Lesson 15: Traditional Christmas Log Cake

Even though it is not christmas yet, our menu today is to make the traditional christmas log cake. This is also part of the meringue lessons that we have been doing for the past few practicals. Again, we are using the meringue sponge. This meringue has very little sugar and more egg white, so we had to be very careful not to over-beat the egg white as less sugar makes the meringue less stable.

The log cake basically consists of sponge being rolled up like a swiss roll with pastry cream in between (coffee pastry cream this time). The sponge is called viennese biscuits. I totally love it! And then we decorate the log cake with butter cream! We also moisten the sponge cake with imbibing syrup which is sugar syrup with rum. I think this does make a lot of difference (although it is just sugar syrup) as it keeps the cake moist and yummy!

This is definitely my favorite cake to date! Love how the sponge is so moist and not too sweet, and the butter cream (when cold) is really nice! However, Chef's comment on my butter cream was that it was in the brink of splitting, so I had to be careful to whisk the cream more or cool it down a bit more next time.

Chef Geraldine's Log Cake with real santa!

Li Lian's log cake with mushrooms and christmas tree!

Lesson 14: Dacquoius

Finally, we are done with choux pastry! Now comes a new phase, which is getting to know the meringue. We learnt about the Italian Meringue which is the 'hot meringue' and the french 'cool' meringue and the swiss meringue which is the toughest meringue of them all! Basically the difference in meringues is the ratio of egg whites and sugar. The higher the sugar content, the more stable the meringues are.

The first item we made was the dacquoius. When Chef Geraldine was making the sponge, I really couldn't imagine how by just using egg white, we can make sponges for cakes! Basically dacquoius is two pieces of sponge and in between that is the praline butter cream, which we have to pipe in. The tough part about this is, as it is our first time beating the meringue (by hand!), we have to make sure we put the sugar in three stages and in the right stage of the meringue. My meringue came out ok.. phew that was a relief! and i really love the soft and fluffy sponge! (Well I really did not know that egg white could make such soft sponges!) The cake was so yummy! When you bite into the sponge you can taste the cream and also the almond sticks inside. Totally Heavenly!

Dacquoius by Chef Geraldine

Dacquoius by Li Lian

Lesson 13: Chocolate Eclairs

This morning during demo class, we got a surprise from Chef Geraldine! She first asked if we were all familiar with making choux pastry already, and when most answered yes, she announced that the next practical will be our 'white exam'! White exam in Le Cordon Bleu is like a mock exam, to make us feel how the 'real' exam will be like. I would say all of us got a bit nervous though, even though we have all done the choux pastry for the past few practicals, it is still nerve wrecking!

For the white exam, the equipments were already prepared for us. However, they rearranged our position in class so that we will feel 'uncomfortable' with the new setting. Initially I was a bit nervous but after a while it was just like another practical class, except that everyone was so quietly doing their own eclairs instead of chatting or discussing what is the next step with each other. My eclairs, was, as you will see from the picture later, like a banana fritter! Or goring pisang because it was too big! The reason why my piping as so big was for the previous 2 choux pastry, i realized that my piping was too small, and so for this time I decided to make it bigger! So it turned out bigger than expected. We then pumped chocolate pastry cream (yummy yummy!) into the eclair and finally topped it up with chocolate fondant! I think the double dose of chocolate fondant and chocolate pastry cream was a bit too sweet though, would be just nice i think without the fondant. But of course the fondant makes it look nice and smooth on the surface.

Chocolate Eclairs by Chef Geraldine

Chocolate Eclairs by Li Lian

Lesson 12: Paris Brest

Guess what! We only had to make one thing for the practical class today! But of course the school is not gonna let us off so easily! What we had to make was Paris Brest! So here comes the history of Paris Brest. Chef Am, who replaced Chef Geraldine today as she was doing the advanced chocolate workshop, told us that this was to commemorate the cycling race from Paris to Brest in France every year. Hence, the shape of this pastry looks like the shape of a wheel.

This is also another shape of choux pastry and it is totally nerve-wrecking to do this! But am glad we all pulled it through though at the end. Firstly, we need to pipe the choux pastry on two separate circles. One was called the core of the circle, and the second was the Brest. What the Brest consisted of was three circles, one inside, one outside, and one on top and in between the two first circles. Sounds confusing isn't it! We were all pretty confused too until we really did it in practical class.

But one thing I liked about this pastry was the cream. As we added the praline, which is like a jam made out of grinding nuts and sugar after cooking them, it made the cream smell really nice!But Chef Am's comment was that I could have beaten the cream more so that it is lighter and more uniform piping.

Here is how the Paris Brest looks like! What a sigh of relief after finishing it! Some people who tasted it at my home said it tasted like ice cream! Panya gave a 7.0 for this. I didn't think he liked the cream that much.

Paris Brest by Chef Am

Paris Brest by Li Lian

Lesson 11 - Beard Papa aka Choux Pastries!

Finally! No more Puff Pastry! But we will be starting three lessons of choux pastry starting today, which is pretty exciting, as I am always wondering how they make the beard papa or bake a wish cream puffs. It is not that easy to make the choux pastry I would say, to ensure that it has the right consistency. We had to mix the dough, roast it and then slowly add in eggs to make it to a certain consistency.

We were all very very careful when making the choux pastry so that we do not add too much eggs else it will be too runny! My choux pastry itself came out ok, but the next trick is the piping! We had to draw circles on the baking paper and then pipe on them. We used the same mix for the choux chantilly, which is choux with cream in between, and for the smaller ones, we just piped it on smaller circles without cream but with almond and nib sugars.

Chef Guil commented that my choux pastry was a bit too small. And for the small ones, the sizes were not even. Really need to improve on the piping!! Hopefully there will be better piping for the next class!

Chefs Choux Chantilly

Smaller Choux by the Chef

Li Lian's Choux Pastry and Small Choux Pastries

Panya's rating for the Choux Pastry was 7.5 (thanks to the cream) and the smaller choux was 7.0!

Lesson 10: Mille-Feuille and Flan Pattisier

Finally, we have come to the final lesson of puff pastry! I think by this lesson I was a bit sick of puff pastry already and I totally did not eat the products that I made today! But am glad its over and we learnt all the foldings and whats nots! Chef said that next will be beard papa lessons! Or Choux Pastries! So am excited about that!

For this class, we first had to make the Flan, which what I think is like a giant portuguese egg tart! After that, we made the Mille-Feuille which was basically a sandwich of puff pastry with raspberry jam in between.

For the flan, the highlight was the pastry cream (the egg filling of the tart). We bake the tart base first, and then proceeded with the very hot pastry cream filling before baking it again together with the pastry cream. The important thing about this tart is that we have to fill the pastry cream when it is very very hot so that the pastry cream does not get hardened. For the tart base, we used the leftover puff pastry from the previous lesson. The tart was ok overall I would say, but the sides of the tart was not even. A big portion of the tart shrunk a lot during baking. Chef Am told us that this was ok as we did not have much time to let the tart base rest before baking, hence the shrinking.

Here is how my giant egg tart looks like in comparison to Chef Geraldine's! Giving me an inspiration to make traditional chinese egg tarts though, which i think i will like better than this one!

Flan by Chef Geraldine

Flan by Li Lian

Next, we moved on to do the Mille-Feuille which is what i call the sandwich puff pastry. The most tricky thing to doing this is cutting the Mille-Feuille into perfect 8 x 8 cm squares! I don't think I did a good job though as the crusts kept coming out when I was cutting this. Here are my not-so-perfect squares.

Mille-Feuille by Chef Geraldine (Perfect Squares)

Not so perfect Mille-Feuille by Li Lian

No ratings from Panya for this as I have distributed all of them before Panya got a chance to eat it! He did manage to eat a bit of the Mille-Feuille though, but I will skip the ratings for this round!

Lesson 9: Apple Turnovers

Finally it's Friday! So glad that today I only have one recipe sheet to bring in. And true enough, the class was quite relaxing. I had food poisoning two days back, so my tummy was still feeling a bit unstable. But good thing the class really took my mind off that!

So we had Chef Marc today finally! And the interesting thing about Chef Marc is he always suggests an alternative way of doing things from our demo chef Geraldine. He told us that it is good to learn two ways to do things! He is also as usual very particular about neatness and cleanliness, which i like.

Today we also didn't have to start another puff pastry, but just continuing with puff pastry that we did yesterday. We also had to cut out the shapes for the chaussons (or apple turnovers), which was a bit hard for my dough as it was very soft. But good thing it still came out ok! As usual, I wish it was curry inside! Think we have done too much apples already in this course!

Apple Turnovers by Chef Geraldine

Apple Turnover by Li Lian

Lesson 8: Palmiers and Puff Pastry Sandwich with Raspberry

For today, we used the puff pastry that we have prepared the day before to do the palters and puff pastry with raspberry (I forgot the french name for this). It was another tiring lesson as we had so many things to do! And this is the first lesson that we had to alter our practical workflow according to how our pastries are. Each pastry needs about 5 turns so if you have not done up to the third turn on this lesson, you will have to do more turns! So it was quite a frantic rush I would say, working non-stop for the whole three hours of practical class. We had Chef Geraldine today, which was very very good as I really learnt a lot from her. Remember I mentioned that my pastries were a bit non-rectangular? She taught us ways to 'fix' this and i think it looks so much better now! Although I still have to improve on the ways to incorporate the butter but i think it is getting better.

We also had to start a new puff pastry today, and using the 'french' method instead of the normal method to incorporate the butter. I was very very careful as I really want to make a nice pastry this time. And it is definitely a great improvement from the previous pastry.

For the pastry dough that we made in the previous lesson, we used it to do palters, or they call it butterflies. Those you can normally buy it in stores. Didn't know it is so hard to make! (If you start from making the dough). And because for palmiers and the puff pastry with raspberry jam, we need to trim off some parts of the pastry, I managed to trim off quite a bit of the bad parts of my pastry, and I would say, the pastry turned out quite well and even! So am quite happy with this lesson!

So after the lesson today, me and Aileen decided to talk to the student services about the number of people in the class, as we are feeling quite squeezy. Also, we heard that there were only 8 people in another Basic Pastry Group and less than 12 in other groups. Just wanted to raise our concern since this will be for the rest of the semester. The office's reply was that for the 8 people class, the class was small, and maximum that it can fit is 7 people but they squeezed in 8. For the rest, she said that the class size has been fixed as they need to order ingredients for different classes so they can't change us now. She also mentioned that the maximum the class can fit is 14, and we only have 13. Well, I guess if we wanted to keep talking we could raise concerns about how come they didn't put some people in classes with lesser people, but I personally thought it was quite pointless. So we just have to make do then and probably redistribute the position in the class a bit. But one thing I found out was that there are different standards, as in some people get to choose their classes and some didn't. Whoever paid in advance, they got to choose the class. And those that didn't pay before the dateline didn't get to choose. Something that I find can be improved as it has inconvenienced quite a lot of people. I was lucky to get to choose though. And it does look like the school is taking in a lot of students, probably up to the brim already. Well, I do hope that they will improve on this as they are raising the fees again and if students do not feel comfortable in the class the 'standard' of the school might drop.

For the butterflies, panya gave me a very high rating of 8.0! and 8.5 for the one with raspberry! I personally like this very much too!

Palmiers by Chef Geraldine

Palmiers by Li Lian

Puff with Raspberry by Chef Geraldine

Puff with Raspberry By Li Lian

Lesson 7: Croissants (Plain and Chocolate)

This week is the start of a very tough week! The tough rolling week! We are doing croissants and puff pastry and because we need to incorporate butter into the dough to 'moisten' the dough, or 'Detrempe' as the French call it, we need to do a lot of rolling and turning. So we already did the croissant dough the last week, so today was just to cut the right triangle sizes and then roll the croissants accordingly. And in between that, we have to start preparing two puff pastries for the next lessons. This means that we all do double portions of puff pastry dough and leave it for the next lessons.

Doing puff pastry was quite tough for me, as I have no idea why I can't roll it to perfect rectangles. So at the end my puff parties have an odd round shape on the top. Chef Am said it was ok so I just continued to do it. Let's see if those pastries turn out well. Was totally drained out after this class as we did so many rollings and turnings. Went back and slept right away!

And last week, our class size was increased from 12 to 13. And our new classmate's name was Khun Chef. Initially i thought that he was the teaching chef, but turns out his name is Chef! Which was funny. During practical class, we all stand along the marble tables and normally two people occupy one 'block' of marble. However, after an additional classmate, me, Aileen and chef had to share the same block, which was a bit squeeze for us. Even Sohny next to me was slightly affected as I crossed my border to use some of her space as well. A bit uncomfortable but nevertheless, we still managed to roll!

Panya only had the croissants the next day and he didn't like it as it was a bit hard he said. So rating was only 6.5. Chef Am mentioned that if we had more time for the croissants to proof it would be softer, so maybe I could try that at home!

Basket of Croissants by Chef Geraldine

Croissants by Li Lian