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.