Today was a fun day. Wondering about the title? One of my friends almost lit herself on fire today. More on that later.
Today we used our sweet dough to make two tarts. One in a tart pan and one in a tart ring. We put the tart pan one in the fridge and will probably use that tomorrow. We used the tart ring to make our lemon frangipan fruit tart. We made our frangipan, which is an almond paste type thing with butter and rum. Its yummy! Those got baked and cooled.
Then we made German buttercream. This might even be better then the swiss buttercream. It was made differently. This one we had to whip our butter until it was super light and fluffy, then we added some of our pastry cream (which had also been whipped.) Those got all mixed together, then we melted chocolate and tempered it with the buttercream. Which means, you take a few big spoonfuls of the buttercream and mix it into your chocolate so It cools it down. If you just added the chocolate right it it would completely melt your butter. Then you add the tempered chocolate in to the butter and pastry cream and then the angels sing. ahhhhhhhh, aaaaammmmaaazing! I don't even need a cake to ice, just give me and spoon and don't judge me.
Now comes the fire part. When you are creaming something you need softened butter. So to soften it we take our mixing bowl over to the gas stove ( flames ahoy..) and you hold it over the heat for a minute to help melt it down a tad. Now, the flame gets hot (well duh, its fire) so to protect our hands we take a towel, or use our aprons or in this case use paper towel to hold on to the metal bowl.
My friend sara is working beside me and I see this flash of light out of the corner of my eye. I stop. Set my bowl down and look over. She is standing there holding a piece of paper towel that is FLAMING! The worst part? She had no friggen idea lol. So I scream "SARA! YOU'RE ON FIRE!" She finally notices it and just stares at it, still flaming away in her hand. So I scream again "DROP IT!!" She finally drops it and we both proceed to stomp out the flaming paper towel. I think we stepped on each other more than we stepped on the fire. Chef comes over and tells us to quite down...I don't think he knew about the fire. He just heard us screaming and then laughing. The only proof that there ever was a fire was the little bits of charred paper towel on the floor and a little burn on her hand. The ironic part was that we had a planned fire drill in 15 minutes ahahahaha. Oh irony.
Luckily she was fine and it wasn't worse (I got her burn gel for her hand - See? I'm a good friend. I made fun of her but I also saved her life and got her burn cream..It all balances out.) It makes for a good story for my blog. Thanks Sara! :)
So after we had the fire drill we came back and had break. We cut our chocolate sponge cakes in to three and filled them with that amazing buttercream. Then we gave them a crumb coat and put it in the fridge to finish tomorrow.
Next we got to finish our franzipan tart! We got out our lemon cream and piped around it then filled it a touch then we had to fill it with fruit. We have made fruit tarts before where we made designs and planned out what we wanted to do. This time Chef wanted us to do it "modern" - no design. Sounds easier then it actually is. For me not being able to lay my fruit down and make a design was quite difficult. You still need to make it appealing to look at, you need to play with colours and shapes. Once I just let my mind go it was much easier.
Doing this abstract fruit tart made me realize I'm really looking forward to plating! I think I will be good at it. I've always had a hard time using my imagination and focusing on an idea. So I'm really looking forward to the challenge!
Never a dull moment in the kitchen here!
Enjoy your evening. Chef out!
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| Crumb coated sponge cake with German buttercake |
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| My modern design fruit tart |
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| BEAUTIFUL! |
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| Can you find mine? |
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