Oh, The Tart of my Heart

Welcome to tart week my friends! We are finally back to bringing home yumminess everyday, rather than a large sculpture once a week. John was pretty pleased ;) And we did indeed bring home at least one tart everyday! It was pretty exciting! (and please, remember to keep your drooling in check ;)

We had a new instructor this week, Chef Pierre. He’s a WORLD baking champion. Yeah, it’s really cool. I liked him a lot. He is from Alsace, France and has an awesome French accent. Anyway, he taught us tarts this week.

We started off with a baked fruit tart. I put apricots in mine. Yum. We learned how to make dough and roll it out into a tart shell. Then we filled it with almond cream, fruit, and topped it with granulated almonds.

We made mini ones too…and mine were a little full. And exploded.
We also made LEMON tarts! We LEMON CREAM! (if you recall the cake program, I’m addicted to a little obsessed with lemon cream…) We made a lemon cream tart with French meringue and it was SO YUMMY. Here are my little meringues ready to be baked.
And a little bowl of deliciousness i.e. lemon cream and meringue. MMM! Favorite so far.

We also made a lemon curd tart! The main difference between the two lemon tarts is that you bake lemon curd. You add lemon cream into the tart shell and do NOT bake it. But BOTH are simply divine. We topped the lemon curd tart with piped Italian meringue, which was then caramelized in the oven for a few minutes to give it a nice color. (sorry if the color doesn’t look all that appetizing in the picture…it’s the lighting. I promise)
It was fun to do some snazzy piping on them. I piped the big one so that it can be cut into 6 pieces and each piece still looks pretty on its own. Cleve, eh? ;)

We made a chocolate tart, filled with chocolate custard and topped with chocolate nougatine crisp..WOW that was a lot of chocolate!

Then at the end of the week we made these tart/pastry/cake thingies. I’m not really sure if they are actually tarts…but anyway, the first was called a St. Honore (SAN OH-noh-REH – really deep in your throat, guttural-like ;) It was made with inverted puff pastry, pate a choux, and crème legere )CREM leh-ZHER). Here is our puff pastry with piped pate a choux, ready to go in the oven.

Here is the puff pastry all baked!

Oh yeah, did I mention the thing will be surrounded by CREAM PUFFS?!

We filled the pate a choux with pastry cream and dipped them in sugar on the top, and then on the bottom to glue them to the cake.

Then we filled the center with crème legere and topped it with some berries and voila! ;)

MmmMmmMmmm…yum. The last one we made is called a milles feulles (and I’m pretty sure I spelled that wrong and I don’t have my book with me to check… but you say it MILL FOY) And it’s basically layers of puff pastry with pastry cream in between. I think this one was really pretty :)

And that was tart week! Next week I may or may not have a post because it’s EXAMS! Dun dun dun…wish me luck! I hope everyone has had a good weekend! :)

My Obsessions

Well, one of them. I’m talking about the vinyl one. ;) I know. I just have to. I love sharing what little things I’ve created with you.

We FINALLY got our pictures up onto the wall. Yay! Now it’s not so bare. There were a couple reasons it took so long... A) When John was still searching for a job, it was getting to the point that he might look out of state, so we might not have even been here that long. B) I was thinking/hoping that if we stayed here for a while, we’d paint the apartment and I didn’t want to put everything up yet. Still may or may not happen. And C) I was planning on getting a bigger cricut mat to cut out my FABULOUS vinyl saying that I wanted up so it didn’t have to come in so many pieces.

Turns out I just sucked it up and made it in several pieces then got the bigger mat the next day ;)

But here’s the finished wall! (sorry the lighting is bad. It’s nighttime and I didn’t want to wait till morning to take a picture to show you…and it totally looks like some of those frames are crooked. Dang.)

I LOVE that saying “Moments are the molecules of eternity”. I have it written down somewhere who said that…but anyway, I knew that’s what I wanted up there with captured moments :) But my newest bit of vinylizing is that cute little canvas there on the left

MARRIAGE Subway art!!! (That’s another obsession, by the way…subway art…) I was so excited when I found that temple silhouette online. It’s even the temple we were married in! And if enough people are interested, I might take some custom orders…but I’m DEFINTIELY changing the font for “True Love” there at the top…too skinny for the cricut, I think. ;)

So anyway, that’s my most recent craftiness. Just thought I’d share ;)

I hope everyone is having a good week so far!

What?! More?!

Yes, more. More what you ask? CHOCOLATE.

(oh no!!)

OH yes. Thankfully however, this post mostly consists of eating chocolate. (for John) And chocolate amazing-ness. This weekend we took a little trip to Geneva to visit a little pastry shop called The Cocoa Bean. If you’ve been with me long enough, you’ll (maybe) remember that I did a stage there back in October and really enjoyed it. Well, Chef Josh used to co-own The Cocoa Bean and said we should all go eat there, so a group of us in class decided we’d make the trip out to Geneva to check it out. When I staged, I didn’t actually eat anything from the shop, so I was excited to try some of their product. YUM. I got a little individual cake with white cake, white chocolate passion fruit mousse, and raspberry crème brulee. John got a little cake with chocolate cake, chocolate ganache and a peanut butter crème brulee. We also got a couple of fresh croissants. Sooooo tasty. Before we got there, I thought “we should make sure to take pictures of what we ordered, so I can show everyone how pretty their stuff is!”. Well, I forgot. This is all we had left…

Basically, it disappeared pretty fast ;) But we got to talk to the chef there and he gave us lots of advice and it was fun to go out with friends from school
And John, of course :)

Also in Geneva was an all chocolate kitchen! John and I had actually heard about it several months ago. Chef Alain Roby had built an all chocolate kitchen for a charity for people suffering from congenital heart defects. We had wanted to go and see it but never made the trip out there. So after Cocoa Bean we found the chocolate kitchen! With a donation, we could take as many pictures as we wanted. The stuff in there was amazing! (and sorry most of the pictures aren’t that great…the lighting was a little tricky…) This sun was made entirely of sugar.

This scene was made from chocolate
A 700 pound white chocolate astronaut!
And here is the kitchen!! (the pot and spatula on the ‘stove’ are real, as well as the heart shaped boxes on the left)
Chef Roby actually came in while we were there!!! (yeah, that patch on his sleeve? He’s been on the Food Network!!!!!)
Pretty amazing huh? It’s all chocolate! The dishes in the cabinet are sugar.

Amazing. Just amazing.

After touring the chocolate amazing-ness, we stopped by a shop called The Spice House. There is one downtown that I’ve been wanting to go to, but this one works too! They have SO many different spices and the smells were almost overpowering, but smelled pretty yummy!

And that was our outing to Geneva! Too fun. It’s really cool little city. Now we’re resting up for yet another crazy week!

C’Mon, Gimme Some Sugar

;)

Well, this week was sugar sculpture. Oh yes. We must welcome back the lava hot sugar.  Lucky for me though, is that I’m getting pretty tough and my fingers didn’t hurt as much as they did that first time in the cake program (trust me, they still hurt). Hurray! Chef Della told us back when she was teaching us sugar candies that she could always tell who was the ‘tenderfoot’ by the way they were reluctant to touch the hot sugar. Well, I’m not a tenderfoot anymore! Just a tenderfingers. ;) Anyway…

We had Chef Josh again for this class and we didn’t actually know what the sculpture was going to look like before we made all the pieces. Chef Josh tried to draw us a picture:

…yeah…can’t say it helped me much ;) But it was something. We started off by making a pressed sugar dome and some discs.

My discs didn’t turn out so good…see the fingerprints on the far one? Yeah…I forgot to oil the mold before the sugar went in…and they didn’t really want to come out on their own. I ended up making new ones later.

Next we made pastillage stems…oh how I loathe making pastillage stems. But I will say, I’ve gotten better at them…so it wasn’t as bad this time around. I do like making pebbles though. We got to marble them with blue :)

Did you know that you can microwave pastillage? It gives it a really cool effect, but OH MY GOODNESS does it smell bad!!!!! Think vinegar and gelatin…um, EW. So basically, don’t stick your head to close to the microwave when you pull out your pastillage, or you might just pass out. It’s a cool look though, isn’t it? It kinda looks like coral, and I’ve heard it’s been used to look like bread when painted.

THEN we got on to the lava hot stuff. We pulled some roses (and got some very tender pointer fingers and thumbs…).

We did some blown sugar, which I LOVE (it’s easier on the fingers too). In the cake program we blew spheres and birds, but this time we blew fruit too!! Apples,
Don’t they look good enough to eat??
Uh…just kidding…
Pears
And for fun, I tried blowing a banana! SO FUN! (I pretty much was so excited I had to show everyone in the class…) BANANA!

We also blew birds, but I had a hard time getting mine to look like the style that Chef Josh had shown us…so here’s what I came up with:
(This little purple guy is my favorite!!)
This was as close as I got to the new style…still wasn’t quite there though…
So I gave up and made a swan like the ones we made in the cake program… ;)

There were more components we had to prep for the sculpture before we could start assembly, but you’ll see those on the finished project. So here we go:
Discs (new and improved) and dome (hm…kinda looks like the base for our chocolate sculpture…)

Then we had what we called “the blob”, which was liquid sugar poured into a bowl of granulated sugar and manipulated to have a very random shape, and the microwaved pastilliage, the blown pieces, the stems, and the rose. There are some pebbles around there too. I added a stem and a leaf to my pear, which I also got to airbrush (I don’t know if you can really see a difference in the picture though…)

Then we had some bubble sugar and I think that was it.

I’ll be honest, it isn’t my favorite. As our intern put it: “It looks like an 80’s soap dish”.

My thoughts exactly. I mean, can’t you see this in some old lady’s bathroom? (Nothing against old ladies of course…anyway…) But it was still fun to make.

And that concludes lava hot sugar week. At least until finals. We start TARTS next week and I’m really excited to bring food home again! :)