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 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!