Delayed

Hi, well last week I only had two demos and two practicals, and although it was significantly less than the week before, somehow I have gotten very behind in all my postings. I have so many things that I want to post about specially these two pasts days.
As much as I want to share what I did on the weekend, and a few weekends ago, as well as on my free days last week, I will only post about my last demo and practical, since tomorrow I have another one and I really want to keep you up to date in those, and I will try very hard to start making postings and try to catch up ending my delay.

So, the last demo we had last week, was about choux pastry again (the one we used to make the little balls in the Saint Honore cake). So since we already know how to do this pastry, this demo was more of a review, and to answer any questions since we already worked with it. The chef did 5 different things, which mainly where small tweaks in the filling of the pastry, the shape we give it to it or topping, since all of them are made with choux pastry.

This is what the chef did:

Choux a Chantilly

I looooove Chantilly cream!!! (my fav ones)

Eclairs au Chocolat, et Eclairs au Cafe

The chocolate ones were too rich for me, I liked more the coffee ones

"Glands" or Acorns, and "Salambos"

This are both filled with pastry cream, and just  decorated different. The  acorns (left) has kirsh pastry cream, and the salambos (right) rum pastry cream

 And the last ones he did were the "Chouquettes"

Choux Pastry balls covered with nibbing sugar

These last ones are very dangerous, since they are so light and fluffy, when you eat one it only feels like a bite, so immediately without even thinking about it, you reach for a second one and put it in your mouth, and so on.

The tricky one here is mainly the eclairs, not doing the actual thing, but getting the topping right, the chef made it look so easy, but I am pretty sure it may be trickier than it looks.

Two day later we went into the kitchen to give it a try in the eclairs au chocolat and the chouquettes.

The choux pastry was not hard, my thing here, was improving the way I handled to pastry bag, from the last time we used it. so I carefully piped the eclair shapes as even and straight as I could. Then the next thing to accomplish was to make the pastry cream without burning it, and I did, then getting all the little chouquette balls to be all the same size, have a nice size, and to look pretty. Not very easy to maintain consistency in size, but somehow I made them to look close to what I wanted. The last steps where to fill up the eclairs, which proofed tougher than I thought since it was hard to get my thick pastry cream inside, and took me longer than I expected, and the frosting with the fondant. Although I had to wait my turn (I was last since my turn passed and I was still filling them up), I was getting anxious, I finally got to do it, and I have to practice a looot, to get them like the ones the chef did, they didn't come out so bad, and look pretty descent.
So here they are:

Chouquettes

Ahhh, so light and fluffly!!!

Eclair au Chocolat

Now, for all of you still concerned about the burn in my finger, here is an update into how it looks now:

   

I literally had a hole in my finger, but is healing nice, it doesn't hurt unless I accidentally hit it, and then it will hurt for a while and even swell a bit, but after a while is ok.

Well tomorrow I have class early so I have to go now, but I will be posting soon trying to catch up!!