh and so clean clean. At the end of the day, I had cookie batter in my armpit. I don't know how it got there but it serves only to indicate that I REALLY got into today.

First off: madeleines!!!!!
Whenever someone talks about madeleines, they inevitably bring up Marcel Proust. In "In Search of Lost Time", he talks AT LENGTH about the nostalgic quality of madeleines for him. Whenever he eats them, he is taken back to his grandmother's house where he used to eat them dunked in tea. I have never read "In Search of Lost Time". (Has anyone?!) So I'm not going to talk any more about Proust. I'm certainly not going to dedicate anything about mine to him. I'm more interested in the rumour that the cookies were named after Madeleines Paulmier, who was a servant who had to come up with a dessert when the chef stormed out. She used a recipe she had from her grandmother. Everybody was impressed. The end. The moral of the story is grandmas always come through for you. And have a cute name, I guess, because someone might name a cookie after you.

Madeleines are gorgeous. They come out with these crispy, buttery edges and they are similar to sponge cake in the middle. So very light. I poked around for the best method to pipe the mixture into the tray. (I got called a bake geek for this action -which I let stand uncontested.) Some people chilled their batter (from an hour up to overnight) so that it held together for firmly in the piping bag. Some used it at room temperature. Some didn't even use a piping bag. Judith Choate just spoons hers in with a tablespoon. Some used those clicky ice cream scoops. Either way you work it you want to get the batter fairly level in the shell mould to avoid strange bumps on the back side of the madeleine once it's baked. I ended using a zigzag method to get the batter to lie the flattest. But then I baked them in a convection oven which has an overachieving fan and blew a ridge on to ours anyway. Life is funny.

The almond spritz have that amazing almond flavor, like amaretto or those almond cookies you get at italian weddings (of which i have been to only one). The cookies start with an almond paste or marzipan base that then gets butter and more sugar added to them. They are then piped in a "shell". The shell was a good exercise because just like the following shortbread, the dough was so stiff that grunting it out of the pastry bag in any semblance of a shape took patience (and the occasional use of expletives).

The piped short bread were most like the shortbread cookies I grew up on. Whipped so they are light and fluffy and literally just fall apart in your mouth they are so soft. It is a texture that is described as "sandy" in our books which is, in my opinion a rather unfortunate denomination. It makes it sounds gritty but it really is simply meant to indicate that it has a small crumb and delicate texture -Falls apart like a sandcastle in your mouth. Piping it made me feel like Mr. Bean. Every attempt resulted in a similar but different ridiculously shaped result. It was like piping cling wrap. It was sticking to all the wrong stuff!

Lastly we did the checkerboard icebox cookies. I'm glad we did them as part of our program because I likely never would have made them in my own and now that I have made them I desire to never make them ever again. In a way we brought it on ourselves, my partner and I. We made very delicate layers and fine stripes when everyone else made Tonka blocks of shortbread, which meant in short that theirs baked longer and were far sturdier. Ours would be perfect as something small on the side of something like pot au creme or a dessert espresso. The perfect size to eat eleven of them. We let ours sit unattended a little too long before we pulled them from the oven so they approached golden brown and walked right by. They are still tasty but they are more like biscotti now than they are like shortbread, shall we say, 'brittle'. There are FAR easier designs that you can do on the icebox cookies but the checkerboard was more challenging and I am nothing if not a stubborn bitch out to prove something. Again with the expletives.

We also made gingerbread men, and women, and amputees! Not that amputees aren't people but hopefully you get my point. You don't get a trayful of cookie people with goiters, no feet and/or oblong shaped heads every day. A lot of them came out with excessive bell bottoms as well. The very picture of diversity. Pictures will emerge tomorrow because we kept them at school in order to decorate them. We made some royal icing and we are going to practice our piping skills. Mine have been egregiously neglected. But soon I will pipe like a pro, or at the very least someone on the road to pro-dom.

We start pies on Friday, which means I am going to have to rig up a different system to get my baking home everyday. A cloth bag with a 'closure' that is rather indifferent to the idea of closing up anything -during the rainy season. We'll need to have a talk.

Labels: baking, cookies, January, sweet

Monday, January 23, 2012

"Stiff peak is like, 'Aw heeeeeeeeeeey!'"

The tables have turned. Remember the first week when I was having all this fun making breads and Moozh was across the hall in his kitchen tourneeing his billionth carrot and verifying the 4cm by 2mm cut of his julienne? Well this week I have been making things I could make with my eyes closed. Muffins, quick breads, brownies.

Today, this is what Moozh made.

Those, y'all, are frogs legs. Uh yeah. FROGS LEGS! As a vegetarian (or as Moozh calls me, a 'broccoli-head'), there are raw cuts of meat that, I don't know, seem…excessive to me. Like tongue. The whole concept of having to pull the layer of taste buds off the the tongue (the tastebuds apparently feel like sandpaper Moozh tells me) is something that seems to have plunged off the ledge of all good reason. Would Jesus skin a tongue so he could eat it? Moozh and I will differ on this, but I think he would put his hands up and say, "No thanks, I'm good with bread and wine."

But these guys are just so little and cute. With massive hamstrings.

You can tell the guy on the far right was the short friend. I'm just amazed how much meat is on them. It's like when people say they eat squirrel, people who are close to me who I will not name. I just think you would frustrate yourself trying to catch one and then you would skin it only to find that the bulk is pretty much all fur.

Plated it looks very elegant though, no?

Looks less bizarre when it's nestled on wilted greens.

This was my contribution. Date squares and brownies. Boring. But we make madeleines tomorrow and at the end of the week we make Parisian macarons. THAT will be fun. But I have eaten my fair share of date squares and brownies in my life. Growing up in the Prairies, especially connected with a small farming community, date squares are a mainstay at everything from Christmas to funerals to church functions. Brownies are similar though they have the bad rap of being more like a cookie. People can convince themselves that if they take the date square, it's really like having a granola bar. I think these people are unaware of how much sugar and butter are in date squares. And granola bars to be honest.

The brownies were nice and fudgey. I wish they had more of a dark chocolate bitterness to them. The best brownies I've ever had are the raw brownies at Cafe Bliss in Victoria, BC. It's so much like dark chocolate that you can't help but feel like you're eating a chocolate bar. And with raw hazelnuts and usually some dried cherries or dried cranberries, it's a great mixture of textures, tartness and chocolate.

The date squares could have had the brown sugar taken right out of them. Dates are naturally so sweet anyway and when they're simmered, they break apart and create that great caramel. Again, eating date squares just make me feel like I should be listening to an elderly person talk about their grandchild that's 'just about my age'. Or simply eating to try and regain feeling in my fingers after a long downhill tubing session.

Scroll up. LOOK AT THOSE FROGS LEGS. Comment on the weirdness. Eat something safe and internally discuss how much you wish you were the kind of person that could eat frogs legs. Repeat.

Labels: bars, cookies, frogs, Moozh

Friday, January 20, 2012

Because it's French it's just ridiculous.

Holy smokes, am I right?

Gruyere and Bechemel Puff Pastry. I am expecting, based on a belief in my husband's love for me, that he will be making this for me soon. And he'll make it into a heart, cuz chicks dig that right?

This dish kind of connected the dots for me. When I was wondering how you get from hollandaise sauce to pork tenderloin in the span of one class, it's because the next day you are going to make this.

Arctic Char with Hollandaise! And look at all of those tourneed veggies! Looks prettay good. They have started making a three course meal for themselves every day which Moozh says is a lot of food but it's good food and then you have to make it if you make a mistake to get an idea of what that mistake tastes.

Or you make creme caramel and you feel like a rockstar. Creme Anglaise, which is basic vanilla cream, has so many applications. Creme Brûlée, vanilla ice cream, and creme caramel or flan. Yum city.

Find a man that cooks. Love him forever. Repeat. (With the same man, of course.)

Labels: Moozh, School

"I wasn't so keen on my scones. They tasted animal cracker-y."

Test #1 down. And not once did I have that "Oh…no. OhmygodOhmygodOhmygodOhmygodOhmygod" so I think it went okay. When I could have been doing a final review last night, after I had stared at my textbook for an hour and realized my brain was at critical mass, instead I played with my makeup and had a bath with my mom's handmade bath salts. It was a good night. Talking to some of the girls in the advanced class (the class that just came out of training kitchen into advanced), they said that pretty much everyone overstudies for the first test. Because you have no idea what kind of stuff is going to be tested, what the questions are like and you have so much fermenting in your head all at once, you stress yourself out when you don't have to. I was sure that 'ohmygod' moment was going to come because it usually does when I am too cavalier. But I trusted myself this morning. I guess we'll see. We don't get our marks back until Chef Maurizio gets back which isn't until next weekend.

Today we started cookies! It's amazing having made cookies all my life, how stressful it was and how much I overanalyzed every step when I did them today. When you're making them for your family, or even to take over to a friends house, you're not so obsessive about how they look. In school though, after you learn about the science behind the ingredients in a cookie dough and how the properties in them contribute to an 'optimal' cookie, you study every step in the process.

Left to right is, classic chocolate chip, oatmeal raisin, and chocolate indulgence. We were supposed to do peanut butter cookies but a classmate has nut allergies. She couldn't eat the oatmeal either because they had pecans in them but peanuts were the big concern and we wanted to avoid anaphylaxis as much as possible. The chocolate indulgence are beautiful cookies. They are labor intensive much it is worth it. They are similar a recipe I got from my mom. Melted semi-sweet chocolate with some butter which is then incorporated with very little flour and then chilled so that the dough can be shaped. This recipe required the eggs to be whipped with the sugar and some vanilla. I had to scrap the first batch of egg mixture because after a significant amount of whisking the mix had turned grey, smelled slightly metallic and hadn't proceeded to the 'ribbon' stage, which is before 'soft peak' when you are whisking eggs. I tried again and got similar result minus the metallic taste. Still no ribbons. So I mixed the chocolate in anyway and formed the cookies. I realized when the cookies were already in the oven that my math had been wrong when I scaled the recipe. But they still turned out beautiful and so airy. Not as chewy as my other recipe and not as sweet either. These had a really nice dark chocolate taste. My other recipe is almost crunchy with sugar.

We had our 'cause and effect' debriefing at the end of the class, where we correlate ingredients, mixing methods, bake time, temperature, etc with the finished product and analyze what could have been done better, etc. I made a little pie chart, or cookie graph, of our escapades today.

The Cookie Trinity

And then! REmember the carrot cake I was talking about. That had a rather embarrassing fall from grace at the end of class yesterday. The proceeding cooling process provided enough heat to help the evaporation continue and by the time we got in this morning they were no longer doughy in the middle. They were pleasantly moist while definitely being cookies. But again with the leavening. When you scale a recipe by four, you lose a lot of precision. My scale can't manage fractions of a gram and so I do my best to kind of guess. But look how squatty it is.

You can see that is packed with stuff. It has grated carrot, crushed pineapple, grated coconut and chopped pecans. It should have been taller than that but probably not by much. It was interesting to pull it out and to see how much it can change even by just cooling completely. And how recipes can be a bit of a bummer.

Monday is a bit of a flex day. Chef allowed us a day where we could have some time to work on a recipe or concept that we've already tackled. For me that meant croissants, which will be a nice exercise. My croissants turned out well but I want more practice so that it's not just fluke. Others are calling on a mulligan on the pastry cream they made that coagulated into scrambled eggs (with vanilla bean in it -ew). Others are practicing scoring bread, or redoing scones because they tasted like animal crackers. We also start brownies and lemon squares and prep our batter for madeleines! Oh madeleines straight out of the oven are like nothing else. If you ever have the chance, don't even wait for them to cool. Grab them from the hot pan and pull the crispy fluted crust apart. It's like a spongecake a little bit but better with crispy butter edges.

Pull cookies fresh from the oven. Break it open and inhale deeply. Assert your belief in everything good and pure in this world. Repeat.

P.S ~ Look at my cupboard. That's just from this week. And that minus danishes and carrot cake that refuse to be stacked.

Labels: cookies, quick bread, School

Thursday, January 19, 2012

Viamo, guys

Tomorrow is my first test of the program.Thank God it's not practical is all I can say. I can spew theory a couple of weeks in but producing consistency a couple weeks in is a bit beyond me at this point.
It's been almost a full week without any Italian motivation. We've had to resort to screaming, "Viamo, guys" at each other simply to keep our spirits up. And our asses in gear.

The past few days have been so fast as we learned quick breads….see what I did there?
Anyway, yesterday was the introduction to quick breads through the different methods of mixing. We made oatmeal streusel muffins, which thus far in my journey in life, were the most labor intensive muffins I've ever made. The reason you can have muffins fresh for breakfast is because they take five minutes to throw together and then twenty to bake. No probs. But then you add a million steps and that's what's supposed to make the muffins fantastic? These were pretty good so this is a bad example but halfway through boiling a glaze to pour over the oats which then had to cool while you whisked eggs and sugar together until you wanted to peel your fingernails off, I was thinking, "I don't remember muffins being this labor intensive."

The streusel on the top is the bomb dignity. Seriously. But when you combine butter and sugar and just enough flour to bind it all together so they become crunchy, caramelly bits on the top of your muffin, you kind of can't go wrong. My instagram portraits leave something to be desired right now because they come off so dark. This is the only lens that seems to provide enough "light" for detail. First world problems.

Next was scones and the key with scones is all mixing method. The dough is not fragile so you don't have to be gentle with it but your scones will become the martyr of over-mixing. You want to mix them only until everything comes together into a shaggy ball. You don't want the dough to look smooth. You still want pea-sized clumps of butter mingled throughout to make a tasty-flaky party. If you're planning on adding anything, you really need to add it once things are probably half to three-quarters mixed. Give it a couple turns to incorporate whatever you're looking to and then flatten it out into a sheet and let it rest for a couple minutes. Flour will develop gluten whenever it comes into contact with water. Think about papier mache. Developing the gluten structure so that it can be a support structure for the loaf is important in baking. In scones, you are adding fat, sugar, eggs, all things that tenderize the dough. Scones are tender. They're British, I mean really. So with all of those things working towards the tender, flakiness of a scone, you don't want to knead the crap out of the scone mix. You'll get weird empty pockets (called 'tunnelling'), the scone will be bland, and you'll end up with a gummy texture. Be brief.

My mom has a great recipe for scones, which she probably got from her mom who got it from her mom who probably got it from the Queen, or dug it out of the ground in some golden 'excalibur' moment. The cranberry-white chocolate variation was always a big hit. So I grew up with an idea of what a good scone tasted like. Rather spoiled, really. These are cranberry buttermilk scones. I think the buttermilk is unnecessary but it's provides the necessary acidity for the leavening agents in the dough. You could replace the buttermilk with regular whole milk as long as you introduced the acidity somewhere else, through lemon juice or cream of tartar. Or something. Who sounds like they're in pastry school? This kid.

And then we made stollen. All the anticipation and excitement that had been building for my own christmastime stollen became immediately affixed to the concept that we would be making stollen in school. Back in Victoria, BC, during my year there, the bakery that I worked at, Bubby Rose's Bakery and Cafe, introduced me to stollen. And it blew my mind. The almond paste inside was so buttery that it kind of melted into the dough around it a little bit and effused it's almond flavour everywhere in the dough. The dried fruit and the nuts. Buttered fresh out of the oven and then dusted with powdered sugar. Unreal. This one…was not what I was hoping for. Again, rather spoiled.

I was eager to learn the method and to have all the different aspects of traditional breads in my head that way. But I was more excited for the flavours. The marzipan was very resilient inside and didn't have almost any almond flavour, which marzipan has the reputation of doing. The bread is really beautiful and tastes really good it just wasn't what I was expecting. Thank God for Christmas. When menus everywhere change because you're gonna gain weight anyway.

Today, we wrapped up our section on quick breads. We move on to cookies tomorrow, which Moozh is very excited for. I'm just scrambling to find people to give our food away to. I have four dozen muffins in my house right now.

We worked on another PICA standard today. Their blueberry yogurt muffins are a mainstay in the bakeshop. For good reason, they are very tasty. But they're also kind of boring. If I'm going to eat half of my daily intake in calories for BREAKFAST, I want it to be worth it. The muffins were quite lemony, which paired well with the blueberries and the tang of the yogurt. But my came out looking so short and dense. When you quarter a recipe though, the ratios and precision (because your scale won't measure .325 of a gram) kind of get messed up. Maybe not enough leavening. Maybe not enough acid. Maybe it's the muffin. I'm begin sabotaged.

Cornbread was also on the list today! In any foodie conversation worth its salt, cornbread conversations always devolve into some regional defiance over the recipe regarding sugar, salt, butter or all of the above and then comfortably lands in the realm of talk of hush puppies, which is almost like a lullaby. Deep fried cornbread balls that you dip in maple syrup and pair with a pickle. Them southerners do it right. We have two southerners in our class and it was fun to sit back while one of them 'schooled' the rest of us on the merit and stipulations regarding what can in all good conscience be called 'cornbread'.

I easily could have doubled or even tripled the amount of jalapeños I chopped. The 'kick' of the chilies was lost beneath all the butter. I popped some cheese in there too, just because cheese always makes things better.

Lastly, we made banana bread, which I could probably make with my eyes closed. We ALWAYS had banana bread in the house growing up. We tried every variation we could dream. I think in my first year of marriage alone I made banana bread at least twice a month, which for two people is bordering on excessive. (*BTW though, I hear you can take a banana bread recipe and instead of baking it in a loaf pan, spread it out on a cookie sheet -with sides obviously. And then I hear you can slice it into slabs of cake and ice between the layers with nutella. I hear your husband will eat almost the whole thing himself and praise you for days and be super nice to you, like bubble-baths-and-foot-rubs-nice-to-you. I hear, anyway. Could be hearsay.)
This banana bread, however, was unlike any banana bread I've ever made. It had this toasted brown sugar tasted when it came out of the oven and came out quite dense because it couldn't rise through the top. I've never had to 'score' my banana bread before because it always came out looking gorge and really tall. But this one was short. Like "I'm an adult and I still shop at Gap Kids" short. Hmm. Again, it could be leavening. I'm determined to make my banana bread and this recipe again and compare them. Now THAT'S a lot of banana bread.

We also attempted, rather cavalierly, to make carrot cake today. Mine was mixed and in the oven in like ten minutes flat and that's with grating the carrots and running to the walk-in for coconut. But we misjudged how long it was going to take to bake them. Conveniently, the recipe didn't state an estimated baking time. Carrot cake is super moist and so it does take a long time to bake. Banana bread takes at least an hour, so carrot cake shouldn't be much behind that, if at all. Two o'clock had come and gone and we were still waiting for them to come out of the oven. Every time we pulled out the pan to check, they were bloated and still jiggly. So we eventually had to pull them and put them on a tray in the fridge for assessment tomorrow morning, which I'm thinking is going to be something along the lines of, "Bake until fully cooked in the middle. Got it. What's next?"

IN the other kitchen, Moozh's exercises have continued in the aforementioned perplexing fashion. He came home the other night and made me hollandaise sauce. Then today, he made:

Pork Tenderloin with Parsnip puree and Au Jus. I don't see the correlation. I guess that's why I'm not in culinary. So pretty though!

Find a loved one. Eat an excessive amount of banana bread. Talk about how happy you are. Repeat.

Labels: muffins, quick bread, School

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Lamination as stress journey

Today was the day. Armed with every admonition from bakers of viennoiserie past, today was croissant day. The teacher from the PM class even came in to put the fear of God into us and prepare us for the intense self-loathing and almost inevitable premature career failure that would come from taking croissants lightly. And then she talked about our first test as well, in the same aggressive tone, just to scare us. And I was scared. I eyed my croissant dough, where it lay in the corner, resting as if it owned the place, with contempt. I held my fragile butter block tensely between my fingers, just so it knew the real gravity of having its life in the hands of a hesitant but equally stubborn new baker. And then I stopped the internal monologue and began.

And a few hours later, not too bad! Glazed with some friendly apricot glaze and stuffed with everything from vanilla pastry cream or almond paste, and garnished with juicy cherries. There are some cheese and plain ones among them as well, you know, to represent the savoury fans in my house. Really the fans in my house are first and foremost butter fans and thus any filling is acceptable post-butter inclusion.

I cut my dough panels slightly smaller than I intended so my croissants came out slightly miniature. But their bite-size so that mean you can eat (or MOW depending on your propriety) as many as you want without feeling guilty. As my Grandmother Porcheron would say, "There's no calories in that." Self-delusion, it's a family trait.

I don't know what is up with my horribly out of focus pictures today. I will rectify that. I was probably just shaking from the fire and brimstone croissant prep talk I got all day long. But LOOK AT THOSE LAYERS!! No bready croissants for me. Those bitches are made pro-per-ly. They pull apart perfectly with a little pocket of vanilla cream waiting inside.

So basically, Today and I are totally buds right now. This is not a, "Dear Today, go screw yourself" kind of day. That was last Thursday. Last Thursday, you can still go screw yourself.

Tomorrow is stollen! And we start muffins! Slippery slope. Not going to lie, in high school I was totally in a group on Facebook called "I Love Muffins". It's been a problem in the past.

Grab a croissant. Pull the ends like a party cracker. Watch how it spirals. Eat in one bite. Repeat. I'm going to.

Labels: baking, croissants, School, viennoiserie

The Oven Wall

The Oven Wall

Friday, January 27, 2012

"You f***ed your macronage…good hustle though."

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Cute