Culinary Schooling
Individual Pastries & Entremets
Just as we have cupcakes and whole cakes, the French have petits gâteaux and entremets. Entremets and their little sibling petits gâteux, are mousse cakes set in a mold or ring, typically enclosing some type of soft filling and a cake/cookie base. These types of cakes allow for a variety of tastes and textures to coexist in one dessert and are stunning to look at before and after being cut. Petits gâteux, verrines, choux derrivatives, and tartlets are just some of the individual pastries we prepared and possible desserts you could expect to see in a French-style pastry case.
Cakes
From classics to decorated, there's a wide variety of cakes that exist. We typically had one lesson about what was to be produced and then we got one chance at executing. If all the components aren't at the proper temperatures/ consistency then it can make getting a clean coating of icing very difficult. Not all my cakes came out perfect in class, but hopefully you'll check out my Custom Cakes page and see how far I've progressed!
Bakes
Baking! A fundamental skill in baking and pastry. Besides knowing when an item is properly baked, skills include learning various mixing methods (there's more than a couple!) and understanding how ingredients react at increasing oven temps. Although most of this page could fall under baking, I chose these photos because even the simplest desserts can benefit from proper technique.
Chocolates
& Mignardises
Mignardises are small, bite-sized treats served at the end of a meal. They could be any combination of ideas, but traditional sweets include pâte de fruits, financiers, and madeleines.
Breads
Bread can be divided into two main categories: lean and enriched. Lean doughs rely on water, flour, salt, and yeast to get the job done and produce crustier breads like baguettes and ciabatta. Enriched doughs utilize butter, milk, sugar, or eggs to produce softer breads like brioche and cinnamon rolls. Laminated doughs, which get rolled and layered with butter, produce flaky pastries like croissants.
Plated Desserts
Some of these photos are from our Restaurant Productions class, where we got to work in the campus restaurant Nao. It was eye-opening experience learning to plate on the fly as orders came in and was an opportunity to serve those mignardises as mentioned above.
Pop-up Bakery Café
Our last 6 weeks of class were spent running a pop-up bakery café, 3 weeks in BOH baking or cooking and 3 weeks FOH serving and interacting with guests. I was in charge of mixing all cookie and scone doughs which another student baked fresh each morning. I also completed the final touches of certain pastries (the few included below). Seeing the full pastry case at the beginning of each day (including a recipe I personally developed!) was very satisfying.
