9 months in pastry world

Okay so where do I start?

Approximately 8 months ago, I started my pastry course at Le Cordon Bleu and now almost at the end of my Pastry course, I find myself writing, wanting to share about my experience in school. I'm a novice. I'm not calling myself an expert after only 9 months in school -- because there are just too much things to learn in pastry world and it takes a long time to be an expert or to be a chef.

So, my plan for going to culinary school was to learn how to cook. To be precise, to take Cuisine course. Learn the basic stuffs: how to julienne carrots to.. to be able to make boeuf bourguignon. Instead I chickened out when I know that I have to handle seafood in cuisine. Killing the lobsters and slicing the fish. Yes, not a big fan of seafood.

Even if I don't like to eat much sweets, I find myself enrolled in Pastry. I thought to myself how hard can pastry be? It must be easier and less pressure than cuisine? But no, I did GET the pressure in basic class, because you just feel self conscious about doing things right, whether it is good enough, whether it tastes right, and looks nice. And the most important is that whether you can finish on time.

In basic, I learned about sponge cake, different type of creams and viennoiserie.
Then I find myself moving up to intermediate level and learning different kind of cakes that are mostly mousse. Also tempering, decorating and creating chocolate box also making plated dessert for each lesson. I find myself having the most pressure, problem, troubles (you name it) when I'm in intermediate level. Struggling with time. To get everything done on time.
Now, on my last level, I find this session is the most relaxing term. Have the least class, least cakes to learn and make. But I learn something new too. Which is pulled sugar. Making sugar sculpture as part of my exam. I am not fully satisfied with what I've learnt in superior level. I'd like to see more but maybe because I expect too much out of this. But hey, who doesn't expect a lot when you already pay so much?

Sadly to say, my whole experience in Le Cordon Bleu Ottawa has just been so-so. Do I learn a lot? Yes. Does it worth the $$$? I'm not sure. I'm not saying that this school is bad, it's good, but maybe the one in Ottawa should step it up a little? I've read stories about people going to LCB in Paris, how they got to see 5 to 7 different styles of decoration of ONE cake. Within 2.5 hours. While the one in Ottawa, we saw only 1 cake or maybe sometimes 2 different cakes in 2.5 hours.

Here are some of the stuffs I've done in Superior level.

1. different flavors of macarons.
2. nid d'abeille
3. tarte aux abricots et crème brûlée à la pistache, strussel aux pistaches
4. entremets aux fruits rouges, crème mousseuse au chocolat blanc
5. chocolate showpiece

Macarons

I've read a lot of blogs about tips and tricks to make the right macarons. I never really try making one because I'm lazy and thinks that it's going to be a hassle.

Well this week I have changed my mind and decided to make macaron shells just for the heck of it. I followed What's for lunch,honey? recipe. Pretty simple and clear.

I struggle when piping the macarons to the right size due to my batter was liquid. I'm guessing that I didn't whip the egg whites to the right consistency or I fold too much the egg whites to the dry ingredients.

For the filling, I used my leftover hazelnut praliné cream for millefeuille praliné. I know that the color of my macarons doesn't really resemble the color of praliné, but pink is a nice color for macarons.

H - Hot, Humid & Hectic

The weather in here has been extremely hot and humid. Due to the super hot weather, lesson 5 for chocolate box had been changed to "Opera" cake. Opera cake was originally placed for lesson 16. I wasn't really looking forward to make Opera cake because I hate to make the borders. In Intermediate class, we don't really have the choice because we'll be doing a lot of chocolate. Be it decorations, piping and etc.

Yesterday, we've attended the demo class and it always looked easy when the Chefs are the one making the cake. The hardest thing about making Opera cake is the finishing. We have to pipe chocolate borders the classic way. All the pastry chefs are very strict about this particular cake because it's so French and they're French so they want us to do it the French way.

Today for practical class we have different chef from demo so they both have different techniques. In the demo, it was made clear that we're not supposed to put so much syrup on joconde biscuit (it will be too wet and soft) but in practical the chef kept yelling to all the students that we have to put more syrup. The more, the better and if you actually finished 200ml syrup for 3 layers of joconde, it's good.

I managed to finish baking joconde, preparing syrup, making ganache,french buttercream and glaze within 1h 15mins. And I spent the next 45 mins to assemble my cake. For the final layer before glazing, I have to chill the cake in the fridge for 15-20 mins so that the buttercream is firm and it will be easy for me to mask with the glaze. For the glaze we used glazing paste & oil.

While waiting for the cake to cool down in the fridge, I spent so much time on piping the border on parchment paper before actually doing it on the cake.

So the verdict for my opera cake is good. Needs more syrup on the joconde and more buttercream on the first layer. And the worse comment I got is for the Opera writing on the cake. It's too big, and far from left and.. it's just wrong.

Better luck next time.

Chef's version of Opera Cake


My version of Opera cake


And couple more pictures form Lesson 4: Fraisier

Chef's version of Fraisier cake for Plated Dessert

Chef's version of Modern Fraisier Cake

Chef's version of Traditional Fraisier Cake

Plated Dessert - Fraisier

Lesson 1: Tartes

Two weeks ago was my exam for basic pastry and today I'm starting my first practical class for intermediate class. In intermediate demo class, the Chef introduced us things about chocolate from ingredients to tempering chocolate. In this level, we'll be handling a lot of chocolate for decorations, it will be the most challenging part because in basic we learn easy decoration and we didn't have to temper chocolates.

Today is the first day of practical class. Finally, after 11 weeks of pain of using balloon whisk, and whisking everything by hand, we get to use mixer. Now that we get to use mixer, we have to move even faster. It's the first time to bake 2 tarts in 2h 30 mins.



We're making passion fruit-raspberry tart and blackcurrant-strawberry tart. Both of the tart shells are using pâte sablée. Pâte Sablée is fragile and easy to break. It is very similar to pâte sucrée. As you can notice on my strawberry tart, my tart shell is cracking because when I do my fonçage, the dough was too soft after I rolled it. The moment the dough turns soft, it has to be chilled.

For the passion-fruit tart we use passion fruit cream as the filling and raspberry coulis that's frozen and mixed with gelatin to get jelly consistency. As for the blackcurrant strawberry tart, we use blackcurrants, almond cream and pastry cream as the filling. Both tarts are garnished with fresh fruits.

My version strawberry tart & passionfruit tart




Chef's version of Strawberry Tart & Passionfruit Tart

lesson 12 & 13 : bûche de noël & miroir au cassis

So, I haven't been updating what I did last week. I am experiencing Christmas in May because Bûche de Noël was the cake that I have to make last Thursday in class. The only thing I'm afraid of was making the sponge cake and roll it. Given the fact that I'm very clumsy, it's highly possible to mess up while rolling the cake. I know, how hard can rolling a sponge cake be right? Hey, it's the first time and I don't have enough confidence in myself.. at times.

Anyways, making this cake was fun. I made a few decorations, not too much because for me the log was fairly small and I don't like over-crowded cake. I kept it simple with leaves, a small gift box, candy canes, swiss-meringue mushroom and chocolate christmas tree.



As for the beginning of this week, I was taught about mousse cake. Miroir au citron and miroir au cassis. The chef did both at the demo class, and I only have to make one which was Miroir au Cassis. I'm not a big fan of both, it's sour but yes it's good!

It is very challenging for me to make the mousse because everything has to be in order. Step by step procedure. From boiling blackcurrants to whisking Italian Meringue manually by hand. The most annoying part was when I have to fold the gelatin blackcurrants puree mixture to Italian Meringue. The temperature has to be exactly 25°C. So I have to heat it again on a double boiler, and when it reaches to 24°C, I couldn't care less, I just fold everything together : blackcurrant puree, italian meringue and whipping cream.

I suck in piping so decoration on my mousse isn't really nice.

lesson 11: succès

Today I spent 7 hours in school for demo and practical class. Class ends at 10pm, late but I don't mind. It will be really tiring if the next day I have to go to class at 8.15am, but hey, since it's at 3.30pm, whooo cares? :)

In demo class, Chef H made 3 cakes. They're the succès, progrès and gâteau russe aux noix. Since I'm not really a big fan of chocolate, I would say that the gâteau russe was probably the best because it's with coffee buttercream! In practical class, we're only going to make succès cake. I felt so nervous with this recipe because I will have to do piping with chocolate and usually we can't fix chocolate, unlike piping with buttercream or chantilly.

So, we have to start by baking succès base which is dacquoise. Then prepare the buttercream to be sandwiched in between layers of succès. After that we pipe the cream and layered the cake and dust loads of icing sugar on the top and let it chill while preparing marzipan for decoration. We have to make pockets where you can put the hazelnut in the center and make some leaves. Then we have to use the torch and burn the sides of the square "thing" (I don't know how to call this) where you have to pipe the succès on it. And as you can see on the pictures, I actually burnt the sides of the "thing" because the torch was crazy, the flames just suddenly went so big. Big enough to burn my marzipan. We were given some time to practice piping with chocolate before we finally pipe it on the marzipan, but since I was (always) the last to finish, I don't have much time to practice.

To me, my piping was okay (really!). I mean, I can totally read the word succès also it's not messy. I made some decoration on the right because I can't leave the space empty. I've decided to decorate it to make it less obvious to the chef. In any case, Chef H thinks that the letters should be bigger for this size of cake, it should fill up the whole square thing and the leaves for decoration should be bended to make it look alive (alive; he did actually said that).

To sum up everything, I am very happy with how my succès turned out.

lesson 10: petit fours secs

Out of all the lessons I've learned til today, this lesson by far is the easiest one to make. With very little ingredients and very short "how-to", I was so looking forward to this lesson practical class. Chef Christian told us that there are more than 200 recipes of petit fours but we're only going to learn the basic dry petit fours first. In practical class, we're making madeleines, palets de dames and cigarettes.

While like usual everybody in my class go crazy the moment they stepped into the practical class, I was really affected with this. I felt the rush because everybody's so tense and just wanna be sooo fast as if they're doing a competition like Iron Chef or something. One thing I learnt in pastry school, do not rush! But of course you don't take your own sweet time like spending 10-15 minutes to gather all the ingredients for one recipe. The faster, the better but no rush, really. Once, I ran in the class and the chef told me not to run, it's not a competition.

Okay so, I find myself rushing as well that day because I was next to this girl whom always, always freak out and wants to be quick and then ended up realizing all her batter for 3 recipes were missing in icing sugar. That's exactly what happened to me although I was saved at the beginning. I forgot to add sugar for my madeleines and I have to make it again. Can you believe it? The first 10 minutes I was in class, I already made mistake! Because of that, I tried to take it slow and finally do things right. It doesn't matter if I'm the last to finish in class, what matter the most is that I get things done correctly.

I start with making the madeleines mixture and set it aside in the fridge until it's time to bake it (which is until everything else's baked). I spent pretty much 10-15 minutes on each recipe to make the batter. The easiest one to do was the palets de dames. Just have to make sure that the mixture's thick and not watery cos we need to pipe it before we bake. The girl next to me screwed up her palets de dames. When it was in the oven, all of them just stick to each other and she got a huge cookies with the shape and size of a baking tray. She was disappointed and shocked. The chef was shocked too and told her that she probably put too much butter that's why it melts. I was so worried that my cookies will turned out the same way, although I have to admit that some of my cookies were sticking to each other like siamese in the oven but they really didn't create the shape of baking tray.

I wasted so much time to make the cigarettes. It took me a really long time to get a perfect round shape on my baking tray also to fold it. My cigarettes came out small because I used a small round template. And as for my madeleines, it's darker than usual madeleines and it's shiny/glossy (I don't know why it's like that).

The chef's verdict for my petit four secs: everything's good except that my madeleines were airy in the middle, because I over-whisk the eggs and sugar.

lesson 9: pâte à choux

According to Chef H, baking pate choux needs patience. He was telling us last Friday on our demo class that previous semester, there was one student baking pate choux for her final exam and she failed because she was too impatient, turned the tray of baking choux too fast. He makes sure that we did not make the same mistake in class.
Once pate choux is placed inside the oven, the oven must not be open for at least 18-20 minutes until the choux rise and color is golden brown. Then, we will have to turned the tray and lower down the heat and bake it for another 2 minutes.

Everybody in my class were so afraid about this practical class, not because of the pate choux but we're going to cook fondant to the right temperature to glaze our eclairs and religieuses. We will be handling more fondant when we're in superior class.

There are 4 steps need to be done to make pate choux.
1. Making the choux itself.
2. The filling which is pastry cream.
3. Chantilly cream for the swan's filling.
4. Buttercream -- we didn't have to do this in class, it's provided by the chef.

We were given 1 hour on baking the choux and 1h 30m to make pastry cream, chantilly, and fondant. We used commercial fondant, and just have to cook it to the right consistency. Need to remind you that since we're in basic we are not allowed to use any electric mixer, so we have to whisk the Chantilly cream by hand. Well it's not so bad considering we have done this on the first day of our practical class, which is to whisk egg whites etc for sponge cake and ladyfingers.

I honestly didn't find it hard to make the batter for pate choux, the piping though is a pain because I'm so bad with piping. Especially for this lesson, the chef wants the eclairs to be the same size and even. Also the religieuses to be an exact size of what he scored on our greased baking tray. As predicted, everybody got different sizes of religieuses including mine but eclairs turned out to be good. Surprisingly, I didn't screw up my pate choux. I cooked the fondant to the right temperature but I messed up the glazing. You'll understand why when you see the eclairs.

Swans

lesson 8: black forest cake

Last week we were introduced to make 3 basic cakes: black forest, moka, and mexican. It was the first time we make cake in class and it happened to be black forest. This is the time to practice the masking and decorating black forest cake as well as learning how to temper with chocolate. 3 hours were definitely not enough for me to be done in time. I took a lot of time on masking the cake with Chantilly cream all over it. I sort of screwed up because I didn't cut the cardboard to a nice round shape that was placed on the bottom of the cake before masking. I was the last to finish masking my cake and I was really in a rush to pipe the rosettes and all of them were piped too close to each other and not on the edge which made my cake looked smaller.

I started off with baking genoise cake, was supposed to add butter on it but because my batter was deflating as I fold it with flour, the chef asked me to forgo the butter. Then as the cake was baking, I went on to make chocolate shavings. It was fun to learn that! And move on to chantilly cream and draining the cherries.

The chef's verdict about my end product was that it's not too bad for a first-timer. Definitely need to practice on masking the cake properly, and slicing the cake to 3 layers in an even way.

This week I have decided to make another black forest and again I forgo the butter, although on exam day if I get to make this cake, I have to add the butter. I realized that having a big rubber spatula helps a lot faster to mix the flour on the whipped eggs, therefore it won't deflates because in practical class, my spatula was smaller and I took a longer time to fold the flour. Anyways, this time around the cake turned out very spongey and dense. And I made a mistake by not letting the cake to cool down in room temperature after I took it out from oven. I immediately placed it on cooling rack with parchment paper above it and store the cake in the fridge to cool down faster. In the end, I got my genoise sticked on the parchment paper and the bottom of the cake became sticky. It can be fixed by slicing the bottom with bread knife to be even. Oh, I did not put enough syrup on each layer hence the dry texture. Also once again, I didn't slice the genoise into 3 layers nicely. It was bad. I didn't know that it would be hard to slice layers on a cake!?

By the way, I didn't put up the recipe for what I've done in school because we basically have to write our own "how-to" in class while watching the chef doing the demo. So my recipes are somewhat messy and unorganized and it's possible I missed some steps because I was daydreaming in class or wasn't really in the zone. I just didn't want to put up my unreliable recipes and screw up somebody else's cake although I can put up the ingredients if anyone's interested.
Just let me know. It doesn't hurt to ask :)


my first attempt of black forest in practical class




my second attempt of black forest at home




demo class and cakes made by the chef

signatures by lcb

All students are invited to attend luncheon at the school bistro free of charge. We were scheduled in a group of 4-5 people. Today is my turn. I didn't get the chance to take pictures of the place though, might be a little awkward since everyone there were eating and.. they're mostly all old people (no offense, really).

For the starter, they offer curried chicken soup with bell peppers or pike “quenelle” in Nantua sauce, I go for the chicken soup cos I'm not a big fan of seafood. Soup was good beyond my expectation. I even lost for words to describe how good it was. It's a clear soup, but tastes so thick and creamy at the same time, has a lot of flavor in it.

Three of my classmates were taking the pike and it looks like dumpling. They all agreed that it was good as well. It's too bad that I didn't take pictures of both starter.

Moving on to the main course there are choices between red snapper filet or
seared hanger steak. Honestly, I have never tried hanger steak and curious of what it will be like. It was served with spinach and squash spaghetti. The steak was medium rare, so tender and the sauce was really good. I'm not sure what sauce it is.

Last but not least was the dessert. It made my day. Really! It was so good that I just want more. I find the 3 course lunch is reasonably priced. I don't want to sound bias or anything because I'm a student here, but I'll tell the truth when it's really good or bad. Definitely am coming back to this restaurant!

seared hanger steak with wilted spinach and spaghetti squash


red snapper filet in a light vegetable broth, thyme-infused potatoes, carrots and onions


yogurt panna cotta served with crumble and red fruit compote

Basic Pastry Week 4

Entering my fourth week in school! I feel so stressed out even though it's not too long ago that I just start my class. I am now on lesson 7, where we learn how to make apple turnover and pithivier. Last week, I did some braided brioche, croissants, pain aux raisins, etc. Turns out to be alright(I didn't take pictures of it), the croissants ended up to be a mini-me size, I'm not sure why I always get a mini size of everything. Just like my apple turnover today. The same comments always came out of the chef's mouth.. "your dough is too thin" or "you don't follow the steps correctly".
I feel slightly disappointed because of today's result. I don't worry about apple turnover, but the pithivier that drives me crazy. I really messed up big time in class!

Anyway, I'm glad that puff pastry won't be in the final exam!