I think I might have a heart attack soon. The amount of sugar I have consumed today is unbelievable! Today was pastry and sweet pudding based. Very tasty, but very fatty and sugary. Not that it's a bad thing, but preferrably not all in one go! Joe was back with us today. He used to be a pastry chef, don't you know! The first job of the day was to make choux pastry. Now you may think, 'oh choux pastry, that's just profiteroles and eclairs'. WRONG! The amount of things you can do with it. Pipe bits into a deep fat fryer and then roll in cinammon sugar to make doughnuts; leave out the sugar to make savoury pastry and make some breadsticks and cover them with any seed you like; make savoury buns and fill them with chive cream cheese and put some smoked salmon on top. Oh the possibilities!
Then it was on to making some of our own pastry cream to fill those beautiful little choux creations and mille feuille which were to be made later. Joe showed us a simple recipe of lemon posset which was for pudding later and then we all made crystalised lemon and lime zest, which is so easy. I shall never buy it again. Then it was lunch time, where Joe gave us free reign of the ingredients to make an egg based lunch, or if you wanted, just a salad. He said it was 'probably one of the healthiest things we'll eat on this course'. Haha! I decided to go for a kind of omelette/frittata made of shallots, mangetout, salad onions and cheese. Odd combination, but tasty. Complete
with a poppyseed choux breadstick. With some salad leaves as well. And some eight year old balsamic. As you do.
After lunch, it was back onto the sweeter side of things, with a swiss roll needing to be made. Very simple and extremely verstaile- the things Joe said you can do with it. It took under 10 minutes to cook and after it had cooled slightly, apricot jam was to be spread on it. As you can see from the photo on the left, Ashburton Cookery School has a plentiful supply of jam! Here's my work partner, Rachel spreading the jam onto the cake.
More jobs were to be done- making a chocolate sauce for the profiteroles, finishing the pastry cream with some kirsch and more double cream and shaping and cooking puff pastry for the mille feuille. We used Jus-Rol puff pastry as it always works and apparently, to make it yourself takes about six hours and when it's ready to use, it often doesn't work, so time is wasted. It's good to know that it's ok to use some ready-made items! We attempted to make chocolate decorations to garnish our puddings by spreading melted chocolate onto the granite work surface and letting it set, then using a metal scraper, curl the chocolate into a 'cigar' shape, however, it didn't work as the Summer heat was too much for the chocolate to handle and it didn't set. Yes, for once, the sun was actually beating down hard in Devon! We at least tried to make it work, as you can see.
So then it was pudding, or as I like to call it, heart attack on a plate! Lemon posset, profiteroles and mille feuille. Rachel and my disks of puff pastry were, shall we say, a little well cooked. Joe said not to worry and to tell people that they were darker in colour because they were chocolate flavoured. He was very kind though, as he gave us his perfectly cooked ones and used our charred ones to demonstrate. Everything turned out well, apart from my mille feuille, which stayed together for about five seconds before it collapsed, due to the heat of the kitchen and warm, melting pastry cream. But you get the idea!
Everyone was so full that most people didn't eat much of their puddings. A few went for gold and demolished it all, some ate nothing and I, foolishly ate most of it. I really shouldn't have, as even though it tasted great, I felt sick before I had even started as Rachel and I had been dipping the spare choux into the spare chocolate sauce all afternoon. I did not feel very well after pigging out on the pudding and had some serious sugar shakes and a racing heart. That'll teach me! It's now time for a weekend break, but the thought of Monday's baking day of bread, chocolate brownies and more fills me with the feeling of sickness. But by then I'm sure I'll be up for it all. Half way through the course now, I can't believe how fast it's going!!
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