Sweet Caroline

I am typing this tonight only using the index finger on my right hand to peck away at the keys because my knife finally got the best of me.  We practiced a lot of knife skills today – slicing apples, oranges, and strawberries; however, I didn’t cut myself while working with fruit.  I made the dumb mistake of reaching into my tool kit for a small spatula and my large serrated knife was waiting there to attack.  Of course the knife guard had fallen off, and of course I cut two fingers!  It could have been much worse, and thankfully I didn’t cry when I saw all of the blood, but I earned myself two blue Band-Aids and a rubber glove to work in the remainder of the day.  Hopefully I got some of the bad knife karma out for a while!

The majority of our product today was fruit tarts.  We baked off our pear frangipane tart, which we had poached the pears for last Thursday.  We made two different shapes for this tart – a round tart and a rectangular tart – and finished each slightly differently with the fine chopped pistachios.  This was one of my favorite tarts so far!  We also worked on fresh fruit tarts and made two different variations – an orange fruit tart and a strawberry/kiwi fruit tart.  To go in the bottom of the tarts we had to whip Cream Chantilly by hand, and I definitely got an arm workout in!  Crème Chantilly is just heavy cream, powdered sugar, and vanilla extract whipped together; it took me a while to get the right whisk motion down, but finally my cream came together.

The other big project we worked on today was macarons… one of my favorite desserts to make (and eat)!  The technique we learned today was different than I had learned previously, but I am glad I had some experience making macarons beforehand.  Each of us made a different color macaron – mine were yellow – and we are going to fill them with the appropriate flavored filling tomorrow so check back then for pictures of all of our brightly colored sandwiches.  Until then, I am going to spare myself anymore typing!

Oh, and the phase 2 pastry class sent us a plate of chocolates… how pretty?!?