It was not a very successful baking day today... First of all, as I was about to leave my house to head to lab, I realized that I had forgotten my kitchen shoes AT HOME! This wasn't good. Thank goodness for Grandma and Grandpa Greve who saved the day by driving my shoes over! I started the lab in my baby blue Keds and explained my predicament, and thankfully my instructor was in a good mood and didn't mind me wearing them. We made a custard to begin with that we would later turn into a Mousseline by adding whipped cream. This is something we've done quite a few times, so it wasn't difficult. Next, we made two different kinds of puff pastry- one for today (a Blitz pastry because it only needs 3 "turns") and one for tomorrow (a classic puff pastry that requires the typical 6 "turns"). Puff pastry is simple enough, however what makes it tricky are the "turns". With the classic pastry, you must roll out the outside only of the square dough leaving the centre thick (like an envelope). Then, butter that was beaten with a little flour goes in the centre, and you fold the outside edges inwards. This needs to sit for 10 minutes, then needs to be rolled and "turned" six times (this means rolling and folding into three) with breaks in between. A little complicated, but not too bad. The Blitz dough was simpler because it was sort of like a pie dough (no butter placed in the centre like before) that was folded like classic puff pastry. This makes the process much faster and it only needs to be turned three times. Once the Blitz dough was finished being folded, we rolled it out to fit onto a medium sized baking sheet and baked it with another pan on top to keep it from bubbling too much. As the heat penetrates the dough, the butter in every layer we folded creates steam and causes the pastry to "puff"! When the pan was slightly lifted (because of the puff), we removed it to give the pastry a little colour. Once everything was taken out of the oven and cooled, we cut the pastry into three strips and layered the Mousseline in between. The top layer was the trickiest part- and the part that I messed up on so terribly. We had to heat up some fondant that was pre-made and pour this on the top layer of puff pastry. Once this was done, we needed to pipe lines with chocolate and use a knife to swirl the chocolate. What was so infinitely difficult about the seemingly easy task was that the fondant dries almost instantly! Once it dries, the chocolate can no longer be manipulated, and therefore can't be swirled. The big mistake I made was forgetting to add a little egg white to the fondant, which would make it cool more slowly. My fondant literally hardened the instant it hit the pastry. So, no pretty design for me. It was quite horrible looking, actually. A mess. A catastrophe. When everyone in the class' looked great and expertly done, mine was a disaster. To make a situation even worse, the fondant was too thick, so when I tried to cut the Napoleons into pieces, the puff pastry cracked. I now have a bunch of randomly shaped Napoleons with some weird design on top making it look like a three year old decorated them. Not my best day. Luckily, my pastry was well done and so was my Mousseline... so it was not a complete failure. Tomorrow's a new day, and hopefully I will find the baking skills that I had apparently lost today.
I don't have pictures today due to embarrassment... so I'll leave it up to your imaginations :)