DAY 34

We have a very busy day head of us so we get started straight away. We have a couple different things in class today. The first being that we have a different Chef (because our normal one went on a mini vacation), and second there is only 3 of us this week. Which will be alot of fun, not that I didn't enjoy all the people, it's just now we won't be split up into groups to make the stuff. We get started right away on the sweet pastry dough and the cookie dough, since they would have to be in the fridge for a little bit, and of course we don't want to waste time. After putting the dough away, which by the way can I say was a bitch to do, because of the quantity. We then moved on to making the lemon cream, almond cream, and the chocolate cream. Since there was 3 of us we each got to pick which one we wanted to do, I picked the lemon. Making the lemon cream was hard today, more because my arms were tired from making all that dough. Chef took the pears out of the cans and into a bowl while we were finishing up our creams. We then walked over to were Chef was at the stove and started making the wine concoction for the pears in the Pear and Red Wine Tart. If your wondering why were not using fresh pears, thats because we want a uniform look for the pears and not have one be bigger than another, or one be lop sided, etc... We put the pears in after the wine mixture, after it had been cooking for a couple minutes. It was neat looking see the pears soak up the wine it was like see a tye-dye. We cleaned up a bit and had our tea/coffee break while the pears were still cooking on the stove. We took our dough out of the fridge and rolled out to pie crusts, one of each kind. The cookie dough one was kind of annoying ,because it kepted almost sticking to the board, I kept having to put flour down so as not to stick. The last thing to do on the listwas to make the cocoa bean nougatine. I would just like to say that making this was nougatine was like magic or something. We took the crushed cocoa bean, which looked like crushed coffee beans, and put them in the pot to cook with the other ingredients, including the glucose, so as to make it more solid. We then took it out of the pot and and put some on the marble and then rolled it out, cutting it into circles, and then putting it into the oven. Letting it cool after taking from the oven we let them cool for a minute, then put them in the mold (see pics). What the magic-y part is, when you put the nougatines in the molds they are a solid mass, but sticky and if you press on it liquid comes out. Then when you come back to the nougatines, after they have been cooled, they are hard and sort of crunchy.

See the magic......