#pastrychefintraining

There was no Wednesday class this week due to a public holiday for the local Royal Show, a display put on every year where essentially the country comes to the city.  Producers of everything from cattle to chickens, pumpkins to apples compete for awards as well as there being the general sideshow attractions.

While usually a day off school is welcome in this case it was just frustrating firstly because I really enjoy school, secondly because it was one less day we had to work on our showpieces and Thursday was our last day to assemble them.

Every time we’ve worked on the showpiece we’ve achieved a little more and it is both nerve wracking and exciting to finally see the whole thing come together.  My team was well ahead of most others so there was a lot of hurry up and wait, we still had to do a bit of work assembling the white arum lilies for the piece which I wasn’t allowed to touch at Susan and Lisa’s behest because of my smouldering hot hands.

We finally had enough of the class up to the air brushing point and started spraying the piece with a black cocoa butter spray, this gives the whole piece a lovely black shiny finish and makes other colours really pop.  It was surprisingly difficult to tell when you had enough colour on the sculpture as it was black being sprayed onto dark chocolate but sure enough with enough layers it worked.

We carefully transferred it back to our bench and started getting ready to attach the other pieces (milk and white chocolate vines and flowers), I turned to wash the black cocoa butter off my hands and heard Susan shriek... Then there was the crash...

And that my friends is how my very first chocolate showpiece crashed to the ground and shattered into a million pieces.

Upon reflection it was decided the most likely culprit was the room temperature, my class is the biggest they’ve ever run.  We had 16 people, plus two instructors, 4 chocolate melting tanks and an air compressor running in a very small room so even though the air con was cranked to make it as cold as possible it still became much to warm too quickly.

Today was our first day back after mid year break, and we started a much anticipated unit: Chocolate.  For the next five weeks the practical I will be studying will be all things chocolate, I am personally pretty excited about this.  Chocolate has always been something of my own kryptonite, possibly it’s living in a humid climate, but tempering, molding and enrobing have never come easily.

Fortunately I have an amazing teacher in the form of Chef Ben, known as the resident chocolate expert at school I’ve seen some of his showpieces and they are nothing short of incredible.  He’s exceedingly passionate about chocolate and cooking in general, being taught by someone passionate is infinitely a pleasurable experience and I find a lot of his enthusiasm rubbing off on me and upping my own already wired nature regarding patisserie.

We started with easy thins after five weeks off, making centres for enrobing.  When chocolate is enrobed it is a centre or filling that is then coated in chocolate, either by hand or by a mechanized enrobing machine.  This is as opposed to molded chocolates where the chocolate is melted and shaped *then* filled.

Enrobed chocolates tend to be firmer as then need to stand up to be handled and moved around, molded chocolates tend to have softer flowing fillings.  As such today each of us worked with a partner and had to produce a batch of nougat for cutting into bars and dipping tomorrow, some of us were also fortunate enough to make other items for enrobing.  My partner and I made an item to be coated much like a chocolate bar with a spiced biscuit base, a pobana (a fruit cocktail of passionfruit, mango, banana and lemon) pâte de fruit (type of fruit jelly set with pectin) and a chocolate marshmallow all layered like a Twix bar.  Tomorrow we will cut and cover these delicious treats in chocolate!

The pâte de fruit was not something I was familiar with, I had to make two attempts at activating the pectin before it worked, and having no made a ‘bar’ like this before either pouring the hot jelly became something of a dangerous exercise, it went *everywhere*! The biscuit base shrank slightly during baking which meant there were gaps, our tray had holes in it (which bear in mind it is supposed to) but we didn’t think to put down silicone paper first so the upshot of all this was me, the stove, the floor and the cooling racks covered in pobana fruit jelly.  Tasted good though!