It's been a while.
After graduating from Johnson & Wales Denver with an associate's degree in delicious cake, I return to New England to continue my adventures, and begin the final stretch of my bachelor's degree at the main campus in Providence.
Last year I finished all my academic courses. This year will be all baking, all the time.
Pictured above: The Cuisinart Center for Culinary Excellence, where my classes are held.
We begin with Advanced Petits Gateaux:
Trust me, I would love to be able to align those two to a row, but Blogspot's user interface is leaving me scratching my head, so screw it. I'm presently typing this in HTML mode because the wysiwyg version of the UI isn't even registering my keystrokes.
Anyway, those are the products of three days' work by the whole class; the ones I specifically worked on are the red cherry domes (made jam centers and chocolate garnishes), the espresso hazelnut entremets (central mousse insert, applied garnishes), and the green tropical boats (lime Bavarian cream, made and placed sugar loop garnishes, glazed with coconut cream).
Other people's work:
-Blackberry lemon things pictured in both bar and dome form; they're considering swapping out the white chocolate garnish for dark, which ought to help balance the over-strong lemon flavor a little more.
-Strawberry yogurt cake. Too sweet because of the extra meringue garnishes but otherwise very nice.
-Caramel apple dome. These things were goddamn delicious. They also made a mini version in a glass (verrine) which was equally delicious.
-Milk chocolate passionfruit thing. Needs more passionfruit.
-Cherry and tropical verrines made with leftover stuff. Both of these were awesome.
Final project for this class is to design a themed dessert buffet and make one of the desserts for real. I've chosen Disney princesses for my theme and to represent Belle, I will be making a layered bar-type thing with rose Bavarian, raspberry cremeaux, and gold-dusted chocolate.
Pastry student out.
