Cookies, Day 9, Practical Day 2

The last day of cookies! We only had 2 things to make today, so it was relativly easy.

1. A new batch of macarons was first. We decided to make them blue again and to fill them with raspberry, just like our previous ones. Why mess with success?

I completely forgot to take pictures of them, but I promise they look EXACTLY like the ones from day 4. And they turned out!!

2. The petit fours are simple, but it is quite a process. And a messy one.

The cut petit fours ready for fondant.

One of the many batches of fondant.

My petit fours are in the forground. I was able to cover two rows, before we needed to make more fondant. You can see Brandi just starting to cover hers.

Brandi is covering her petit fours. On the left you can see the giant pool of fondant that forms under the wire rack during this proccess, which is the source of most of the mess.

We decorated all of the petit fours with chocolate filagrees.

Our practice sheet.

Very dainty piping. Remember this is on a 1 1/4 inch square!

3. At the end we each made a platter with all of our cookies. I was bad and didn't take any pictures, so you will have to use your imagination!

Cookies, Day 8, Practical Day 1

For the practical we had to make nine different things. We could turn them in at any point over the two days. At the end of the second day, we had to combine our cookies and make an individual platter.

1. We started the practical by making chocolate chunk cookies. We wanted to get the easy things off the list as quickly as possible.

2. After the chocolate chunk, we started our macarons. We wanted them to have as long as possible to dry before baking.

The macaron batter.

The piped macarons.

This is the point where things whent downhill for our macarons. There was lots of drama in the kitchen over oven temps, and things kept getting changed. Needless to say, our macarons were completly ruined by a change in oven temp. They collapsed and were a sticky mess! It was beyond irritating, but we would be able to remake them the next day.

The useless macrons.

2. Next up were the harlequin cookies, the raspberry sandwich cookies.

3. We then went on to the peanut butter and chocolate arrachide cookies.

4. Next up was spritz cookies. We only had to do rosettes with raspberry.

5. Financiers were quick, and turned out perfectly.

6. Raspberry bars were also fast.

7. We turned in the marzipan fruits that we had finished the day before.

8. The last task of the day was to cut our petit fours. We cut them into 1 1/4 inch square then put them back in the freezer.

Cookies, Day 7

1. Today we finished our petit fours. To do this we layered two frangipane sheets with a small amount of raspberry jelly in between. Then we spread another very thin layer of raspberry on top and added a thin layer of marzipan. At this point we cut the large sheets into quarters. We each needed 1/4 of a sheet for todays production, and we were allowed to save a 1/4 sheet for the practical.

The sheets are then cut into 1 1/4 inch squares, and placed on a wire rack.

We then covered the petit fours with fondant. This process is a HUGE mess! The fondant is a combination of liquid fondant (which feels like that mixture of cornstarch and water you used to make as a kid, which gets hard when you squeeze it and gets soft when you leave it alone) and simple syrup. You have to keep the mixture at about 95 degrees or it will get too hard to pour. You then have to pour the mixture over the petit fours. I used a piping bag to get the fondant on the petit fours, but you can also scoop it with your hand and pour it on. There will be pictures of this whole process under the practical days.

Once the petit fours were covered in fondant, we decorated them. Half of them got rosebuds, and the other half got piped chocolate filagrees.

We had to present the best 30 to the chef for grading.

2. The only other thing that we had to do today was finishing our marzipan fruits.

Here are my fruits...

Cookies, Day 6

1. Today was the start of our petit four glacees; these tiny cakes are a two day process. The first step is to bake the cake layers. The cake needs to be very dense and not crumble easily, so we use frangipane. Frangipane is a almond mixture (almond flour, eggs, butter, sugar, and a tiny bit of four) that can be spread very thin and baked in sheet pans. (It is also traditonaly used as a tart filling with apples)

After the sheets were baked, they went into the freezer overnight to get extra firm.

2. Next on the agenda was decorating our cutout cookies. We used royal icing that the chef made. It was pretty thin, so it made decorating with any detail very difficult. We all got a little frusterated with the whole process, so we didn't worry to much about the asthetics of the cookies.

3. Once we finished the cutout cookies we started to work with marzipan. We needed to make rosebuds to top some of our petit four glacees with, as well as fruits that are due as part of our practical.

We were allowed to sit to work with marzipan, which was pretty exciting. Here you can see our marzipan set-up.

Here are the beginings of my rosebuds, sans leaves.

We only had a little bit of time to start on the fruit, so we didn't get very far. The beginings of my fruits (strawberries and cherries) are on the right of the sheet pan.

Brandi and I decided to take marzipan home to work on the fruits. We had a "marzipan party" over the weekend during which we finished our fruits.

Cookies, Day 5

1. First we made harlequin cookies. Harlequins are two sugar cookies sandwiched with raspberry jelly and dusted with powdered sugar. Beacuse we had the dough already made, it was just a matter of cutting out the rounds and baking. My group is very good at getting a cookie assembly line going, so we get things like this done VERY fast. (Not to brag or anything, well...maybe a little)

2. Next were arrachide cookies. These are also made with sugar cookie dough. The dough is cut into flutted rounds, marked with a fork, egg washed, and baked. The rounds are then sandwiched with peanut butter, and partialy dipped in chocolate.

3. Next were cutout cookies. I had brought a few of my own cookie cutters to class, so we used them. We were not decorating them today, just baking them.

4. Raspberry strips also use sugar cookie dough, so we made them next. The cookies start off as strip of sugar cookie dough. You then pipe a line of butter cookie dough down each side, and pipe raspberry jelly down the center. The strip is then baked, and cut while still hot.

5. Next we made almond s cookies. They are a piped cookie, made with a almond based dough. We piped small s shapes, baked them, and sandwiched them with apricot jam (finally a cookie that is not sandwiched with raspberry!).

6. The last cookies of the day were japanaise. They are a strange cookie. The cookie itself is an almond merinque cookie that is molded using a stencil. While the cookies baked, we flavored the butter-cream from yesterday with mocha compond. Once the cookies were baked, we sandwiched them with the butter-cream, piped a butter-cream shell on top, and topped them with a chocolate "espresso bean" (coffee flavored chocolate that is molded into a bean shape).

Here you can see the japonaise in the foreground, and the almond s cookies in the background.

7. Again, the culmination of the day was our platter. Today, we had to use these ugly gold cardboard rounds as our platters. The issue with these (beside the fact that they are tacky) is the size, they don't hold very much.

Cookies Day 4

1. We started the day with spritz cookies. Spritz are just a piped butter cookie. We made rosette shaped ones with a tiny bit of raspberry in the center. We also did shell shaped ones, that we partialy dipped in chocolate.

2. We then made milano cookies. The dough was made in a big batch for the enire class, so all we had to do was pipe the dough, bake them, and dip them in chocolate.

3. Next, we started our French macarons. I LOVE macarons!! I had made a bunch of macarons a few days before, so I was on a macaron roll. We made very small blue shells. They have to dry, in order to form a skin on the top. This process takes forever in the Charlotte humidity. They were sitting out for almost 2 hours before we were able to bake them.

Here are our drying macarons. On the top pan you can see the spritz cookies, and on the second tray you can are the milano cookies.

4. While the macarons were drying, we made checkerboard cookies. They are made with sugar cookie dough, part of which is chocolate flavored. They are easier to make than it seems, you just have to be be able to cut very straight lines.

5. We made a batch of swiss butter-cream to use for our macarons and the next days cookies. Swiss butter-cream is the easiest to make, you just heat egg whites with sugar which you then whip into a stiff meringue. Once the meringue is cooled, you whip in butter and voila...butter-cream!
We flavored part of the butter-cream with raspberry to use for our macarons. The rest we left plain for the next day.

5. Once the macarons were dry, we baked them. This goes rather quickly, beacuse they were are small. Once they cooled, we fliped the shells over to filled them. We piped a coin of butter-cream onto the shells. We then added a dot of tart raspberry jelly onto the butter-cream.

We then sandwiched the shells together and our macarons were finished!

Here you can see the size (that is my thumb).

6. The last task was to put our platters together with all of the cookies.

Platter 1...

Platter 2...