Brunch With The Girls

Last weekend I had the opportunity to assistant our chef with a recreational class that he was teaching called, 'Four Star Breakfasts'. It was a rather interesting class full of some rather interesting people but the best thing about it was the food! All of the dishes that my "team" of students made were really, really good and so today, I decided to host a little brunch of my own, with some lovely ladies from my pastry class, and make one of the dishes that we made last week, Croissant French Toast filled with Goat Cheese, Herbs and Champagne Grapes...I think I just gained five pounds. Now I know that the combination sounds a little funny, I mean goat cheese and grapes, in croissants?! However, I promise you it is really good.

If you have never heard of Champagne grapes, they are a hybrid-type of grape that are really, really tiny. They are sweet and delicate and just burst with flavor in your mouth.


Aren't they cute?!

If you can't find Champagne grapes, you could easily substitute berries or another type of fruit; just as you could substitute cream cheese for the goat cheese (I did today...).

CROISSANT FRENCH TOAST FILLED WITH GOAT CHEESE, HERBS AND CHAMPAGNE GRAPES
Adapted from Chef Chad Pagano
Serves 4

2/3 cups half-and-half
3 eggs
1/3 cup orange juice
1 teaspoon sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 teaspoon grated orange zest
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
12 ounces goats cheese (or cream cheese)
2 tablespoons finely chopped herbs (I like to use Italian-parsley)
4 day-old croissants
1 cups Champagne grapes (or berries)
2 tablespoons butter

To Serve:
Powdered sugar
Whipped cream
Warm maple syrup

Whisk the half-and-half, eggs, juice, sugar, vanilla, orange zest and cinnamon in a medium bowl. In a small bowl, combine herbs and cheese and use a spoon to stir till smooth and spreadable.


Cut a three-inch slit into the croissants along the side and with your fingers, make a wee little pocket and stuff the croissant with the cheese mixture and about 1/4 cup of grapes.

Heat a large fry-pan on medium-heat and melt 1 tablespoon of the butter; then as you would regular French toast, lightly soak the filled croissants in the egg mixture. When the butter is melted, fry two croissants at a time in the skillet till golden brown on both sides. Repeat with the other two croissants. Serve with lightly whipped cream, powdered sugar and warm maple syrup.

Gum Paste Flowers Are Fun, Fun, Fun!

I'm kind of in shock. I really didn't expect to like cake decorating. I thought I would hate the detail work and that making gum paste flowers would be a dreadful experience. I was wrong. I sort of love it. I wish I knew before the end of school...

So today, as I said, we started working on gum paste flowers. Gum paste is basically a mixture of fondant and a natural chemical called tylose. Basically, gum paste never goes bad, ever, so when you make flowers with it, you can keep them indefinitely. Also, the mixing the tylose into the fondant enables you to roll the gum paste paper thin so you can make life-like flowers. We worked on the bases of five different flowers today: mimosas, roses, calla lilies, five-petal flowers, and five-petal bases. Since it is the weekend, the gum paste is going to have time to dry (it needs at least an hour but a day is better) and then Monday we are going to start making petals and creating life-like flowers!

I know they don't look like much but here are our flowers so far:


Mimosas


Buds for the roses


Calla lily bases


Five-Petal Blossoms

Damn Fine Dummy Cake

Today was a Long day. It wasn't long because it was awful, it was long because it was, well, long. You don't hear about it often, but I have a management class at 8am most mornings and then I have pastry in the afternoon but today, just for kicks, I agreed to assist my chef with a recreational class at 5:30. The class was called, "How to Make the Perfect Birthday Cake" and I thought I was only going to stay for an hour or two but I ended up staying till 10:30 to help out -- it was a bit of a mess! Needless to say that after a long day of school I'm verra tired but also verra excited to show you my very first finished "dummy cake"!

Yesterday I lied to y'all about the type of "lace" that we learned to pipe. Evidently it is not called cornet lace but instead called cornelli lace.


Remember the cornelli lace?

Personally, I don't care about the name, I just love the way it looks -- very modern and yet retro and fun, all at the same time. So I decided I would do the cornelli lace all over the cake...


And I'm thrilled with how it turned out! It was a little tricky to do on the sides of the cake but I got the hang of it and I was actually able to do the whole thing pretty quickly. I like it so much that the cornelli lace just might decorate my final wedding cake that we begin to work on tomorrow when we start to create the gum paste flowers that will also decorate our final cake.

Before I drift off into dreamland, I just want to show you the other thing I worked on today, chocolate plastic bows and roses. I didn't end up using them on my cake but I made them just for practice purposes. Also, you will have to excuse the appearance of the plastic, it was very warm today in our kitchen and so the plastic was heating up very quickly and getting all finger-printy and gross! The roses are kind of a tricky thing to create. Our chef says that pastry chefs and God are the only ones who have the skills to create life-like roses and I think I'm still working up to flowers that really look real but I will get the hang of it eventually...


Chocolate plastic bow on my cake


Chocolate plastic rose

Let The Celebration Cakes Begin

We are back into cakes again but this time they are cakes that we likely won't be eating since were only going to be baking them to decorate them. Not that we didn't learn to decorate before but this time we are going to be learning how to cover cakes in fondant or marzipan, how to decorate using royal icing, and next week, how to make gum paste flowers. I'm thinking of it as decorating cakes kicked up about ten notches.

We started today by learning how to cover a "dummy cake" or a Styrofoam board with marzipan that we made and then colored.


Are we really surprised by my choice of color for the cake?

After we had all finished covered our cakes, it took a little while since it was the first time that most of us had ever covered a cake, we made royal icing and practiced piping(yes, again...) with it. The icing is a pretty easy substance to work with actually, it flows much slower than chocolate which makes it easier to control with the piping bag.


Swiss dots


Cornet lace...it doesn't look like lace to me either but I kind of like the look anyway!

Tomorrow we are going to be finishing our "dummy cakes" and I have to admit that I'm a little stuck on how exactly I'm going to do that -- there are too many neat, new skills to choose from!

Cupcake Day!

Finally! Our chef told us today that really the only reason that we were getting to decorate cupcakes today was that three days of solid piping without something to break it up made students want to slam their heads into the wall. I admit, it wasn't fun practicing but it sure makes it worthwhile to be able to pipe onto those tiny little cupcakes today and have great results.

We began the class by learning how to pipe rose buds and vines, full roses and also how to pipe a basket weave pattern. The roses are actually pretty tough and for the first while, most of mine came out looking more like carnations than like roses but our chef said that that's ok. He said that the point is not necessarily to do it like the text book or like he does it but to put our own style on it and just be consistent. He's a gem.

Now I could blabber on about how to pipe and coloring the frosting and about how freaking delicious the frosting was but really, I know y'all just want to see the cupcakes, so here a few of them are!


My favorite cupcake with my bestest rose!


Shell boarder and rosette centers


Grass(!) and a little butterfly


Basket weave with decorative dots


Almost the whole lot of 'em! These are my partner and I's cupcakes but after this picture I still decorated more...I couldn't help it, it was really, really fun!

More Piping Practice...Really?!

So yes, once again today we practiced our piping skills, almost the whole class but there is an end in sight because tomorrow is cupcake day! We made the cupcakes today and also made some special practice butter cream that we will use for learning to pipe big roses and flowers tomorrow but other than that, we just piped, a lot. It should be relaxing but after a while it gets a wee bit boring...

The Only Spinach Salad For Me

I have to admit that I've never really been one for spinach salads. It's something about the eggs and the mushrooms, and well, the spinach that I'm just not a real fan of. However, since Collin Murray likes them and relationships are about compromise, I've tried to find spinach salads that delight us both. It actually didn't take that long to find one, Martha is always a reliable source for such things.

This spinach salad has a warm dressing that ever-so-slightly wilts the spinach and has an excellent tang. Martha serves hers with roasted pecans but I prefer a poached or fried egg to round out the dish in terms of protein.


WARM SPINACH SALAD WITH BACON AND TOMATOES
Adapted from Everyday Food
Serves 2 as a main course, 4 as a starter

8 slices of bacon cut into 1-inch strips
1/2 of a red onion, sliced thinly
2 cups grape tomatoes, halved
1/3 cup white wine vinegar
1 tablespoon sugar
2-3 bunches of fresh spinach (about 7-8 cups)
Salt and pepper to taste
*2-3 eggs (optional)

Before you begin to cook, chop your bacon, thinly slice your onion and half your tomatoes: set these ingredients aside so you will be ready to add them when the time is right.

Cook the bacon over medium heat till nice and crispy in a large nonstick skillet, spoon off bacon and set it aside to cool on a paper towel; drain off all but 3 tablespoons of the grease. Return the pan to medium heat and add the onion. Saute till it is translucent, about 5 to 7 minutes. Add the tomatoes, vinegar and sugar and allow to cook for about 2 more minutes or until the tomatoes are heated through. At that point, add a little salt and pepper; taste to make sure that the dressing is to your liking. Either add more seasoning or carefully pour the dressing over a bowl of spinach, add bacon, toss and enjoy.

*What I usually do with this salad is have Collin Murray fry a couple of eggs in the same pan that I used to crisp the bacon and make the dressing but you could easily add a hard-boiled egg, or a poached egg if that was your taste.

Farmer's Market Delivery

One of the best things about being in New York is the Union Square Greenmarket. Not only does it have an amazing array of familiar produce like peaches and corn but it has also introduced Collin Murray and I to a ton of fruits and vegetables that we have never seen or heard of. It is such an exciting place to shop because the it is a truly interactive market. The farmer's who grow the produce that you are purchasing are the ones that take your money and they have a great deal of pride in their products and they are also more than willing to tell you about how they grew them and how to prepare them. Their passion makes it easy for you to get on-board with the idea of buying local and having an awareness of where your food comes from.


Fresh plums in the foreground, and a bounty of other products in the background


Itty bitty eggplants

This week my Greenmarket discovery was one that really excited me: I found fresh chickpeas at the market! I know it may seem silly but I had never really thought about the fact that chickpeas are grown on stalks, come in little pods and begin their lives as a fresh product! To me, I guess I had always seen them dried or in a can and I was so excited to see the fresh version. I asked the farmer how to prepare them and he told me that you simply pop the pod open with your fingers (they actually make quite a loud popping sound!) and shell the chickpeas. You can use them raw in salads or you could saute them, roast them, or steam them and then add them to pastas or stir fries.


Closed chickpea...


Open chickpea!

The other really interesting aspect to the Greenmarket that really delights Collin Murray and I is that you can watch dozens of chefs from some of New York's best restaurants shopping at the market. Often the chefs come in pairs and select produce for that night's specials but a lot of restaurants use the Greenmarket farmer's as some of their primary fruit and vegetable suppliers and so they have standing orders that are picked up on market days. As I said, sometimes the chefs from restaurants that the Greenmarket supplies just pick up their orders and lug them back to the restaurant but others, like Chef April Bloomfield's tiny gastro-pub, The Spotted Pig, have devised other ways of transporting their farmer's market purchases...


The Spotted Pig's delivery bicycle and cart!

As you can see there really is a lot of things to see, taste, and learn at the farmer's market and I hope y'all with take the time to explore your own local market and get excited about the fresh produce that you find!

Three Hours Of Piping. Really, That's It.

After our test today, I think our class officially began winding down to the end of school. We made buttercream and we practiced piping. That's it. I wish I had more to tell you but unfortunately I don't. Next week we are going to be decorating cupcakes though and that certainly makes me very, very happy. Stay tuned!

Wee Little Marzipan Fruits

We made marzipan fruit today. That's all. Truly. Four hours of marzipan fruit. Apparently making marzipan fruit is a dying art but our chef assured us that it is still an important skill to know.

I don't know if I've ever shared this with you, but marzipan is super easy to make. Basically, take one pound of almond paste and break it into little pieces in a Kitchen Aid mixer and before you turn on the mixer, add in eight ounces of confectioner's sugar. Mix till the almond paste and sugar look like very finely ground almonds and then add eight more ounces of confectioner's sugar. Then, very slowly drizzle in three fluid ounces of white corn syrup and mix till the marzipan is combined and smooth. For our purposes today, with the shaping and detailing of the fruit, we added a bit of fondant to smooth out the marzipan and make it a little more pliable.

Here are some of my little fruits...not very realistic, I realize.


Pears


Apricot


Apples

Tomorrow we have an enormous test on chocolate and then on little bits of things from the entire course. We found out we were doing it tomorrow, today. There is not enough time to study and I'm freaking out but this is our last test and I couldn't be happier about that fact.

Chocolate Showpiece: THE END!

Oh my goodness! We made it! There were no tears, no wailing or gnashing of teeth, just a bit of stress and a whole lot of chocolate.


The finished piece!

Our day went like this: paint chocolate petals with cocoa butter, spray chocolate showpiece with paint spray gun, warm and knead chocolate plastic, make leaves, rosebuds and flowers out of chocolate plastic, assemble flowers, begin assembly of showpiece, curse, pray, continue assembling showpiece, fight with breaking petals, pray some more, carry showpiece into a far enough away room to freak me out, relax because it's finally over.

Here are a few details shots of the piece:






Tomorrow we have been promised a zen day of marzipan fruit making. I can't wait to do something without chocolate!

Chocolate Showpiece: Day Three

Today started off really good. Our chocolate from yesterday just popped right of the molds which means we had a perfect temper but that's really that last thing that went right from today. We had intended to paint our spheres to look just a little shimmery, like pearls, but we made the mistake of using a product called lustre dust and they came out silver-y and icky and awful. They were patchy and just looked bad so we air brushed them and tried to cover our mistakes although I don't know how successful our cover-up was.


These were our "successful" mini spheres or the pearls as we have started calling them that we air-brushed with cococa butter.

So since yesterday I didn't have a lot to show you so I thought I would try and show you a little something from today. One of the other things that my partner and I did was make our half spheres into whole spheres today.


We melted the bottoms of two spheres and then used the melted chocolate to act like glue to piece the two halves to a whole.


See?!

So tomorrow is going to be a big day. We have to spray our piece with chocolate, assemble it, paint and assemble the most decorative part of our piece, a blossoming flower, AND make vines and rosebuds -- oh man alive! I truly hope that is all we have on our list, I promise you we will be starting class early tomorrow, it's going to take a lot to get all done!

Chocolate Showpiece: Day Two

I feel like a whining three-year-old but I don't care. I hate chocolate showpieces. I had a four hour class and all my partner and I did was temper dark and white chocolate, fill sphere molds (again), make a game plan for the rest of the week and make a moon. Maybe it's just that it's boring or maybe I'm just not feeling this "project" but whatever it is , I just hate it.


This is our moon -- it will be air brushed on Wednesday when we final our showpieces but you get the shape, right? We made it by using silicone "noodles" (long rectangles of silicone) and shaping them into the moon shape, pouring the tempered chocolate in and then letting the moon set up.

Tomorrow our plan is to clean up the main structures of our piece, make white chocolate plastic that is tinted green and pink (remember chocolate plastic?), begin our the work on our flowers and learn how to use decorative sugar. Hopefully with that kind of full plate of to-dos we will have a better day than today...

Strawberry Fro-YO!

I know I go on and on about my ice cream maker and I am really sorry to do so but I just love mine and I love the things it enables me to make. Ice cream and frozen yogurt, gelato and sorbet -- they are all so expensive to buy and so cheap to make yourself. If you haven't done so yet, get your butt out there and get an ice cream maker, I promise you won't be sorry.

I know that strawberries are not particularly seasonal right now but I happen too be one of those people who, when it comes to strawberries, doesn't really care. I love 'em all times of the year and I love that when the fresh ones are obnoxiously over-priced, that the frozen ones generally do the trick to satisfy my craving.


Which brings me to today's post, Strawberry Fro-Yo. Collin Murray love love loves the Fro-Yo that I began making ages ago but I personally find the recipe to be a touch tart for my liking. When I found this recipe from David Lebovitz (of course and yet again, he of The Perfect Scoop fame), I had to try it. It seemed simple enough, slice up some strawberries, mix them with sugar and let them get all nice and syrup-y, puree, mix with yogurt, a tiny bit of lemon juice and then stick the mixture into the ice cream machine. Now let me tell you, it was simple but straining the strawberry puree so that you didn't have seeds in the final fro-yo was simply too much work. Seriously, I don't have all day people and so I just skipped that little step, I don't mind the seeds but if you do, make sure you don't get impatient...like me.

STRAWBERRY FROZEN YOGURT
Adapted here from David Lebovitz

1 pound strawberries
1/2 cup sugar
1 cup Greek yogurt (I used non-fat)
1 teaspoon lemon juice


Thinly slice the strawberries and mix them in a bowl with the sugar. Leave the bowl on the counter and give the mixture a little mix every 15 minutes or so for about an hour.

Place the strawberries and their juices into a food processor or blender and puree till there are no longer any chunks of fruit left. Whisk the puree in a bowl with the yogurt and lemon juice and place in an ice cream maker. Freeze according the the manufacturer's directions and enjoy!


*If you wanted to strain your mixture, do so before mixing the puree with the yogurt and lemon juice. Also, the original recipe had 2/3 of a cup of sugar in it and I felt that was a whole lotta sugar which is why I cut it down to a half. If you like a sweeter fro-yo, feel free to add the original amount.

*Another little note to add is that this fro-yo gets really, well, fro. Once you put it in the freezer, it freezes solid and I recommend removing it before you want to eat it at least a half and hour in advance.

My New Favorite Muffin

I realized today that a while ago I'd made some super amazing muffins and I never told y'all about them. For this, I am truly sorry.

A few months ago Collin Murray and I went to an iconic New York restaurant called Veselka (you may recall from this post). Veselka serves delicious Eastern European food and American-style pastries that are also rather tasty. Soon after the first time that we ate there, Collin and I discovered the Veselka Cookbook and naturally, since we have a cookbook addition (no, really, it's a "work-related", "research" purchase), we bought that baby. I have to admit that the cookbook itself is kind of lack lustre but these muffins are not. I Promise: They. Are. Delicious.

CHOCOLATE-CHIP PUMPKIN MUFFINS
Adapted from The Veselka Cookbook
Makes about one dozen large muffins

1 3/4 cups rolled (not instant) oats
1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/4 cups firmly packed light brown sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup chocolate chips
1 1/2 cups canned pumpkin puree
3/4 cups vegetable oil
1/2 cup milk (whatever percent you have is a-ok)
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract


Ok, ok, I know it looks like a lot of ingredients but it's mostly pantry essentials so don't fret!

Preheat the oven to 350F and line a muffin pan with liners. In a large bowl, combine oats, flour, baking powder and baking soda, brown sugar, cinnamon and salt with a whisk till you can see that all the sugar is broken up. Once the dry ingredients are mixed, stir the chocolate chips into the mixture. In another bowl, whisk together the pumpkin, oil, eggs and vanilla. Make a well in the center of the dry ingredients and add in the wet: mix together til combined being sure not to over mix. Using a large ice cream scoop, fill the muffin liners 2/3 full.


Bake for about 35 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the center of one of the muffins in the middle of the baking tin comes out clean.


This is the finished product and also one of my favorite photos -- it delights me.

Chocolate Showpiece: Day One

Like many of you, I really had no clue that something called a chocolate showpiece even existed. I'm a small town girl at heart and these fancy-pants concepts had never even crossed my mind before I came to pastry school. However, now I'm here and I'm making one. Little old me and a sculpture of chocolate -- Lord help me.

Today was the first of four days that our class will dedicate to the showpiece and really it was a pretty basic day. We started by actually learning what a showpiece is. We learned that there are two different kinds: the French, which is designed in an "S" shape and usually has very figurative elements and the American, or as my chef said, the everywhere else style of sculpture, which is very literal and is less strict in terms of what elements it is required to have. Since our school teaches in the French style, my partner and I are trying to come up with a plan that suits the French style which is not as easy as it seems especially when our theme is "Breakfast at Tiffany's"...don't pretend you are surprised.

So once we came up with a theme and started planning out some of our elements, we tempered about five pounds of chocolate to begin to create the basic structure of our piece.

This is the neoprene mold that we...


Poured the chocolate into and let set...


And then unmolded.


On Monday we are going to shave this chocolate down and clean up the lines and edges and eventually, these shapes will be arranged, glued together and sprayed with chocolate to cover up any imperfections.

In addition to the chocolate shapes, we also made these perfectly shiny little half-spheres that will eventually be glued together to become little globes that will be used, somehow, in our showpiece.


Lord mercy. Wish me luck for next week, I must admit that I feel a touch out of my element.

The End Of Molded Chocolates

Thank goodness it's over. Honestly. Not since we had our very first practical exam have we had such an anxiety inducing exam. The thing with molded chocolates is that they are kind of a one-shot-deal. You put them in the mold, fill them, put a bottom on them and pray because if you failed to do part of the process correctly, the chocolates are not going to turn out. Thank heavens mine turned out. I was so worried.


Pretty framboise ganache molded chocolates

The mark of perfectly tempered molded chocolates is the ease in which you are able to unmold them. When chocolate is tempered perfectly it drops out of the mold with just a little shake or a tiny tap and I cannot even tell you how happy I was when my chocolates just plopped right out -- it was like music to my ears.


We had to do different molds for our test and this mold was the much easier mold to work with because it was a simpler shape. These chocolates also tasted really good, I'm totally obsessed with the framboise I put into the ganache and I wish y'all could taste these chocolates because they are yum, yum, yummy.

Tomorrow we begin the preparations for our chocolate showpieces. I can't even tell you how not excited I am to create a two-foot high sculpture out of chocolate...

Bad Chocolate? Is That Possible?

So I told you yesterday that our chocolates were setting in their molds overnight and I wish that I could tell you that the results were successful but I can't, cause they weren't. One of our molds never even released the chocolate and the other mold, the ones that had had chocolate sprayed into them, set but the chocolate that we sprayed was not the proper temperature and it dried disgustingly. I was pretty upset, I'm not going to lie. Yesterday was a tough day with a lot of new techniques and to not have a single chocolate turn out was pretty upsetting. However, we trucked along today and produced a number of beautiful, shiny, well constructed chocolates that were rather tasty.

Hopefully these pictures give you an idea of how we constructed the molded chocolates; as I said, it is a bit of a process.

Tomorrow we have a big exam on, what else, molded chocolates. I'm a little nervous because I've only had success with the chocolates just this one day but we will see how it goes as I try to churn out purty chocolates!


These are the molds that the chocolate is poured into and kind of swirled around in till it is coated and then the excess chocolate is poured out and you are left with...


A cleaned mold waiting to be filled.


Here is a mold filled by piping in ganache into the little reservoirs. This mold is waiting to be covered by a top layer of chocolate. This is basically done by pouring the chocolate into the molds, spreading it evenly with a spatula across the entirety of the mold and then removing the excess with a big ol' spatula.


First perfect chocolate to be unmolded


My favorite photo of today -- A Hedgehog(!) Chocolate filled with Matcha Green Tea "guts"...sassy chocolates are where it's at!