Last week??! WHAT?!

I know. This past week was our last official week of class. Next week we have exams, and then our last week is spent doing major cleaning and prep for the graduation dessert buffet. We make everything for the buffet. Cool, huh?

Anyway, we finished up our petit fours class and we have LOTS of deliciousness to discuss, so grab your towel!

We learned how to make macarons. NOT macaroons. MacaRONs (mah-kah-ROHNz) They are soooo yummy. Especially when filled with french meringue buttercream. French meringue buttercream is made with egg yolks and whole eggs, as opposed to italian meringue buttercream, which only uses whites. Do you know what that means? It means those yolks in the french meringue buttercream brought an AMAZING creaminess and flavor and I’m a little obsessed with it. When Chef Jonathan made it for demo, he passed some around with tasting spoons to try. After I tried (and kind of freaked out with excitement) he let me have what was leftover to myself. And I just sat and ate buttercream throughout the rest of the demo. Oy. I need to exercise.

But I digress…

Macarons:
They are basically a meringue cookie with almond flour and then we sandwich them together with a filling…and they look like little hamburgers :)

See? Mini dessert hamburgers! These were probably my favorite from this week. I didn’t let John take them to work. And I finished them off for breakfast yesterday morning. ;)

We learned that with the exception of chocolate, macaron shells are rarely flavored. They are colored however, to reflect the filling of the macaron. We made a chocolate raspberry ganache as a filling and so we colored some macarons PINK! And, oh, were they pink

And of course, we made chocolate macarons. We flavored our leftover french meringue buttercream with hazelnut paste (oh my goodness, it’s amazing) and used that to fill the chocolate ones.

We made some pear tartletts with almond cream

We made something called an opera cake. It’s a traditional French cake, but I didn’t have any because all the layers of cake inside were drenched in a coffee syrup we made. (I hate the smell of coffee, by the way…I was gagging making this thing) But it turned out really pretty!

We made an apple-nougat tart, which had cooked apples with an egg white/almond topping

We made madeleines (MA-deh-linz)
 
We also made a “plain” (almond) financier. I LOVE this one…because we stick a raspberry in the middle right before baking it and it comes out sooooo moist and yummy!

We made coconut rochers. I learned that rochers means “rocks”. Interesting, no? I’m not a huge fan of coconut, but these were really good!

We made an almond caramel tuile (TWEEL) and I made them WAY too big so they melded all together during the baking so they took up all the space on my rolling pin when we pulled them off to shape them. They were really good though. Think caramel with butter and almonds in a crunch. Yum.
Behold the MEGATUILE!

And we finished up the week with fruit tarts. Fruit tarts are only good the day you make them, so I only made four. And then I ate them. ;) I brought home leftover pastry cream so that I could use it to make more in the rest of my tart shells, but we’ll see if that actually happens or not…
I love fruit tarts, they are so pretty!

Well my friends, that is the last of my classes! Can you believe it?! Neither can I!! We’ll have a master demo next week, so I might have pictures of that for next time, and I will definitely have pictures of graduation! Oh my goodness…I can’t believe it’s almost here! It’s been quite the ride, hasn’t it? Thanks for keeping up with my pastry adventure!!!