This week we started petit fours! (little bite-sized desserts, literally translated to “little oven”) We started the week preparing a bunch of different doughs we’ll need over the course of the 2-week unit. All the doughs were pretty straightforward, so thank god my Monday brain didn’t have to strain itself too hard 😉
The first thing we made this week were little puffs of pate a choux dough filled with a dark chocolate pastry cream. Pate a choux might sound like an unfamiliar term, but if you’ve ever eaten a cream puff from the WI state fair (come on, who hasn’t), you’ve already tasted it! It’s the kind of light, almost bread-y dough that puffs up when you bake it. I think we made pate a choux maybe 4? 5? times this week for different recipes…I’m very good at making pate a choux now. 😏
We also made a few different kinds of little sandwich-like cookies. These pictured on the left are a super sweet meringue-like cookie with hazelnut powder that we filled with a walnut and red wine cream. Some of my classmates make fun of me because I don’t really like a lot of what we make, especially the creams/fillings that taste super buttery… ahh, c’est la vie. (Good French, huh?!)
The Paris brest is a super classic French pastry made with pate a choux dough and filled with a praline-flavored cream. Below is the traditional look: the choux piped in a circle, cut in half, and then piped the filling in the middle. On the right are little baby blueberry tarts. How cute
A French pastry that are all the rage lately and most everyone recognizes……. macarons. Not to be confused with Passover coconut macaroons, these babies are made out of almond flour, confectionary sugar, beaten egg whites, and some sort of filling. After working at Alliance Patisserie for a few months where the focus is on their 14+ flavors of macarons, I’ve become a big fan. All the macaron fillings at Alliance were based with white chocolate because it sets pretty hard (so it doesn’t squish out the sides when you bite into it) and is a relatively neutral base for other flavors like hazelnut, mango, lemon, coffee, etc. Chef Joel explained to us this week that macaron fillings are often based with white chocolate, although the ones we made (pistachio) had a buttercream filling. Because of the softer filling, they’re better chilled for a while before eating so you don’t end up with a shirt full of buttercream. Aaand cue the photoshoot:
Chef Joel mentioned that we’ll be making macarons at least one more time. I’m rooting for chocolate.
The last few things we made this week all started with, wait for it…. pate a choux dough. We made eclairs, smaller eclair-like pastries called salambos, and little stacks of pate a choux called religieuse.
Eclairs and salambos are pretty much the same thing, except a different size. As pictured above, the eclairs we made were about 10cm of piped pate a choux dough, filled with pastry cream in the middle, and then topped with a chocolate fondant glaze. Below, our salambos were about 2 1/4″, filled with pastry cream, and then topped with a hard caramel.
These little guys are called religieuse, “nun” because they look like little nuns! They’re made with 2 different sized pate a choux stacked on top of each other, filled with pastry cream, and then topped with the same chocolate glaze as the eclairs.
That’s all for now! We have another week of petit fours this week, and then a week of exams that will cover these 2 weeks of petit fours, and breads from the previous 2 weeks. Only 8 weeks until graduation, OMG.
With a Side of Butter 