Christmas Cake??

In Mexico and USA, that I know off there is no particular cake that we eat for Christmas. In Mexico there are some characteristic desserts  of the season, as well as in the USA, but not one specific cake for the Christmas Dinner. Well, in France they do, is called a buche. The interesting thing is that buche only refers to the shape of the cake and not the flavor, so it can basically be any cake, which ever is yoour fqvorite as long as it is in a log shape or buche you can eat in it Christmas. Some are decorated with Christmas motifs, and some with no particular theme, but always nicely decorated.
At school they taught us, how to make this cake in the Pistachio-Chocolat flavor modality, as well as a bread called Pain de Genes. The rectangular cake is made of the left over batter, just for the Chef to show us a different way to present this cake for another ocassion besides Christmas.

The Buche Pistachio-Chocolat was ok, but a little too rich in chocolate flavor for me, since it was a pistachio Genoise, with chocolate ganache in between the layer, and a choclate glaze. But I can't deny that the presentation of this cake is very elegant.

The Pain du Genes, is not a formal bread at all, but I quite like it since it is mainly almond bread it has a much milder taste.

Even though you already see what the inside looks like, I will still post a picture of what I got for "la degustation".

For our practical we, of course did the difficult one of the two, the Buche Pistachio-Chocolate.
Doing the glazing of teh cake so that is smooth, even and all over the cake is very difficult> Somehow I managed to get it done like this, but things don't end here. Once you have it glazed you have to move it somewhere where the chocolate can set, so I put mine behind me, and all was ok, except when the chef passed real quick beside it, and gently hit my cake. The result, my chocolate glazed cracked. Because of this I could not make the vertical decoration the chef had done in demo, and I had to figure out a way to hide my cracked cake without it looking horrible or that I was covering something. I managed to make it look pretty descent, or at least I think so.

When we were all presenting our cakes to be graded, I saw that most of them just did the normal decoration even though their glazed was cracked. I had second thoughts about my decoration, but then I though mine is ok, since mine shows a perfect glaze hidden the crack.

The French "Rosca the Reyes"

In Mexico we have the tradition of eating Rosca de Reyes for The Three Wise Men Day in January 6th. This round bread has a plastic baby figure that is to remember baby Jesus, and who ever gets it, has to buy the tamales for February 2nd. Well the french have a similar tradition, but in the first days of Februqry and they eat a "Galette des Rois" which has a colored chickpea inside. And the way they do it, is that the youngest member of the family gets under the table and as one older person cuts out the pieces, the kid is to say who that piece goes to making it fair   so that no one cheats in trying to avoid getting the chickpea which in turn will have to buy food for another occasion.

In school they taught us how to make this, well sort off, we made the "Pithiviers" which is exactly the same thing as a Galette des Rois, the only difference being is that the Pithiviers has petal shapes all around it, and the galette des Rois is completelly round. The "cake" is only puff pastry with almond paste in it, the puff pastry was good, but the almond paste not my favorite thing to eat though.

      

The chef was actually in a pretty good mood, and was telling us all about this tradition. And there is a third way of calling this cake if you do it in a long rectangular cake, and then sell it as individual pieces, which is the: "Dartois". Talk about being picky about names, this cake changes name in the way you even serve it.

    

 With the left over dough, since is difficult to reuse in another cake, since it won't puff as nice, the chef just did what they call "Sacristans" which are nothing more than chopped almonds, cinnamon, and supar twist. They are very good though.

     

And of course the fun part was to try them all.

For practical we had to do the Pithivier, and with the left over the Sacristains.

Look at those nice layers!!!!

The making of the pastry was a workout. We had to do 3 1/2 double turns on the dough, and the rolling out of it, is exercise.

Mine turn out pretty good actually, since my dough really puffed out in a very nice way, even though I had little pieces of butter exposed while making it.

     

The sacristains are a whole other thing. These are very very difficult to make. They look easy, but rolling them so they actually look like twist, and for them to be all even and look alike is very very hard. Mine once baked turned out not so bad, but I has very worried before baking them cause they looked really awful. Thankfully flavor and looks not always go hand in hand, and these tasted very good!!

    

And We Begin with Fancy Looking Cakes

As we past the bread braking part of Basic, we begin with starting really form the Charlotte aux Poires with more fancy looking cakes. For this demo we had Chef C, which after this demo, if I hadn't admitted it before, there is no going back down, he is my absolute favorite Chef in the school. His demos are absolutely amazing. In practical he is known to be a bit bipolar since if you are doing ok, he is very nice, but if you mess up, he will go all out, yelling, but since I have been doing fine, is all good. His demos are fantastic, he always goes beyond what is required of him, he is always telling us something, or joking to try to get us to understand better.
For this demo, what he did, was because he said is boring to see the chefs do the same cake in the same size several times, he thought he would show us, different options in sizes, since we won't always make the same size cake.
For this demo the chef made the Mogador.

Which is a chocolate cake bottom with raspberry jam in the middle, topped with chocolate mouse, and a very thin layer of the raspberry jam on top.

And for those wondering how the inside looks, well, here's a peak:

     

The chocolate mousse was a bit too sweet for me, but the raspberry and the chocolate cake, were really good.

Although we did use some new, techniques, and the cake did look a bit challenging, things at the practical went pretty good, with no mayor problems. And regarding how it looks, this is definitively one of my favorites in looks so far.

House Cake

In school we made the Charlotte aaux Poire, or Pear Charlotte, which is not really a little house cake, but to me it certainly reminds me of one, with the floor the walls, and roof we made for it, hahahaha.
This cake is made of a almond biscuit all around, with a pear mousse inside, and some caramelized pears. We had Chef T for practical, who is such a sweet man. He is a really really good chef, he was Pastry Chef at the famous hotel Le Bristol. He makes everything look so easy, but yet he is always willing to correct you and help you learn the right way to do it in practical. Having him in demo is not so exciting thou, I mean he will give a good class, is just he doesn,t talk that much, or do much more other than what we are requiered to learn. I don't mind him giving the demo, but I am not excited either.
Here is what the chef did in demo:

The big cakes are the ones I was talking about the Charlotte aux Poires

and the other personal size pastries are called Pain de Gens

This is nothing more than old brioche bread, sliced in personal size portions, imbibed with syrup, and with a layer of almond cream.

And of course my personal favorite part of the class, "la dégustation".

I love the whole charlotte presentation, is elegant and pretty, but to my taste, I found that the mousse tasted way too much like alcohol, in fact that was all I could taste. We asked the other french girls if it is supposed to always taste like this, or had it been the chef adding a bit too much of alcohol, and they told us that they had always had it tasting like that. I really did not like that; the recued leftover brioche on the other hand, was soo good, you would never imagine is leftover bread fixed to sell it. It was nice and moist thanks to th eimbibing syrup, and the almonds on top, gave it a nice flavor. I even managed myself to get a whole thing to eat as a very late breakfast afterclass with a hot chocolate from the school vending machines. Talk about a really tasty breakfast, hahahaha.
Since we are in school to learn good french pastry, we of course didn,t do the left over brioche recipe, we did the Charlotte aux Poires.

    

 It is not as challenging as it might look, the piping wasn't hard, but my mix was a bit runny in the end, so the shape of the balls, or drop like things I did doesn't looked as sharp as they could, other than that it went well. Since I was doing my cake, and I can do whatever I want with it, I di add a lot less alcohol that the one the recipe asked for. When I took it home, I was a bit reluctant to try it, thanks to the bad experience I had with the one at school. After I managed to get other people to try it, and got positive reviews about it, I tried it, but just a spoonfull to check it, I like it. The flavor was good, since I could actuqlly taste other things besides alcohol, hahahaha. I didn't eat much more, but I will definitivelly give it another try as long as I know I made it ;)

I am such a bad blogger, I know

I really want to apologize since I know I haven't been wrtitting like I used to, but luckily I have been founding myself busy with work, school, and spending some time with friends.

I am almost out of school (I will post on what I have been doing) just had my last practical and demo yesterday. And now I am in the process of getting ready for my final on Friday.

We had our written test a couple of weeks ago. I had a hard time studying since one of the parts was to memorize the ingredients lists for 6 recipes, which to me is totally useless. I do not see the point in this and had a hard time memorizing them since I didn't see the point in doing it. The day before the exam after writting them for don't know how many times I managed to memorize them completelly. I studied the theory notes we had (types of mil, cream, butter and sugar), and managed to memorized the terms in the glossary. When I took th etest I was so mad they didn't ask almost anything of what they had told us to study. They asked generql stuff and qbout recipes and things the chefs might have mentioned in class (luckily I knew most of it). One of the things that really got me upset is they asked us stuff from recipes we never made in prqctical like what are the ingredients to make macarons, I mean yes the chef made them in class but is very hard to remeber what goes into something you have never made. Yesterday we got our grades, and dispite the feeling I had after the test I am happy to report I got 92 in the written exam, and 100 in the ingredients list memorization, which by the way I got the easiest recipe of the list.

I have mixed emotions about finishing basic. I am so happy because of all that I have learned, I absolutelly love going to school everyday, but am a bit nostalgic that is almost over, I don't want it to be; This time has gone by so fast I don't want it to end.

Anyhow life goes on wether we want to or not, so in th emeqn time I will work on practicing one more time some recipes before my test on Friday.

Wish me all good luck!!

Le Brioche

Making the brioche dough was intense!!! I have always looked at people in TV making brioche, and bread in general and always wanted to give it a try myself but was scared to do it, without anyone teaching me how. Here I finally had the opportunity to do it. I definitively won't do it by hand even again, but I loved the experience.
We have the dough, but what to do with it, well I know know a lot of things I can do with brioche. We had the demo, and the chef showed us, many options of things we can do with it, and gave us lots of interesting ideas, and suggestions of things we can do with them. I just love this lectures where the chefs go beyond the recipes they are to teach us. Makes the class much more interesting, and of course makes the chef look really impressive.

Here is all the chef did at the Brioche demo:

Suisse Brioche

Pain aux Raisins

Brioche Mousseline

Braided Brioche

Grosse Brioche

Brioche Moule

Brioche Nantes

Grosse Brioche individual pieces

Again my favorite part of class "la degustation", this breqd was so good, just warm out of the oven, the only thing missing was a coffe or hot chocolate to go with it.

Next day we had our practical, which  was very excited to see how my bread was to come out like being that I made the dough all by hand. Thank God, it came out really good, with no mayor problems in the practical.

My pain aux raisins  and my Grosse Brioches

    

my Brioche Nantes

    

Don't they look good!!! Next time I would definitively do it in the mixer, but I can absolutely get used to this homemade bread, is just awesome!!!