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.
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