Class 11/12/09 - Puff Pastry, Tarts, and Cookies

When the class began it seemed like we were doing one or two subjects a week and moving on. It's proved to be not quite true, as this is I think the third week now we're working with laminated doughs and pies/tarts. We're also beginning cookies.

First up was some work with puff pastry. We used pre-made puff pastry instead of making our own. Since we've already made danish and croissant doughs, the chef thought it'd be unnecssary since it's pretty much the same thing. Plus in any professional kitchen you buy pre-made puff pastry. They have perfected machine manufacture of it and making it by hand is time consuming and will probably yield an inferior product. So with the puff pastries, we made a Cream Napoleon. We baked off the puff pastry, but we didn't want the puff but rather a crisp dough, so we docked it and kept it flat with sheet pans. We also prepared pastry cream to go with it. To put together the Napoleon we layered three pieces of puff pastry with two layers of pastry cream. We then topped it with some fondant and made a spiderweb design with some more fondant that we added chocolate to. The chef gave a demo of putting it together including tips on putting on the pastry cream and fondant to not break the pastry as well as for cutting and squaring it off for good presentation. The left picture is from the chef's demo and the right one was my group's product.


We began some work with cookies. Today we made "Chocolate Jumble Cookies" which is flavored with coffee liqueur and chocolate, and has chocolate chips and chopped walnuts in it. Our batter was wetter and runnier than the others-we added too much liqueur and melted too much chocolate-but the final cookies still came out fine.

We also did more tart dough preparation for tomorrow. We made both the regular tart dough and Linzer tart dough. More on those when we use them in production tomorrow.