muffins and quick-breads (breakfast station part 1)

After I left Cakes and Tarts, I went to Breakfast Station, which was fun because it was less ambiguous. Not that freedom/ambiguity isn't fun, but being a pastry beginner, it's more important/enjoyable to me to master a set of tasks before I think up things on my own. Breakfast Station was definitely a task list type of station. Everyday there was a set amount of items (and quantities) we had to turn out.

We had to do three batches of muffins: bran, lemon poppyseed, and another one of our choice (often blueberry because that was what customers requested). Here was a cranberry white chocolate one I did:



Then we had to slice one loaf each of pumpkin raisin bread and banana bread (usually made in a big batch once a week and frozen, then put into the walk-in to thaw the day before).



Something about using gigantic utensils makes everything feel so hard-core.

cake on me

Over the course of my time in Cakes and Tarts, we got better at making and decorating cakes.



This was a devil's food cake Sydney put together.



This was a chocolate caramel cake slice I decorated - I really love the saucing part, it's almost like painting.



These were mini carrot cakes I put together, with cream cheese frosting and candied carrot shreds on top. (Candy-ing was quite an easy process, just simple syrup and the carrot shreds in a pan over heat!)



Once in a while though, Chef would still come by and show us a trick or two on how to disguise one of our "homelier" cakes. Here he is coating the cake sides with chocolate crumbs.



And here he is showing us how to mirror glaze the mousse cake that was my crowning achievement, made on my last day in Cakes and Tarts.



It practically took the entire team to cut the darn thing, it had just come out of the freezer (required for the mousse to set, another reason why mousse is so effort-intensive!). There was so much mousse I made three cakes, which the team was able to use after I left.

Yay cake!

the unbearable lightness of meringue

On an earlier post I mentioned whipping heavy cream in order to make whipped cream. Heavy cream, as you may know, is liquid. Whipped cream, on the other hand, is very much not. The difference between the two is all in the whipping, or the incorporation of air, something I still can't think of as anything but a miracle.



Meringue is another one of these miracles. Whipped egg whites and sugar, basically. My first experience was on Pi Day, when I made lemon meringue pie at the behest of my roommate Daniel. I was so enthused at this first encounter that I literally whipped the egg whites and powdered sugar into meringue with my bare hands, which was a great arm-workout. (Turns out this type of meringue is French meringue.)



Luckily I haven't tried this in the bake shop. With the sizes of the batches we do, my arm would just as well fall off.

As it turns out, I've made Italian meringue (for Italian buttercream) when I poured sugar syrup (boiled to 240F, or the softball stage, more on that eventually) into the whipping egg whites.


(It being buttercream, butter was later added, then whipped cream - who would've thought?!)

And as it turns out, I've also made Swiss meringue (for mousse cake, my crowning achievement in Cakes and Tarts because it's complicated and requires the use of gelatin and Chef said I wouldn't have time to make it but I did anyway). The sugar is incorporated into the egg whites with the use of a double boiler/bain marie (so basically they were mixed in a bowl that was being heated by the steam from boiling water). And then whipped by a KitchenAid mixer until they achieved stiff peaks (the longer you whip, the stiffer the peaks, although I think it's possible to overwhip).



Such a beautiful miracle. Because just think, that was once just egg whites and sugar.

crème, cream, and everything in between

Also on our first day we made vanilla cream pie. Sydney made the crust while I made the cream - which involved using an actual vanilla bean (so much nicer than the extract stuff!). The recipe came straight out of our pastry textbook, which is literally our bible, since we need it for everything we do.



After I made the vanilla cream I had to comb it through a sieve, which was challenging because the cream was thick and didn't want to go through. Despite the difficulty I was extremely excited about the task because it was something I had never done before or imagined doing.

And the thing about the pastry side is that it's a bastion of specialized knowledge, and part of why I came to culinary school was to be privy to that. Most everybody will cook at one point or another, or bake cookies, but pastry is a whole other realm. And even though I don't particularly like pastries or sweets, I am really taking to the process of making them because of the structure and its built-in perfectionism. In pastry there is a right way to go about things - from measuring the ingredients, to the order you incorporate them, to the temperatures they need to be at (and for how long), and it's quite evident from the final product when you have done everything correctly (and thus succeeded). Savory, on the other hand, is composed of a lot of open-endedness and improv, since one can arrive at "delicious" in ten thousand ways, all in varying degrees of taste and texture.

(And getting personal: even though my life goes the way of savory and my personality has evolved to accommodate that, the inner overachieving perfectionist in me really takes to and finds expression in pastry.)

Anyway, after the cream was poured into the pie and allowed to chill, it settled into a firm jigglyness - the "just right" consistency between solidity and liquidity. We topped it with streusel and piped some whipped cream (basically whipped heavy cream, no Reddi-whip here!) on the edge.



The dot of vanilla sauce on the plate was to anchor the pie slice, so that in case the plates were being moved around, the slices would not slide.

And there you have it, just another drop of knowledge in that vast bastion-pool known as pastry.

let us make cake!

The first station I was assigned to on the pastry side was Cakes and Tarts. For those of us on the station, our daily task was to come up with 48-60 plates of dessert. Which sounded impossible until I learned that each cake yielded 10 slices (or 10 plates), and each pie/tart 8 slices. So each day we made some combination of cakes (including cheesecake or moussecake), pies/tarts, and tartlets.

Being that the previous pastry people had left us with a surplus of cake rounds (chocolate, vanilla, devils food, carrot, etc.), all we really needed to do was assemble them. So we got a crash course in cake-decorating.

First we defrosted the cake rounds (generally two for each cake we built), filed off the tops and basted the exposed cake-ness in simple syrup. Then we frosted them with buttercream. For the first one we made, we decided also to add strawberry slices (being that the cake was vanilla).



We quickly learned that buttercream frosting needs to be at the right temperature (and thus consistency) for it to frost nicely. If you look closely at the picture you'll see the unevenness and the crumbly edges that were the result of dragging too-congealed buttercream across the cake surface.



Once the upper layer was added, we frosted it all over the first time, which is known as the crumb coat. This is because the crumb (general term for the innards of any pastry) is still exposed and crumbs (haha) generally come off with the excess buttercream that is scraped off to make the layer smooth. After this first layer of frosting the cake is then put in the walk-in refrigerator for a bit so the buttercream can solidify, yielding a smooth layer for the final frosting.



Being that this was our first attempt at cake-assembly, the cake was still bumpy-looking after the final frosting (or, as Chef Mark put it, "homely-looking"). As an improvement, Chef demonstrated using the triangle-teethy tool (one of the many specialty tools I know not the name of) to create wavy lines of distraction all over the cake.



And voila! First cake assembled.