Oh. My. Cuteness.

So John has this theory. When it comes to girls, the smaller an item is, the cuter we will think the item is. So basically, to a girl, mini-anything is adorable.

He’s probably right ;)

This week we started petit fours. Mini pastries. CUTE mini pastries (see?). I mean, how can a little bitty tart NOT be cute?! Anyway, we made more than just tarts, we made lots of yummy things this week. (grab your drool towel!)

We made daquoise (dah-KWAHZ) cookies with a yummy cream filling
We learned how to make a lot or different things using pate a choux (pah-tah-SHOO) It’s the stuff we use and fill to make cream puffs. But we learned new and wondrously delicious fillings. Like the hazelnut/pastry cream/buttercream mixture we made for the paris brest (PAH-ree BREST)
We mixed pastry cream and hazelnut praline to fill the chouquettes (shoo-KETTS)
Just regular pastry cream for the Salambos (sah-LAHM-bohs) – well, we were supposed to put kirsch in there too…but we didn’t. And then we topped them with caramelized sugar and an almond.
We made chocolate pastry cream for these mini éclairs. Aren’t they so CUTE?! They are about the size of my index finger. :) Betcha didn’t know that éclair means lightning! Another translation (as I understand it) is the zipper of your pants. Weird. I know.
We made mini blueberry tarts, topped with streusel
Here’s the collection for that day :) Yeah, I brought half of this home on one day. John ran a race downtown that day and so we towed it all over downtown before bringing it home. Then I had John take it back to work with him. They LOVE me over there! By the way, John did AWESOME on his race, running 3.5 miles in less than 22 minutes. He was given the “Eating Healthy is Overrated Award” at his office for running his time at the race “fueled solely by cookies, pastries, and cakes”. Nice, huh?  
We made chocolate financiers (fih-NOHN-see-ehys). These were made with bankers and workers of the financial district in mind. Traditionally, they are made into a bar shape. To look like a bar of gold ;)
At the end of the week we made these chocolate espresso tarts. I didn’t have any of these because of the coffee, but there are still cute, yes?

And that was pretty much it this week for class, but I did go on a little field trip on Wednesday. The school had gotten us free passes to the Sweets and Snacks Expo, a large floorshow of candy and snack companies, so I headed over Wednesday morning with Jill to check it out. IT WAS SO COOL!

We were given these gift bags that we FILLED with TONS of free samples! Oh yeah, sugar overload at 10:30 in the morning? Yes, please.

This was a booth for this super sour candy (which I LOVE). The stuff in the jar on the left was really good :)
LOVE me some jelly bellys!
The place was huge!!
The displays were awesome
And at the bottom floor, we found this: (This is for you Mom)

A PEEPS bug! AH!! So cute!

That night I laid out my spoils of the day. I came home with soooo much candy
That lollipop is the biggest jawbreaker I’ve ever seen. Whether or not I’ll actually try to eat it remains to be seen. I’ll keep you posted ;)
There were several companies there that I didn’t recognize, so it was fun to try something new
KOALA COOKIES!!!!!!!!! They had these in Okinawa! LOVE THEM.
Some companies (like Hershey) were giving out samples of candy that hadn’t hit the market yet. It’s pretty cool!

So it’s been less than a week and I’ve probably gone through more of my stash here than is healthy…what can I say? ;)

We are down to 3 weeks left of school! One more week of petit fours (stay tuned!) then we have a week of exams, and then we spend a week making sweets for our graduation dessert buffet (I know, right? awesome) and cleaning for the end of the term. It’s going by so fast!