Advanced Baking Year in Photos

Random Blueberry Pies

I'm not really a pie person. Nor am I a blueberry person. With that in mind, heres what I made for a blueberry pie.

Cake Competition

This is my most recent work, the winning entry in a cake competition at my school. Its a triple chocolate terrine cake with a white chocolate stand holding up a tiny raspberry covered genoise cake. The thing at the bottom of the one picture is just the leftover cake that I decorated for the hell of it.

Baking Class finals:

So here are the finals that my baking class did. I am honestly so proud, I can barely even express it.

The three cakes

These three cakes (elaborated below) all were made for a party in which I was in charge of desserts. They include the Tiramisu, the Julianna, and the Triple Chocolate Terrine.

Tiramisu

I'd say this is a pretty standard cake. It looks better once the acetate paper is taken off the outside and the plate is cleaned up a bit.

Julianna

Of course, the reason for doing this cake was the fact that its name so closely resembles my own, but its very complicated. The outside is a tempered milk/white chocolate marbled shell, the inside is genoise sponge brushed with coffee dessert syrup and layered with a praline/nougatine filling and a vanilla pastry cream filling. The top is a marbled coffee gelatin and some blackberries for decoration. The recipe is just too long and involved to post, so if you'd like it, once again feel free to email me for that.

Triple Chocolate Terrine

So this is my pride and joy, my favorite dessert to make, the tastiest chocolate cake in existence, the honest to goodness pride of my life-- the triple chocolate terrine. (look above at the three cakes photos for what it looks like on the inside. So the basic gist of this is a chocolate cake layered with white, milk, and dark chocolate fillings, with ultra shiny chocolate glaze and strawberries on top. The recipes are not actually all that hard, it just requires some patience. If you want the recipe for this one, comment on the post and I'll send it to you.

Strawberry Napoleon

So here is the strawberry napoleon, which has only 3 components. The first is puff pastry, which I chose to make chocolate, the second is Diplomat Cream, in this case flavored with Grand Marnier, and finally the actual strawberries. The top is done with a lattice cutter, but you could just as easily put some cross woven puff pastry strips in the oven. My tips: If you want to make this be sure you have a VERY good serrated knife to get through the puff pastry layers and the strawberries without pushing down the whole structure and squeezing out the diplomat cream. Also, Be sure you plan for some lost cake, you will probably end up trimming a lot of it off for a good appearance, so make sure you're making more than your even requires. Here are the recipes for the Diplomat Cream and Puff Pastry:

Chocolate Puff Pastry must be made first and way in advance.

Dough:
Bread flour 12 oz
Cake flour 4 oz
Butter 2 oz (soft)
Water 10 fl. oz
salt: 3/8 oz

Lock-in:
Butter (soft) 1 lb 2 oz
Bread flour 1 oz
Cake flour 1 oz
Cocoa Powder 1 oz

Sift together the flours, blend in the butter until it starts to form small pebbles. Combine the water and salt and add all at once to the mix by hand for about 5 minutes. Shape this into a rectangle and refrigerate about an hour until it is harder but still pliable.
For the lock in you'll need to blend the flours and cocoa powder with the softened butter until very smooth, transfer it to a sheet pan lined with parchment paper to go in the fridge and cover it with more parchment paper. Roll out into an even layer about 1/2 the size of your dough and refrigerate.
When they are about the same level of hardness (but not completely solid) take them both out, wrap the butter rectangle in the twice as large dough rectangle and seal it on all the edges, taking care to avoid incorporating air. Then roll it out to a long rectangle on a heavily floured surface to avoid tearing the dough and exposing the butter. After it is rolled out administer a four fold or a book fold (folding both sides into the center and then in half again) and roll out again. Refrigerate until cool and repeat 3 times.
Finally, roll out the dough, cut, and bake at 375 for 10 to 15 minutes with another sheet pan covering the dough for both the bottom and middle portions. This bakes the dough without letting it rise too much so that it can hold the strawberries well at the bottom. The lattice can be baked separately.
To assemble, create 3 long slices of puff pastry the same size-- two that are flat and solid, one that is latticed or woven. Now slice the strawberries to that they have flat bottoms and assemble on the bottom puff pastry.

Diplomat Cream:

Diplomat cream is a mix of pastry cream (the stuff inside éclairs and cream puffs), whipped heavy cream, and gelatin. This makes it much lighter than the pastry cream and mellower in flavor (not to mention healthier by the ounce). For a grand marnier diplomat cream the alcohol must be added to the warm pastry cream when it is initially made. If you use another recipe for this, be sure not to cool the pastry cream like you normally would when making eclairs, the cream needs to be cooled down but not refrigerated when the gelatin and the whipped cream are added.

First you want to make sure that you are completely ready with the puff pastry and strawberries. Once the diplomat cream is made it should be used and refrigerated right away.

Whip 16 fl. oz. of heavy cream until it reaches the soft peak stage (a whip put in a taken out will result in a soft ice-cream like peak). Cover and refrigerate.

Pastry Cream:
Milk 10.5 fl oz
Sugar 66 g
Salt pinch
Cornstarch 24 g
Eggs 4 oz
Vanilla extract 1 tsp
Butter 2/3 oz
Grand Marnier 4/3 oz

Combine 9 fl. oz of the milk with 40 ounces of the sugar and all of the salt and bring to a biol over medium heat while stirring.
Whip the cornstarch and remaining milk until very smooth and add in the remaining sugar and eggs. Whip again until a perfectly smooth mixture is formed.
Add about one third of the hot milk mixture in a thin stream to the egg mixture while whipping vigorously to temper the eggs (heat them without cooking them).
Pour this mixture into the remaining milk and put over medium heat, wisking until the mixture thickens noticeably.
Remove from heat and add the butter, vanilla, and grand marnier.

Now bloom the 7 oz of gelatin needed in 5 times its weight in water. After letting it sit for 5 minutes melt over hot water on the stove and add to the warm pastry cream, whipping. Finally, fold the reserved whipped cream into the rest of the pastry cream mixture 1/3 at a time.

Pipe this very thick cream over the strawberry peaks so that it fills in all gaps and covers strawberries by about 1/2 inch. Then place the next layer of puff pastry on top. Pipe another 1/2 inch of diplomat cream, and smooth the top. My recommendation is to NOT do what I did and add the latticed puff pastry at this point. Instead, refrigerate this whole thing and add the lattice in protion sized strips once the whole thing is finished.

Once you take it out of refrigeration you can trim down the sides so that you can see the strawberry slices.

Brain Cake

This is what happens when you are a psych major/baker.

Puzzle cake

My roommate and I celebrate strange occasions. This is a cake she made for me for ending my volleyball season. This is not to say that I didn't deserve a cake, but most people don' t get cake for those kind of things. Anyway, really we just like to test our skill and critique each other. I have to say, this was pretty damn impressive. So the layers you see are chocolate and vanilla chiffon cake (chiffon is a mix of sponge, or air leavened, cake and artificial leavening such as baking powder). The layers of frosting are a Swiss Buttercream, which I really have to say is much preferable over the French and Italian. The cake gets layered into 4 layers and then you cut a cone from the center. Set the cone aside, take the rest of the cake and flip it over. Pus down so what was once the the inside wall is now the bottom. You want to frost one more layer and place this weird trapazoid thing on that. Then frost the inside and put the cone back in. What you should get is some layers going diagonally and some horizontally. Then cut the edges to be square and frost. It doesn't look special from the outside but the inside is spectacular.

Bread day

So this is what happens when we need bread around the house! Left to right: sesame and poppy bagels on the bottom and ciabatta on top, everything bagels, challah, epi, baguette, fougasse, rosemary salt bagels and cinnamon sugar bagels

Another baking class project: Dobos Torte! This is a traditional hungarian cake with many many layers of think dobos sponge pancaked with spread buttercream and a carmelized cake layer for the top. It was one of our most difficult projects yet, but it was another very successful one.

Not the best image in the world, but this was the chocolate souffle my baking class made today! I'm so proud of them, this is the highest I've seen a souffle rise! And the taste was just MAGNIFICENT! We served it with a frangelico sabayon sauce and it was perfectly moist!

My roommates birthday:

Publish Post

So it was my roommates birthday recently. We generally go a bit overboard as far as occasion cakes go (she is much like myself), and so with the help of my newly purchased acetate paper and my chocolate tempering skills I was able to make a chocolate cage and fill it with layered sponge cake and butter-cream frosting. The top is just some whipped cream and a chocolate decoration. The one at the bottom was one I made at the same time for another girl which is similar but with fewer layers and some raspberries on top along with a different chocolate decoration. They came out just splendidly I think.

Chocolate Coffee Cups with Chocolate Cappuccino Mousse

Blueberry Souffle

So a friend of mine grows blueberries and asked me to find something interesting to do with them, so this was one of my projects.

Sourdough Bread

Sourdough is a nice test of patience. I am not a patient person and it was a miracle that I was able to make it through the whole process without ripping my hair out, but overall it still came out pretty well. For those of you who don't know what sourdough is or why its called that, heres the gist. Most bread that you make uses commercial yeast; little bacteria they've conveniently packaged for you- just dissolve and watch the magic begin! But back before we had major corporations to provide us with our bacteria, we had to get it naturally. Yes, this means that sourdough is literally a result of the bacteria that you grow right at home! This is where being an untidy person really pays off.

The first law of sourdough is that you must start with a starter. This is the way we catch the wild yeast and get them going. Now, I got some fantastic advise from The Fresh Loaf (always a great place to visit). A woman there made a starter using what she calls "raisin water". Now before I continue I should explain that the natural yeasts in the air are attracted to fruit and fructose (the sugar in fruits). Many starters will call for use of a slice of some fruit to help attract the yeast. This woman had a much better idea. If you ever look very closely at raisins you will see that the creases have kind of whitish stuff in them. That is wild yeast. How do we harvest it? Dissolve it in water. Take warm water (105ish) and pour it over a handful of raisins. Let it sit 20 minutes and you've got raisin water, more accurately yeast water. This is a great way to jumpstart your starter.

From here Im going to site her instructions because they were amazingly much better than the ones I got from my Profession Baking textbook.

1 cup rye flour
3/4 cup raisin water

From here you want to stir and let sit. When it gets about twice the size (should take about a day but its hard to tell because it depends very much on heat and the amount of yeast) you want to refresh the starter. Your new starter should consist of:

1 cup bread flour
1/2 cup water
1 cup previous day's starter

These are pretty good standards, but if you see that it is getting too thick, you can add more water, or visa versa. You want to refresh it every time it rises to twice the size and keep this going for about 2 weeks. If you don't want to throw out the rest of the previous day's starter you can just make it in bulk and create a LOT of sourdough.

Heres another warning. It will smell. Not so strongly that people will be put off, but thats actually how you can tell your sour dough is coming out. It should be sour. Don't worry, not all of that smell will be imparted in your bread. Adding flour to anything dilutes flavor. Proteins in flour bind to flavor particles and make them useless. If you make a very wet starter as I did, you will have to add a lot of flour and so you will greatly dilute the sour flavor. If you want a more sour sourdough, you will want to have a stiff starter, meaning more flour and less water in your starter. That way you wont have a lot of additional flour to add after you have let it ferment.

Anyway, the thing about sourdough is that it is literally an art. There is no strict way to do it because for everybody it will differ. The yeast in one area is not the same as the yeast from another, nor will people get the same amounts when they make the dough. This is what makes sourdough so interesting, but it also makes it complicated for a beginner. After the 2 weeks or so have passed and youre beginning to feel like youve got a nice starter, take half the starter, add enough flour to make a dough that isnt sticky, and kneed it 10 minutes. Take the rest of the starter and put it aside for more dough later. The nice thing about sourdough is that you can just keep refreshing it and it will keep making dough for you. Here are pictures of the dough i finally made and the starter that I retained. My mistake when i first made sourdough was that I didn't kneed long enough. A good test to see if you have kneaded long enough is to try to stretch the surface of the dough. It shouldn't break on you, and if it does it won't hold in gases when it is baking either. You will end up with poorly leavened bread.

Here is another tip. After you have let the dough rise to double its bulk, after you have shaped it and let it proof, you want to think about baking temperature. This is the same thinking you would use for any type of bread. If you are going to make a baguette or a roll you that is not very thick, you want high temperature so that it can brown on top as fast as it bakes in the middle. My recommendation is to start with 500 and then bring it down to 450 when you see that the oven spring is finished (inside temp 140). If, however, like myself you are making a loaf or something much thicker like that, only use a temperature of 500 if you have a lid for your pan, otherwise keep it about 420 or so for the entire time, and bring it down if the top is getting nicely brown but the middle isnt near 200 yet.

The last thing I must say because I am a strong advocate is that you MUST use steam throughout the entire oven spring period. This is just common sense. If you do not use steam a hard skin will form on the outside of the bread. That skin will turn to a crust, but there will still be gas creating pressure on the inside of the bread. It will cause the crust to crack so that it can find somewhere to go. This results in terrible looking dense bread. You never want to let skin form on your baked good and if it does, you want to score it very well just before putting it in the oven so that there is plenty of room for steam and CO2 to escape.

~Jules

Croissant Makeup

So I realized that I really didn't have much posted in the last post in the way of how to roll a croissant and make it look presentable. Here are some pictures on just how to do this. First, the large sheet of laminated dough that you roll out you want to cut into triangles as I have here. Before you cut you generally want to wait about 20 minutes to let the dough relax. You have just stretched out the dough and if you cut immediately its just going to recoil instead of staying in its position. You should end up with tons of triangles that can then be rolled up. You want to take one triangle and cut a small slit in the base. This makes the base a bit wider and allows for the little wings that come out the side, otherwise you would have to cut very oddly shaped triangles out of your dough. When you begin to roll, make sure that if any of the sides are sticky or unsightly, they are facing up. Then you want to pull the "wings" out so that there is a wider base to the croissant. From here you can begin to roll up from the base. You want to roll with one hand and hold the tail with the other hand. Once you have rolled about half way you want to start stretching the tail to make it longer and thinner and continue rolling. This is how you end up with many revolutions that make the final product look fantastic. Keep rolling until the final end of the tail is attached to the body of the croissant. Place the entire thing on the tail so that it doesn't come up during baking. Then take the wings and fold them inwards. I have yet to find a very reliable way to keep the wings real tight during baking, but I will figure it out. Once they have been rolled and are looking good you want to proof them an hour at 80 degrees so that they get nice and light. From there they can be put in the oven until the inside reaches about 215 degrees and the tops are nicely brown. If you want a shiny crust, brush the surface of each one with egg yolk, it gives a great finished touch to the croissants. If you want a matte crust egg whites or milk is best to brush with. For a very flaky and plain crust use water or simply bake them the way they are. I also recommend putting in some chocolate to make a dessert croissant. Semi-sweet is best in my experience, but its all personal preference.

Croissants

So Ive been making croissants for a while and I notice that they only get better and better as you make them. I don't believe that this is something you can ever perfect, but that there is always room for improvement. It also takes a good amount of experience and dedication to get this right, so I'll throw in as many tips as I can.

Danish Pastry Dough:

Water: 7 oz
Yeast (dry): 5/8 oz or 20 grams
Bread flour: 5 oz
Sugar: 2.5 oz
Salt: .75 oz
Milk: 12 oz
Water: 1.5 oz
Bread Flour: 2 lb
Butter: 1.5 lb -- Cold

(keep in mind that this will make TONS of croissants-- In my photos I doubled the recipe because I wanted to experiment a bit more, the single recipe above makes about 30. If you have use for that many, you should definitely make it, but if you do not, this is just a recipe for temptation)

So the first step is to dissolve the yeast in warm water (105 to 115 degrees) You then want to sprinkle on the first amount of bread flour without mixing. In the 5 minutes this takes to dissolve, you then want to add the sugar salt milk and water and stir until the sugar and salt are dissolved. You also want to measure out the remaining flour.

After the 5 minutes are up you can go ahead and mix up the yeast and the first amount of flour that is sprinkled on top of it. You then want to alternate between adding the liquid and the flour and mix by hand. Do not over mix! You don't not want to kneed this like you would bread dough because you don't want it to be as tough as bread. To get the nice crumbly consistency you need low gluten development which means high fat and little mixing.

From here you can knead it very briefly on the counter top. its alright if you don't end up using all of the flour. Flours and their ability to absorb moisture change all the time, thought they are somewhat standardized into categories like bread flour and pastry flour. If you don't use all of the flour, use some of it when kneading to be sure that the dough doesn't stick to the counter top. You want your dough to be sticky and you want to kneed it only enough to be sure it is homogeneous and cohesive.

When you are finished kneeding you can use some oil to grease a large bowl (at least twice the size of the dough) and put the dough in there, letting the oil lightly coat all sides of the dough. You then cover it with pastic wrap and let it rise until doubled in volume.

When it is finished rising, you then want to punch it down. Pull the dough up from all sides and push down into the center and turn the dough upside down to release the CO2 that is built up. From here you can wrap tightly in plastic and let it rest in the fridge for at least 30 minutes. Some people insist on letting it sit overnight. If you are going to do this, please wrap tightly. The yeast is less active at fridge temperatures but it is still active and the dough might explode if there arent at least three layers of saran wrap keeping it in.

When this is going into the fridge you should be taking out your butter. You want to take the rolling pin that you are going to use for the project and beat the cold butter until it is nice at flat, as seen below. You are doing this because it will be easier to incorporate into the dough later. I recommend beating the butter with the wrapper still on, that way its less mess on the rolling pin. The wrapper will still come off easily, no worries. You want to then line up these butter slices and put them back in the fridge. When you take out the dough to roll it out, you are going to take out the butter too.

The key to good croissants that don't bleed butter out the edges is having the dough and the butter at the same consistency. This is very important because whichever is warmer is going to move faster with the rolling pin and cause unevenness. Even worse, when you are doing butter enveloped in dough like this, it is easy for the butter to squirt out if it is too warm. Trust me, you dont want this to happen. It is not only the worst mess in the world, but from there it is extremely difficult to salvage the croissants. My first few attempts at making them failed in this regard. So the key to having even consistency is to have them both at a similar temperature--cold. Any time you are working with the dough it should be cold.

So now you have taken the dough and the butter out of the fridge. You are to beat the dough with the rolling pin real quick to loosen it up and then roll it out into a 1X3 rectangle like this picture. You then want to use the still cold butter to cover about 2/3 of that rectangle leaving some space (about an inch or so) around the edges to be able to seal it when you create the envelope. The picture below doesn't have butter in it, but this is still how you fold the final product. Fold in thirds so that the layers go dough-butter-dough-butter-dough. Push out any air bubbles and seal the edges tight by pinching them. Don't try to roll it out at this point. Refrigerate again for about 30 minutes or more. This will not only bring things to an even temperature, but it will relax the gluten strands in the dough and allow it to stretch further without breaking, which is another key to making good croissants.

When you take the envelope out you want to be sure you have a well floured surface to roll on. Once the layers start to form they are going to be very thin and anything that causes them to stick will tear them, leaving a nice open wound of gushing butter to cover your counter top. Not fun. So from here you want to beat the envelope with a rolling pin until it starts to get a bit more maleable. Additionally, you want to roll it in the opposite direction you did the last time. The side that was the 3 in the 1x3 should now be the 1. This means that the edges of the envelope should be the parts that will be 1 and the sealed bottom and top will be 3. This ensures that you aren't stretching the gluten in only 1 direction (which will eventually break it). When you roll you want to have more downward pressure than outward-- push down as though you were trying to flatten it, don't push across the dough, that will drag only the top layers with it and that would be bad. This is called your first turn. A turn is when you turn the dough 90 degrees, roll it out, and then fold it up again. You are going to fold just the way you did before and refrigerate again. Then you want to repeat this 3 more times. Each time you roll and fold you are creating more and thinner layers of dough and butter. This is how the flaky layer texture of the croissant is achieved. By the end, if you cut the dough in half you should see tons of tiny layers piled up. You want these to be even. You want there to be over 100 layers.

When you achieve this, refrigerate again and then roll out this dough one last time. You then cut the dough into triangles. You want to make the base of each triangle a bit wide. As you roll the croissants from the base upwards toward the tip, you want to pull the tip away, stretching the dough and making the roll tighter. It just looks nicer that way-- no impact on flavor :) Then you want to take the wings of that base that you elongated and pull them inward. The finished roll should look like the ones you see here. Cover and let rise at 80 degrees for about an hour, or until you see them get large and puffy.

As for baking, you want either parchment paper or a silpat to bake on. There will be butter. They key is not having so much butter that the croissants are simmering in their own juices. If you've done it right, they shouldn't. Bake at 400 degrees for as long as it takes to get the tops nicely golden brown. Even if the outsides look done, the insides might not be, so to be safe, if you have an internal thermometer you should definitely check to see when the croissants reach above 200 degrees on the inside. That is the key to knowing that they are done. Any additional time in the oven will just make them look better if thats what you're going for. Mine went to about 220 internal temp, and they were just perfect.

I highly recommend taking them out and immediately throwing them on some absorptive towels. You want to get off as much grease as you possibly can. Any butter that is reabsorbed by the croissants will make it heavy and very fatty, so its good to have something like a paper towel spread layed out for when they come out.

It takes a lot of time and its a lot of work, but it is also fun and tasty, and besides that, not a very common skill outside the professional pastry world. Definitely worth the work.



~Jules