Week 40 Assessment Day

First of all, I am frustrated to do this post again. I had already written a long post and was ready to publish it a few days back and suddenly the internet wasn't working and all that I wrote disappeared. Anyway, I won't be able to remember what I wrote, so now I will write what comes to mind today. 

The day has come for our final assessment for Stage 4. We were required to prepare 6 desserts and again I will be working alone. But luckily I have friends, Di and Megan offered to help me with some of the things. Things like chantilly cream and cream patisserie which were accompaniments for the desserts. I was a little relief that I will get some help but I knew I still had to plan my workflow carefully to make sure I can complete everything. 

After looking at the workflow for a few days, I decided that it will have to do. As long as nothing gets burnt, nothing sinks or deflates and nothing too bad that it cant be saved, then I should be ok. Let the fun begin. 

Menu of the day  : Iced Orange Grand Marnier Parfait

                                 Meringue Poached Pear

                                 Glazed Petit Four

                                 Strawberry Frangipane Tartlets

                                 Flourless Chocolate Cake

                                 Olive Oil Profiteroles

Accompaniments: Chantilly Cream

                                  Cream Patisserie

                                  Fruit Marzipan

Now looking at the menu, parfait needs a few hours in the fridge, therefore it needs to be started first thing in the morning. I struggled with the meringue poached pear a few weeks back and now it is back to haunt me. Petit four another a pain because it is very time consuming to make. Strawberry frangipane tartlets and the flourless chocolate cake are both rather simple and lastly profiteroles which we have made so many times. I know this term is about special dietry requirements and so this is a butterless recipe but can't we do something more interesting?

Knowing that it was going to be a long and stressful day, I asked this guy in our class whether it was ok for me to use the 2 ovens near my workbench and he use the ones near his workbench. The reason I asked was he likes to use whichever oven and whenever he wants to all the time. So for assessment, I wanted to make sure the oven temperature was not messed with and no one opens the oven when something is in there. Things like profiteroles will deflate if you open the oven too soon. Anyway, he agreed and I was happy. Now I am all set for the day. 

Iced Orange Grand Marnier Parfait

I started with the parfait as planned. I lined the dariole moulds with cling wrap and set them aside. Then whipped the cream to soft peak and chilled it. Creamed the egg yolks with sugar and added melted gelatine together with orange juice and grand marnier. Then the egg whites were whisked till stiff peak and folded into the egg mixture in alternation with the whipped cream. Then poured into the dariole moulds and freezed. 

I peeled the pear and gave it to Di to poach together with theirs. This saved me some time and also we didn't have to make and waste 2 big pots of sugar syrup just to poach the pears. Now I was ready to bake the sponge cake for the petit four. Once that was done, I left it to cool completely and then cut into 4 pieces. Sandwiched them back together with apricot jam and placed a layer of marzipan on the top layer and cut into cubes. The original method was to cover each cube with marzipan all around but our trainer said we can save some time by doing it this way. I then cooked the fondant icing and coloured it pink. I dipped each cube in the fondant and left it on a wire rack to dry. Then I shared the fondant with others. 

Petit Four in the process

Then I made the choux pastry and was almost ready to put it in the oven and suddenly I saw the guy that I mentioned earlier was opening my oven to put his meringues in. I quickly went there to stop him. He said his tray was too big for his oven but I wasn't going to give in. I said No! my choux is ready to go in. He actually changed my oven temperature without telling me. I got my oven back with some help from others to convince him. I was so annoyed by this person. Now I had to wait for my oven temperature to go back up to 200˚C. Finally choux was in the oven. 

Choux pastry and tartlets

The choux were filled with cream patisserie and dipped in chocolate. Then I drizzled it with some white chocolate. I played with some chocolate drawings on the plate because I was inspired by a youtube video that I saw but my work  was miles behind compared to hers. But it was still fun to try. 

Olive Oil Profitroles

Then I made the sweetcrust pastry for the tartlets and chilled it. While that was chilling, I did the chocolate cake. Once the chocolate cake was in the oven, I took the sweetcrust pastry and pressed them into my little tart cases. Some of them blind baked their tart cases before filling in the frangipane but I decided to bake them together. This will save me some time and because the tart cases were small, it should cook at the same time. Fingers crossed and into the oven it goes. After about 20 minutes, it came out golden brown and I was so happy. 

Strawberry Frangipane Tartlets

The chocolate cake was to be presented as a whole cake. I just placed the fruit marzipan on top as decoration. We were required to make an apple, a strawberry and a banana. Well they are not made to scale but as long as it looks like the fruits, I think it is ok. 

Flourless Chocolate Cake

I initially wanted to decorate the petit four with royal icing but then realised that there weren't any icing sugar left. So I used melted white chocolate instead. I drew some snowflakes on each petit four because I thought it represents season now and reminds me on how cold it is. Unfortunately it wasn't a very tidy work. 

Glazed Petit Four

Remember what I said about the meringue poached pear is back to haunt me? I had trouble plating it up because everything was white in colour. So this time I coloured the meringue with a little pink and managed to get some strawberries to give it some colour. Honestly, this time I am pretty happy with the plating up for the meringue poached pear. What do you think?

I have to say my plating up is really simple. One because I personally like it simple and secondly it saves time. As you can see, most of the plating up is with strawberries, haha that is because that was what we got. I consider myself lucky to even get nice strawberries. 

Meringue Poached Pear

All done! I have to say I am quite happy with my work. With the help from Di and Megan, I manage to finish my work pretty quick. I think some of them had much more complicated plating up than me. So I presented my work and was so glad that the trainer said that it was Excellent! Haha! So happy! Thank you Di and Megan for your help. 

Work of the day

Week 39 Fondant Anniversary Cake

I was actually quite excited about this week's practical lesson. We had baked our fruit cake last week and this week we got to decorate it with fondant icing, royal icing and marzipan. I researched and googled for some examples that I would like to try. I decided to do something with flowers on it because I have never made flowers on a cake before. What flowers should I try? What colour cake do I want? hmm..... the flower will have to match the colour I choose for the cake.

Filling the gaps with marzipan

So after looking at so many pictures on the internet, I chose purple. Now, what purple flowers do I want to try that is not too time consuming and yet looks pretty. I don't have a lot of time to do decoration in class, so it has to be simple. I found one, it is hydrangea. It has different shades of purple and coincidently I have the cutter for the flower. Great! it is decided then.

Covering with a layer of marzipan

 We are required to do some decoration with royal icing too. So i decided to have the icing on the sides of the cake. I just hope I can do it because I haven't done much of royal icing before. 

So after covering the cake with marzipan, I covered it with another layer of light purple fondant. Then I coloured the balance of the fondant with 3 different shades of purple. Made the hydrangea flowers and let it dry on the egg carton to get the nice curve. After making about 25 of them, I thought it should be enough and maybe I should start decorating the cake with it. 

Then I was told that we have to use marzipan to make something. So I quickly started making roses. Oh! I also wanted to try to make some white lilies and so I did. Even though these flowers were not part of the design for my cake, it was still good practice to make them. 

Hydrangea flowers

Roses and white lilies

Marzipan roses

Now that the hydrangeas are dry, I can start to place them on the cake. I glued them on the cake with royal icing. Then I started with the royal icing piping on the sides. It was quite challenging to keep the hands steady. 

Almost done, now I hear we need a figurine! Oh no! What am I going to make? I don't want any figurine on my flower cake but I still had to make something. I quickly coloured the fondant green and a little with yellow and made a small dinosaur. She has big eyes and looks a little funny. hehehe..... Well I think she is quite cute and Andrew named her Dorothy. 

Small dinosaur

Hi, I am Dorothy

Yay! all done now. Royal icing done on the sides, flowers placed on the cake, figurines and marzipan roses done. Since I am not a fan of fruit cakes, I gave the cake to Rob and Julie, I know they like fruit cakes.  I just heard from them recently that they really liked the cake. I guess I better find the recipe and file it. I hope I remember the small changes to the recipe that I made. 

Purple Cake

Royal icing on the sides

Though I am very happy with the cake, I feel if I had more time, I could have made the flowers have more 3 dimension effect rather than lay flat on the cake. I think I need to practise more on royal icing piping. I read that the consistency of the royal icing as important as the piping skill. To give this cake a theme, I think it looks like an anniversary cake. So lets just say that it is.

Fondant Anniversary Cake

Week 38 Dessert Trolley

We were preparing a dessert trolley that day. A dessert trolley is where a few selection of desserts are placed on a trolley and customers get to choose what they like. We had 5 items to plate up and I wondered if I will be the last to finish because I was working alone. 

I started with the vanilla panna cotta. Panna cotta is basically cooked cream with gelatine and chilled in the fridge for hours before serving. It needed time to chill so it had to be made first. I brought my small silicon muffin moulds for the panna cotta. I wanted it to set faster so a small mould would be good. I sprayed the mould with oil and poured in the cream and chilled it. 

Vanilla Panna Cotta

Some of the components were made in advance, like the meringue cases and the frangipane tartlets. With the meringue, I filled it with chantilly cream and fresh fruits. I did 2 designs for this dessert. I prefer the one on the rectangular plate. I think it looks neater and I like it being simple. I gave the plate a little colour with the raspberry couli. Raspberry couli is made of raspberries, sugar and a little glucose. It is boiled and blended in the food processor and sieved to get a nice red sauce.

Meringue with fruits

Meringue with fruits

I drizzled chocolate over the frangipane tartlets and plated 2 on the plate with a little crushed almonds and had 2 simple lines of chocolate on the plate. 

Frangipane tartlets

I also made a fresh fruit salad in a martini glass and served with chantilly cream and raspberry couli. Seems like we didn't do much except panna cotta and cutting some fruits, well there was on more thing that we had to do. We had to bake a fruit cake for Week 39. Next week we decorate the fruit cake. 

Fruit Salad with chantilly cream and raspberry couli

Products of the day

I like the panna cotta plating up the most. It looks simple and sweet, maybe because it was on a square plate. I think I just love square plates and everything looks nicer on it. HaHa... 

Week 37 Hot Chocolate Soufflé

OK, this week there are 3 items to prepare, chocolate soufflé, chocolate almond pudding and frangipane tartlets. I organised my time a little better that day, had a workflow plan and decided to keep the plating up simple. 

I brought my own ramekins to school that day hoping that my red ramekins will make it look nicer during presentation. I changed the recipe of the chocolate soufflé a little. (Hehe... don't tell anyone) I added more chocolate and reduced the sugar. Greased the ramekins with butter and cleaned the edges before pouring the soufflé in. Then placed the ramekins in a tray in water bath and baked for 15minutes at 170˚C.

 It was so fun seeing it rise in the oven. But the weird thing was a few minutes before it was ready, the top of the soufflé started to burn a little. I mange to take it out in time before it got too dark. Quickly dusted it with some icing sugar and tah-dah! no one can see the dark top. I only brushed the plate with some chocolate to keep the plating up simple. As the soufflé was a hot dessert, there was not much time to play with presentation because it has to be served as soon as it comes out from the oven. 

Hot Chocolate Soufflé

Chocolate almond pudding was served with caramelised banana and anglaise sauce. I greased the dariole moulds with butter and dusted it with flour before pouring in the batter to bake. Again the puddings were browning too quickly in the oven. What was wrong? I finally knew what went wrong, the oven was set to grill! Oh dear! How did that happen? Well the label on the oven were mostly gone and I must have accidentally turn it to the wrong one. Silly mistake that should never happen again. Luckily it wasn't too burnt and it was still pretty moist on the inside because we had little chocolate pieces in it. 

My lucky day, I got a rectangular plate. Why so happy? Well, there are only 3 of them for the whole class of 12 students and you can only get it if you are early. Well I wasn't the early bird that day but I saw someone took all 3 of them when we only had to plate up 2 desserts, so I asked her to spare me one and she did. 

Chocolate Almond Pudding

Frangipane tartlets were not meant to be plated up that day, it was supposed to be kept in the freezer for the next week when we do dessert trolley. But I was practising my chocolate drawing on a plate and I had a few extra tartlets, so I plated 1 up for fun. I guess I must have had a bit more time than last week.

Frangipane Tartlet

Quite an easy week and I was happy I managed to do everything by myself and wasn't the last to finish. I admit that the plating up was rather simple but we only had chocolates and sugar syrup to decorate with. 

Week 36 Meringue Poached Pear

Ah... End of work experience at Westin and back to school. This week back in school is a little difficult for me. My partner decided to stop at Certificate III which means she is done with the course. She is not coming back to school. It was so different without her.

 Instead of finding a new partner, I decided to do rest of the term by myself. This is also because most in the class already have their usual partners that they work with. 

This week we made Meringue Poached Pear and Chocolate Orange Crême Brûleé. Together with these, we had to make spun sugar, chocolate filigree and tuile biscuits as garnishes. 

I had thought of plating up the meringue on a rectangular base rather than a round case. So I baked some round cases and 2 rectangular bases.

Meringue

The chocolate orange creme brulee was rather interesting. It had orange segments inside the ramekin and on top of the chocolate custard, it had a foamy créme de cacao sabayon poured on right before serving. I don't know why it is called a brûleé when there was no burning of any sugar on the top. The taste was quite nice because it wasn't too sweet. 

Chocolate & Orange Crême Brûleé

I made some templates for the tuile biscuits with a thick paper. I made some leaves, bees , shapes, forks and spoons. It was fun shaping the biscuit when it came out from the oven. I placed the biscuits on a rolling pin that was sprayed with oil to make sure it doesn't stick. It gave it a nice curl when it cools down. 

Tuile biscuits

My spun sugar was not good. I was disappointed that it was not as good as the last time I made it. Anyway I made some balls and some just a ring. Then I made some chocolate shapes, I wanted to make a cylinder shape chocolate with horizontal lines but I can't seem to join the ends and keep it in place. In the end, I made a tear drop shape case. 

Both the dessert didn't look like how I imagined or how I planned it to be. First I couldn't get the small rectangular plate and then suddenly I was given a huge square plate to plate up a small crême brûleé. So since nothing came out how I wanted it to, I had to quickly see how I can plate it up with what I had. 

I placed the spun sugar ring on the ramekin with a tuile biscuit sitting inside it. Had the chocolate tear drop case at the other corner filled with fresh fruits. Then I wanted to have a light dust of cocoa powder on one corner but because the sieve had too big holes, the cocoa just came out looking messy. So I placed a small fork shape tuile biscuit on top of it. 
Sigh... not happy with the presentation of this dessert. 

Chocolate & Orange Crême Brûleé 

For the meringue poached pear, I initially wanted to plate up with the rectangular meringue and top it with the sliced poached pear. But the chantilly cream was too soft to hold the pear and the pear was too slippery to sit on the cream. So I ended up using the round case and filled it with chantilly cream and placed the pear on it. It looked dull and plain because everything was white and yellowy. I tried to inject some colour in by placing some strawberries and orange segments on the side and had some chantilly cream and tuile biscuits as part of the decoration. Hoping that it will make it less ugly. 

Meringue Poached Pear

Overall it was not a good day for me. I didn't like both the desserts that I made. I think I was a little nervous when I saw how fast everyone was and I only had myself to do all the work.  I wonder how I am going to go through the rest of the term working by myself. I miss working with my partner. Hopefully next week I will be more organised and work better alone. 

Westin Week 3

Last week at Westin, I had a lot more to do this week. I stayed back a few more hours to help the chef. She was very nice and entrusted me with a lot of tasks that last week. 

I was lucky because it was the end of Autumn season for high tea, so I had the opportunity to see the new menu for the Winter high tea. It was the transition from Autumn to Winter where the cookies changed from autumn leaves to winter snowflakes.

 I started rolling out the pastry and cutting out the snowflake cookies. I made at least 300 pieces of the snowflake cookies and then baked them 6 trays at a time for about 15minutes. Then left it to cool for the next stage of covering the fondant.

Snowflake cookies

Baked snowflake cookies

Marble bench top 

I had to make about 100 pieces of the autumn leaf cookies to cater for the last days of autumn. I had fun mixing the red and yellow fondant to make a marble effect and got a very nice autumn colour. Placed the fondant on the baked cookie with maple syrup as the glue. Then piped some green icing sugar and dusted it with coloured sugar. 

Mixing colours

Autumn leaves

More autumn leaves

I made a tray of banana and pecan muffins, blueberry and lemon muffins , raspberry and white chocolate muffins. Then I sandwiched about 40 croissants with ham, cheese and tomatoes. Another 60 lemon meringue pie shots were made and kept in the fridge. Next was dipping the macarons in chocolate and topped with hazelnuts. 

Muffins

Croissants

Preparing Lemon Meringue Pie Shots

Lemon Meringue Pie Shots

Chocolate hazelnut macarons

More fruit tarts

Heavy duty stand mixer

Now I get to continue with the snowflake cookies. Since it is a snowflake, the fondant was just plain white and the icing was a very sweet light sky blue. Then a edible pearl was placed in the centre and some silver sparkling dust was sprinkled over it. It looks so pretty and it really represents winter. 

Snowflake Cookies

Some of the proposed winter high tea items for the menu

This is the final look of the Winter high tea. There are scones on the top tray with whipped cream and raspberry jam. The centre tray has the savoury snacks and the last tray has the cookies, strawberry shortcakes, puddings, chocolates and a chestnut brûlée. 

Wow! I am so happy with my experience at Westin. Even though it was really tiring at the end of the shift, I learnt a lot there. I did so many desserts in huge quantities, seen how real kitchen operates, use some of the heavy duty equipment and experienced the busy schedule in a hotel kitchen. Thank you chef for sharing your knowledge and for giving me so much opportunities to learn. 

Winter High Tea