Scones And Tortes And Biscuits, OH MY!

It was an intensely busy day today at school. We made chocolate scones, flaky biscuits, a linzer torte or tart, whichever you prefer. We made Swiss buttercream and pate sablee and we also had a marzipan demo. Like I said, intense.

The chocolate scones were really, really good. They have a wonderfully tender texture because we used buttermilk in them and since buttermilk contains acid it acts as a tenderizer -- the exact scientific reason as to why this is the way it is I canna remember to save my skin, but nevertheless, know that if a recipe uses buttermilk it is not only adding a little flavor, but it is also adding texture. Plus, they have chocolate in them and I'm a fan of anything with chocolate in it...


Please note the oozing chocolate

I have not tried the linzer tart yet but it is the darn prettiest little torte/tart. We made it by making a very moist pie-type dough that has cloves and almonds in it. Then we patted half the dough into a cake pan, slathered some raspberry jam onto the dough and then piped (and I wish I could express to you just how hard it was to pipe the dough -- far worse than trying to put a dress on a donkey I'm sure) the rest of the dough into a lattice design and then around the edge of the pan. The tart was finished with a quick egg wash of the dough and then a little sprinkling of almonds. Collin Murray says it tastes very good, so as per usual, I'm taking his word on it.


Pretty Little Linzer

The biscuits were made kind of like how some of our pie doughs were made. We broke the butter up into little pea-sized pieces within the flour, added a liquid (again, we used buttermilk for flavor and texture) and mixed the dough just until it all came together; this is to say, hardly at all. Like pie-doughs, biscuits are often over-mixed and turn out hard. You have to be careful to "just" mix them but when you figure out just how long that is, the biscuits turn out to be so flaky and tasty. I may share the biscuits with y'all on here too, there were a lot of variations that I wanted to try like cheese or cheddar and chive so as always, stay tuned.


Buttery, flaky biscuits

The buttercream and marzipan, while tasty, are not especially blog-worthy as they are were made to prepare for tomorrow's class when we are making TINY TARTS!!! At least I think that's what we are doing. If it is tiny tarts, I may be so excited I have to sit down because tiny things delight me and tiny sweet things delight me more than words can say.