Piece of Cake

This week's topic was Cakes and Petit Fours...we spent the week doing lots of creaming, sifting, mixing and piping...learning to make some very traditional and classic French cakes and small treats.

I was in the morning class again this week - and it is usually dark outside our windows when we start our class.  After several weeks of cold, gray and snow, we were treated this week to some sunny and clear days, that started with a beautiful sunrise...

One of the perks of morning classes is that you get some sort of fresh-baked breakfast treat - some croissant,  pain au chocolate or other viennoiserie that one of the classes has made.  This week we got an extra special treat - one of our chefs, Pierre, was making beignets in the class next door, so on Thursday we got a Valentine's Day delivery of fresh, hot beignets for breakfast!



Pierre with a special delivery - beignets for breakfast!




 

We spent part of the week focused on cakes - and, of course, we started with the classic, Cake Quatre Qart - which translates to the French version of a classic pound cake, with equal parts of 4 (quatre) ingredients - butter, sugar, flour and eggs. 

 



 Not only did we make the classic version of the cake, we made it with chocolate, with lemon, with candied fruits, with pralines - and decorated each of them differently -- flavored syrups, chocolate, candied fruits, nuts, etc.

The rest of the week was focused on making some classic French "small treats"......everything from speculoos (ginger/spice cookies), to madeleines (light and fluffy small cakes, molded in a shell shape), to rocher coco (what we in America would call a macaroon - rich, coconut cookies)....

...we piped baton marechaux....a sponge-type cookie...

...covered with almonds, baked golden brown, filled with a hazelnut/almond paste (think Nutella) and then dipped in chocolate...

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...we made cannelle, the rich and eggy, rum-infused, fluted treat from Bordeaux...

...we made three types of financier, small cakes made with browned butter - rum, chocolate and pistachio -  and also made the classic Sable Breton, a rich, buttery cookie from the Brittainy region...

..we tried our hand at almond tuiles (tuile means tile, so named because these thin, almond cookies are shaped like the roof tiles of French homes) and classic French chocolate cakes, seen here in a mini version...

 

 

...and, of course, we made macarons, the French favorite - pink filled with raspberry coulis and yellow filled with a light, lemon cream...

 



And, suddenly, it was Friday and we had a rack full of trays with all sorts of cakes, just ready to be displayed on our buffet.

In addition to our usual stands for displaying the cakes, this week we used large brandy snifters for decoration, filling them with a single ingredient that was representative of that specific petit fours...

Sable Breton - featuring LOTS of butter

Baton Maracheaux - sponge cake "sticks" or "batons", made into a sandwich with hazelnut/almond paste and covered with almonds and chocolate

Pain de Genes Chocolat - a chocolate cake made with almond paste, decorated with sliced almonds and syrup or a raspberry jam

Cake Agrume - pound cake with lemon and lime zest, brushed with a lemon-sugar syrup and decorated with candied citrus

So - here's the final spread - lots of cakes!

 Hard to believe we are at the end of week 6 - only 2 more weeks of classes to go!