Where did we leave off? Ah yes, a few weeks back Kevin and I were doing Cakes Week of the Pastry II, our first station in the rotation.

The following week saw us on Ovens duty so nothing to discuss or show here except to note that we made sure the ovens were running smoothly and all the required product was being baked and sent off to the upstairs and downstairs cafeterias as needed. That was week 2. I’d point out here that we really did plow through this (as we have all other stations in the Pastry or Bread sections) even though we are the only 2-person team. Not sure if this hobbled team situation is being noted in our marks; we’re managing to keep up in spite of having 33% less manpower than other teams.

The photo? Just a little fun around the oven with Sara and Josie. Figured this was better than a photo of the oven baking stuff.

After Ovens came the Deserts section which consisted of producing Mousses, Puddings and a German Dough (sweet tart dough) and a Mousse cake, while still making sure regular bar productions (Nanaimo bars, etc.) were kept up.

I chose to produce a bread pudding but used cake scraps instead, adding cranberries and bun spices. I made up a base of the German Sweet Dough and filled it with a cherry and coconut filling. For my cooked pudding, I made a chocolate version topped with Crème Diplomat.

For my cake I made a Charlotte aux Framboises (raspberry), shown bellow.

Process: A cake ring is filled with a border of cake slivers “glued” together with raspberry jam. In the center is places a smaller round of cake for the base.

A raspberry mousse is made up and the ring is then filled to almost the very top. This is now refrigerated and allowed to set.

Once the mousse has solidified, a final layer of fruit glaçage is added to the top and, once this has again set, the ring is warmed up and slipped off.

The final cake is ready for garnishing, in this instance with raspberries, blackberries, strawberry slices and white chocolate decorations.

For week three, a short week as we were heading off to paris on Thursday, Kevin and I were on the Savoury station. As had been done in the Pastry I section, we had to produce a lot of meat pies, enough to supply the caf while we were away. I also made a hundred or two Sausage Rolls.

Not exactly exciting but here’s a three steps in one photo. After making the puff pastry (yes, we make it ourselves) a ground meat and spice filling is piped onto a length of pastry so it is about 3 cm wide and thick (top). The pastry is then folded over the filling and the bottom edge is eggwashed (center). This edge is then wrapped up and over (bottom) and the long rope is then cut into 12 cm lengths. At this point, we froze the above (I made this same amount twice) to cover our absence. Once thawed, they are egg washed, baked until golden brown and crispy. Unless you’re vegan, you would likely find these surprisingly tasty. It’s all in the spices, doncha know.

Then we went to Paris for two weeks.

On our return, Kevin and I were into the Puff Pastry section. Here we had to make six individual (or one large) fruit pies and six custard or chiffon pies as well as a dozen eclairs. We also had to make a puff pastry such as cream horns, Paris Brest, Pithivier, or St Honore. For pies, I chose to replicate the delicious Chausson aux Pommes (apple turnover) that we had seen and tasted in Paris. For custard, I selected a lemon curd tart, also enjoyed on our trip. For the puff pastry, I made some Napoleons.

Above: Chaussons aux Pommes. I made an Apple Compote (fresh-cut apple pieces, sugar, butter) and put these in, again, hand-made puff pastry (by Kevin) and placed a generous portion into each pocket, cut with a scalloped cutter. Double-egg washed, the final wash is gently scored by hand before baking. Baked until a deep golden brown, the scores show up as light decorations on the crust. Taste? I had a small morsel (we destroyed a few of these to share with the class) and I must say it was remarkably tasty, better in fact than a couple of bakeries’ in Paris. Somewhere between the very pure “simply apples” from Du Pain et Des Idées and the sweeter apple-sauce fileld types of most boulangeries. I took two home to share with Punkin but I put mine in the fridge to eat later. Big mistake. When I went to get it, it had vanished. Grrr…

The eclairs turned out alright, save for issues with the Crème Diplomat which, for some reason, would simply not stiffen up correctly. I made a second batch for the Napoleons the next day and that worked perfectly. I also noticed that the gelatin sheets the second time around stayed in sheet form after soaking, where in the first batch they disintegrated in the water so now I suspect something had gone off in the sheets I used. Ungelled gelatin would certainly mean soft and soggy diplomat.

I continued with the puff pastry work and made the Napoleons.

Process: bake a sheet of puff pastry large enough to be able to cut out three layers of a size to suit your needs. Here I have cut rectangles 10 cm x 24 cm which, when cut, will give me 6 Napoleon slices. Update: Seems the morning class went ahead and sliced the Napoleons without me around so I have no final photos.

Pipe your filling (here, it’s Crème Diplomat) onto the base sheet; top this with the middle sheet, this is a good place for a sheet that broke. Pipe more crème and top with your best flat sheet to finish. Refrigerate until the crème is quite solid.

Cover the top with a white fondant then pipe several chocolate lines across the top while everything is still a little warm. Immediately run the back of a knife across the lines in one direction then again in the opposite direction to make the distinctive pattern. Allow to cool. Here we had to put the pastry aside until the next week as we were at the end of the Pastry section. This will be helpful as you do want some of the moisture from the crème to seep a little into the puff pastry and make it a little softer and less brittle to make cutting the slices a little easier.

While the Napoleons were chillin’, I made also a few mini-Palmiers from some of the puff pastry:

These are actually rather easy to do. Simply take a length of puff pastry, coat very, very generously with sugar (more than I used here is advised) rolling to embed the sugar as much as possible. Then fold the outsides in to 1/4 of the way, then 1/4 again and fold the two halves together. bake until golden brown and the sugar caramelizes. Flip over to complete baking. Once cooled, serve as is or dip the ends  in some melted chocolate.

And that covers the Puff Pastry section. Next week: Quick Breads.

Tomorrow, we leave for Paris.

Yes, this ragtag bunch of breadheads from Vancouver Island University’s Pro Baking and Pastry Arts course is heading off in all our bright red splendour into the skies, eventually landing some 20 hours later (largely due to time differences) in Paris.

I will eventually get posts and photos added on this blog here but during the trip, Vancouver Island University has asked me to be their official blogger for the Field School so I’ll be updating things from the laptop they lent me directly to the Official VIU Blog space:

VIU Blog: Paris 2012

So those of you interested in following our antics as we visit the 2012 Europain World Bread Baking and Pastry Exhibition, watch the best bakers in the world compete, see the latest baking techniques and equipment and all the usual trade exhibit fun. Then we’ll be hitting a slew of bakeries in Paris and (hopefully) get in “behind the scenes” a bit, visit chocolatier Barry-Callebaut in Brussels at the end of the first week, l’Ecole de Boulangerie et de Patisserie in the second week, and of course get a wee bit of plain ol’ Paris culture in between.

l’Ecole de Boulangerie et de Patisserie a Paris

So hop back in over the next couple of weeks to keep updated and trip about the “City of Lights” with us, even if just virtually.

A bientot! 

With the end of the first section in the CIVIU course, we begin this second half with Level 2 of Pastry where we’ll be upgrading the products we put out. Finer quality items, more detail, a little more complex construction are expected. Likewise, when we get to Breads 2 a few weeks from now, we’ll need to up the ante there as well. This first week in Pastry Level 2 finds me in the Cakes section.

And who’s on the team for this section? Surprise! They didn’t change the teams. So once again, it’s Kevin and I, the only team of two, doing what the other teams of three are expected to pump out. This means bigger workload for us, since we won’t have that third person to help produce all the regular production requirements (cakes, bars, pot pies all for the cafeteria). Fortunately, they’ve decided to cut back on the quantities we have to produce but that applies to teams of three as well. We’re still out one person.  We’ll see how that goes.

Some of the production stuff we needed to do for Cakes week included making a few sponge cakes and carrot cakes (iced), genaches, simple syrups, cheese cakes, simple buttercream and a giant load of Italian meringue buttercream. Since Kevin hadn’t done buttercream when he was on cakes during the previous Pastry section, he got to do it this time. I made the carrot cake. Both of us made a sponge cake. Then we got on to the individual items. Oh, and a special order birthday cake for the end of the week came in… on Wednesday.

Since this meant we were swamped and would have had to either skip the birthday cake or be extremely behind on our mandatories, Chef Gower got one of the people on Ovens to help us out. Hooray! So Josie stepped in and built & decorated the birthday cake.

Above: Kevin creates a peach-topped cake, Josie works on the “shoe box” cake.

Aside from the carrot cake and cheese cakes, I selected Opera Cake as my Specialty Cake.

I made a thin sheet of Joconde cake which, once cooled, is sliced in three equal parts. On third is then coated in a simple melted chocolate sauce and allowed to harden. This is then flipped over and becomes the bottom layer of the finished cake.

The first layer is then given a covering of coffee-flavoured buttercream and this is topped with the second layer of cake. This is then topped with a layer of chocolate ganache, adding the third cake layer and topping this with more coffee-flavoured buttercream.  The surface of this last layer need to be quite smooth and flat as it now gets coated with melted chocolate to form a semi-firm, shiny chocolate finish. (Sorry, no pics of that process; not enough hands, again.)

I made a bunch of marzipan “coffee beans”, shaping little ovals and using the back of a paring knife to make the indentation. A bit of the coffee buttercream was used to pipe little florets on each slice and the bean added to complete the design.

Issues I had: the joconde cake itself was not perfectly level; you can see in the large photo above how it was a bit thin at the very corner then increased in height towards the right. The bottom layer was flat but somewhat thicker. This is all in that original joconde cake baking so it is important to make sure the batter is very well and evenly levelled before baking. Chef Gower also noted the piped floret was too small and would have looked better just a bit bigger.

It certainly tasted good though!

And there went Cake week for Pastry Level 2.  Week two will find us working the ovens so there is nothing to report or show for that section. We’ll therefore be skiping ahead to week three next, where we land in the Bars & Squares section.

This post will be mostly baking photos so that I can get the last bit of the Bread Section recorded in here.

The last bit of the Bread Section (Part 1) at The Culinary Institute of Vancouver Island had us repeating, for the final two weeks, the several areas we had been through during the first six weeks, except we hit each station for just two days. Sort of a “Rapid Fire” version of the original stations which wasn’t actually that stressful as we already “been there, done that” just a short while before.

So here are, not necessarily in chronological order, a whole bunch of photos from theis Bread Section for your visual enjoyment.

Here’s Kevin, my “partner in crime” for this Bread Section, readying a recipe.

And (finally) I managed to get a snap of Angelique, the bakery department’s Assistant; she’s the one who knows where everything is, orders stuff for us and is generally the “power in the background” that makes the whole thing run smoothly. She was a student here a couple of years back herself so she also has a few tips on how this all works.

Pita Breads in two varieties, getting baked.

 The white breads are made using Peter Reinhart’s Lavash Crackers recipe from The Bread Baker’s Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread. the recipe includes a little honey and veg oil, so the bread is enriched and softer than it would be with a straight, flour-water-salt only dough.

The whole wheat ones are made using a basic Whole Wheat Bread recipe we use for, well, plain ol’ whole wheat breads. This would show that pretty much any decent dough can be used for pita breads. This is the same whole wheat bread we used in the loaves at the very top of this post (beautifully slashed, I’ll add, by Chelsea who was on Ovens that day).

The bread disks are put in a very hot oven where they puff up very quickly. They are removed once puffed and flipped over so the opposite side faces the hearth or top. Watch out for steam escaping from the very hot interior of the bread, though, and act fast. Once they puff up once more, they are taken out and stacked as shown to cool; stacking them this way helps them deflate before they harden and keeps them from drying out too fast. The whole baking process takes just a few minutes from raw dough disks to finished bread cooling off.

Danishes

For the Danish station, Kevin and I came up with these Passion Fruit danishes, based on this recipe from chef Eddy Van Damme – his original was cassis based but we had none available. Passion fruit tasted amazing, even if it don’t have the “pow” of the purple cassis, visually.

Bialys two ways

Well, sort of two ways: we’re looking simply at the finish here.

I was assisting Andrea and Nicole with their special bread, bialys, when Mr Barnet came by to indicate that these would next be finished by egg washing and sprinkling with poppy seed.

“Gasp!” said I. That isn’t the “traditional” way of making bialys. So Mr B suggested we do it both ways and see which came out best.

The one on the left is filled with a little of the roasted onion/poppy seed mix, then the filling spoon was wiped atop the bread’s surface, leaving the crust to brown up a little and tasty remnants of onion and poppy seed delicately spread about. Now if this had been my take completely, the onions would have been more of a paste than diced and would have given a better coating to the top of the buns. But I was working with Mr B’s onions & poppy mix here so this was what I could do.

On the right: Mr B’s version, using the same bread disks and a somewhat more hefty amount of onion filling, but finishing up with a coating of egg wash and a sprinkle of poppy seed to the tops. This gives the breads a more golden baked finish.

Who’s is more “correct”? Not easy to decide. First, my version should have stayed in the oven a bit longer – they’re looking very anaemic. Second, it’s likely true that today’s consumer would prefer the “nice golden” even look of the egg-washed version. But if one goes by the bialys produced by places like Coney Island Bialys and Kossar’s Bialys, both New York bakeries that have been making bialys since the 1920s or 30s, just before all Jewish bakeries in Bialystock, Polland disappeared (a travesty of pre-WWII activity): there’s no egg wash used.

Left: Coney Island Bialys. Right: Kossar’s Bialys. Note they are both baked a little deeper than mine had been allowed to.

So here’s my friendly argument with Mr B’s technique: should we be messing with tradition? I think in some case, like these, no. These are the sorts of ‘tweaks’ to classic methods that eventually lead to the soft, fluffy, uninspired bagels that can be found in stores everywhere these days, not even close to what an original bagel should be like. The original bialys – whose actual name is bialystoker kuchen - taste great, have an interesting texture and a bit of history. They can and have stood on their own this way for nearly a century. Is it really necessary to “update” them?

Post your own view below.

Final Exam for Baking Section 1

During the last week , we needed to produce a set of baked items to be marked for our mid term exam. These were:

• Challah breads: 2 loaves, 12 buns
• Empress Hotel Scones
• Tart shells (buttertart filling supplied)
• Muffins of our choice
• Piped Shortbread Cookies

I volunteered, as did three others, to be the first set of people to do this bake-off. We had from 6 am to 11 a.m to make all of the items from scratch.

You can see my finished products in the photo above. Although we still haven’t received our final marks (there is also a written test we did a few days later), Mr B’s comments were fairly positive, although I did do some miscalculations reducing the original scone recipe down to the dozen required here. Not enough sugar. This was clearly an error on my calculations since the original recipe makes 24 and the task, in part was to cut the recipe to 8 so I only needed to reduce all amounts to 1/3. Urgh, a silly mistake that should have been obvious.

The other thing he mentioned was the cookies were slightly underbaked – there was a wee little taste of slightly raw dough noticeable. Another minute or so would have done the trick.

Otherwise, it all turned out quite well. Now I have an idea of what all those “Top Chef” type show contestants feel like when there’s a clock going and a pressure to excel. Timing is everything and part of the issue with the cookies. With four of us baking while the kitchen was doing it’s normal routine as well, I was shut out of the oven until the very last minute so I jumped the gun a bit to get my presentation done. My problem, though. We were also marked on our Mise en Place, which included the logistics of when to make what in order to simultaneously make and bake five different items. Other than the oven bottleneck, I think I did pretty well.

I didn’t get the other folks layout photographed that day (sorry!) but I did snap some pics of the batch from two days later:

Mr Barnet tasting and marking the goods. There’s Kev and Sara’s output.

And while people were taking their tests, we were still pumping out the normal lots of baked goods…

The first photo is of a set of baguettes Kevin and I made up a few weeks before. Note they’re somewhat odd shaped and poorly slashed.

Next, we made baguettes on the last day and this is the new batch of dough, slashed and ready for the oven. Below that, the same baguettes baked and ready to be sent up to the Culinary class for sandwiches. There’s much improvement in the slashing and shaping. The bottom two are my slashes and they should have been a little less diagonal, I think. You can’t really see much “gringe” on these, either.  Still, not a bad batch at all. We didn’t get to cut them open to check the crumb or taste them as the Black Hats (cooking students) were there to pick them up the instant they came out of the oven.

Sourdough Bagel Fail

The day after my exam, I made up a batch of sourdough bagels using “Lucy”, the class white starter. With only two days at our disposal, it was sort of imperative to get these going as quickly as possible before the end of our station and, in fact, of Bread I section. I had fed Lucy the night before but she had just come out of the refrigerator and wasn’t, in reality, up to snuff. Another feed or two and she’s have been going gangbusters. Alas, not the case. What we ended up with was bagels that just wouldn’t bulk proof and, in spite of forging ahead to beat the clock, when we tried to boil and bake them the next day, they sank like lead rings in the malt water. We baked a dozen to see if they could at all be rescued but… no. Tasteless. Really tasteless, no flavour at all. Not even “bad” flavour. I hope the other class get to give these sourdough bagels (I used the Mike Avery recipe you can see here) another, less frantic go and start to produce these really tasty bagels on a regular basis. The ones we make now are ok, but these, when made right, knock them out of the park effortlessly.

Pro Tip: Never rush a sourdough starter; you’ll simply be wasting your time, energy and ingredients.

I also made a batch of 40% Rye Bread with Caraway that very last day with “Roland”, the class rye starter. This one I had taken home a couple of days before to get going properly. These turned out rather nicely and tasted great. But then I’m a bit of a rye fan. I even made another batch at home when I had finished this loaf. MMmmm rye bread…

And there you have it, end of the first half of the Professional Baking course. The following week, we start on Pastries II where we are to get into more intricate deserts. Midway through this section, we’re heading out to paris for Europain, back for the last  three weeks of Pastry II, then into Bread II until May. At that point, we are to be doing a Parcticum while working in a real live bakery for a couple of weeks, then it’s graduation.

Good grief, time flew by fast!!

The Handmade Loaf becomes our Group Baking focus

With Jeffrey Hamelman’s wonderful “Bread: A Baker’s Book of Techniques and Recipes” now completed, the Mellow Bakers have chosen to set their collective sights on Dan Lepard’s highly praised book, The Handmade Loaf available from Amazon UK here. Elsewhere, it is available as  “The Art of Handmade Bread” and in Spain, a translated version titled “Hecho a Mano“.

With over 80 bread recipes in this book, we are looking forward to a great variety of new challenges each month as we proceed through The Handmade Loaf, baking as many loaves as each member feels is warranted for their personal situation. Bake as many – or as few – of each month’s selected breads as you think makes sense for your household. The group name “Mellow Bakers” is not accidental. We strive to keep the group baking process as user-friendly as possible, so there really are no expectations or requirements to join in. All you need is the book, a desire to make a variety of bread and sharing the results with your fellow Mellow Bakers. Having a blog to show off your baking results is a bonus but not required, the forum platform lets you post and, if you have them, upload your own photos.

The main goal is to build up our skills as we attempt breads we might not otherwise have given a try to and to share our baking experiences with fellow bread heads. No matter where you feel you are on the bread baking path, we welcome everyone old-time bread heads and brand new novices. If you’re just starting out, this is a fine way to get a lot of bread experience under your belt in a supportive, friendly atmosphere. Old hands will appreciate the variety and challenge of making loaves they might have otherwise passed over.

Dan Lepard, author of The Handmade Loaf, is an accomplished photographer and award-winning baker and writer who has worked for great chefs all over the world. His latest book is Short and Sweet, a compilation of over 200 various recipes. He is also the writer of a regular column, “How to Bake” in the UK’s The Guardian newspaper. He also has a popular website, DanLepard.com with recipes, reviews, a blog and an active forum.

If you’d like to join us as we bake our way through The Handmade Loaf, hop on over to MellowBakers.com and check us out! Jump in (and out) at any point, too – we aren’t limiting this group to only those who start baking from the beginning or agree to do the entire book; that just wouldn’t be Mellow!

The group bake is slated to start in April, 2012 although we’ll be discussing some of the details ahead of that so everyone’s input is more than welcome.

We look forward to seeing you!

At last, we’ve gathered up the courage to make macarons, these delightful little meringue-based almond cookies that are currently extremely de rigeur in the classiest of places. Reading up on them, however, may made you a little daunted because of the aura of finickiness that seems to be placed around their construction.

Fear not, for there are a few things you can learn that will make creating macarons much simpler than is usually shown.

This is the third part of a series showing how I made my very first batch of Macarons. Previous entries were:

Making Swiss Meringue Buttercream (great for cookies or cake)
Making Almond Flour

The following pictorial step-by-step is based on the macaron recipe found on the awesome blog BraveTart.com where pastry chef Stella Parks guides you through the process, eliminating much of the hocus-pocus typically associated with making these cookies. Her view, basically, is this: They’re just cookies. Yes, there are steps peculiar to this style of cookies, but there are specific steps for many other cookies too and this doesn’t elevate them to near-ritualistic requirements.

As noted in a prior post, two things you will want to read – and possibly print out – before we get too far ahead are:

1. The Ten Macaron Commandments
2. Ten Macaron Myths Busted

Some of the things we’re told we can be less fussy about: perfectly aged egg whites and their temperature, drying the piped cookies, drying the almond flour, using cornstarch-free powdered sugar, being super-duper careful with the meringue. Let’s just follow Stella’s simple recipe and get us some nice macarons, shall we?

You may also want to print out this template I made for piping out macarons in either PDF format or as a PNG image. It will fit a typical (US) home sized baking pan of 16″ x 10″ under a silpat type silicone liner or parchment paper.

Simply print out TWO copies at full (US 8.5″ x 11″) page size, tape the open ends together and trim. Each baking sheet will then give you a total of 32 circles (for 16 finished cookies), optimized for the standard macaron size of 3.5 cm with 2 cm space between each. Just remember to pull it out from under your parchment or silpat before putting your piped macarons in the oven!

Alright, let’s gather our ingredients and make some macarons!

Our Macaron Ingredients

The following should be enough to make about 40 finished cookies, so 80 macaron disks.

Equipment:

• At least two 16″ x 10″ sheet pans with silpat liners or parchment
• Large piping bag with plain round tip
• A stand mixer (preferrably)

Preheat the oven to 300 F (150 C)

Macarons Directions

The following is based on the recipe posted on the BraveTart site; the main difference here is simply the inclusion of step-by-step photos. This recipe forgoes many of the usual “tricky bits” of making macarons.

Put your egg whites, sugar, salt and, if using, the scrapings of a vanilla bean (don’t add any extract yet) into your mixer’s bowl. Using the whip attachment, whip this mixture for 3 minutes at speed 4 on Kitchenaid (med low otherwise). At the end of the 3 minutes, the resulting mix won’t look like it’s done much, which is correct.

Increase the speed to 7 and whip for another 3 minutes, then up again to speed 8 for 3 minutes more. Stop the mixer. The resulting mix will now look like proper, rather stiff meringue. Scrape the sides of the bowl with a spatula.

At this point, add any flavour extracts and, if used, colouring of choice. I use AmeriColor Soft Gel Paste, available at good baking supply stores or online. Wilton brand would work as well, available at  Michaels Craft Stores. Last choice would be grocery store colours as they are very “wet” and not terribly concentrated and therefore may add unwanted moisture to your meringue.

Now give your meringue a good whipping at top speed (10) for a minute to get all the colour ad flavour dispersed and get that meringue good and stiff. When you lift the whisk from the meringue, there should be a big glob of meringue stuck in the center; you can knock that out by tapping the whisk on the bowl’s side. If there is NOT a glob in the middle, your meringue is still too soft. Give it another minute at top speed. Check the stiffness again.

Once the meringue is the right stiffness, dump in all your dry ingredients at once. The next stage is part of the “hocus-pocus”…

The Macaronage

Fold the dry ingredients into your meringue using a rubber spatula. For the uninitiated, “Folding” means scooping from the bottom and in a smooth sweep, dropping the results on top. It is a smooth, rhythmic motion: dip deep down, smooth stroke up (along the side of the bowl) flip spatula over when you come up, dropping the bottom stuff on top; give the bowl a 1/6 turn, repeat. The pont in this motion is (normally) to gently mix the ingredients into the meringue without beating out all the air you meticulously added while whipping.

Except with macaronage, we DO want to deflate the meringue a little bit.

So we change the motion a bit: We scoop in, gently scrape along the bowl’s side as we move up, dump the scoop on top, then press that spatula down onto what we just brought up, squishing it onto the side of the bowl. This last extra move will knock a wee bit of the air out of the stiff meringue. We’re still gently incorporating the dry stuff into the meringue but adding a small bit of controlled deflation.

You’ll start with what looks like a big mess and eventually end up with a slightly glossy, softer but still a bit stiff batter. To get there, do the following:

Count your scoops. As you reach scoop 25, stop. Take a little of the batter and drop it down onto the rest. You are now going to watch what happens in the next several seconds. If it stays where you dropped it and never incorporates back in, it is still too stiff.

Give it another two scoops, then check again. At some point, likely 15 extra scoops, you will note that the glob you drop back down stays up but in a few seconds begins to “melt” back into the remainder. After 15-20 seconds, it should have levelled out considerably, yet still be a soft blob. You need to check like this for the first few times you make macarons only, by then tyou’ll start getting the “feel” and know when it’s done.

If you go too fast and too far, your batter will become too soft, the glob you drop back will almost immediately smooth itself out to invisibility. At this point, you’ve lost the game, you’ve deflated the meringue too much. Start over from scratch; this will not make macarons.

See the photo on the right above? I went a tad too far here and passed the “perfect point” by a couple of extra scoops. Not so bas as to be unusable but I would have been better off holding back a bit earlier. On my next batch, I did much better.

BTW: In case it’s not clear, I’m doing this step-by-step on my own First Ever Attempt, so you get to see me making mistakes and, hopefully, this will help you avoid too many of your own. However, I contend that doing everything perfectly the first (few) time(s) is a bad way to go – you learn a LOT by making mistakes. 

The goal here is to get a batter that is the right consistency so you don’t have it running out of your piping bag and/or once piped in your little circles, spreading out into flat puddles. Your circles need enough body to maintain some height yet soft enough that the peaks will level out slightly after about 20 seconds.

Piping Macarons

OK, so your batter is at the right consistency (or close to), now it’s time to make your little meringue disks.

Fill a large piping bag bit more than half-full. You don’t want to fill to much or the bag becomes hard to handle and the pressure you get is difficult to control. The tip should be a large, plain round tip.

Slip your template sheet under your parchment or silpat liner on a baking tray and let’s start piping. The circle size should be about 3.5 cm (a smidge under 1.5 inches), and spaced 2 cm apart (a hair more than 3/4 inch). The template shown at top is designed to get the most cookies out of a standard North American home baking pan. You will want to maintain your piped circles a fraction inside the actual circle as the meringue will spread a little after you’ve piped it.

Above is my original attempt to “eyeball” the size and placement (I made the template after this, for obvious reasons) and as you can see, there was a definite lack of continuity. I also didn’t get as many cookies as possible from each pan. My second batch, with template, were much more even sized and better distributed, getting 32 cookies where the tray on the right above got only 20, and the tray on left got 33 but much too close together.

Serious case of “Do as I say, not as I do”!

Once your circles have been piped out, take the tray and, warning anyone nearby, give it a couple of good, hard smacks on the counter top. This will help to get those little “nipples” to disappear somewhat and also knock the bigger air bubbles out. Turn the tray 1/4 turn and give it a couple more smacks.

Baking the Macarons

Put the trays of macarons in the 300 F oven and bake for 16 – 18 minutes or until you can peel the parchment/liner away from a sacrifice macaron easily. If they come apart when you try to lift them, it needs more time.

Once they are baked, put the full trays on a rack and let the macarons cool completely. Lift off the macarons carefully, using a metal spatula if needed (metal spatula is good and thin).

The two trays of pink macarons from my very first attempt: one had mostly successes, the second had a lot of cracked shells. These were much too crowded. The two trays from my second attempt, below, were almost all good. They also rose up more with better “feet”.

Note in this close-up  that some of these cookies have a strange, dull looking raised spot on them. This is because I followed a small trick suggested on some macaron sites to finish up the piped disks and get rif of the remaining nipple “bump”: you use a wet finger to tap the little nub down. What this causes here, however, is a damp spot on the otherwise drier, slightly shiny cookie top and when baked, this spot gets a spongy look and rises a bit more than the shell around it. This is strictly a visual issue but one I would suggest not be done to the cookies. Improved piping skill and the right consistency plus good tray whacking should get rid of the little lumps.

Once all the cookies are baked and off the liners, start matching them as pairs based on size and prettiness. Even cracked, odd shaped cookies will taste great. The perfect ones can be for guests.

Fill your (cleaned up) piping bag with the filling of choice. Here I’ve used the milk chocolate Swiss buttercream I made previously. To one of each pairs of disks, apply a dollop of filling, about the size of a quarter and generously enough, then place the top on the cookie.  In the sample above, I was just a little shy on the filing, not yet knowing if the buttercream would go far enough to do all the cookies. Which, obviously, it would have and this is how I know 2 cups of filling will do 40 filled cookies quite nicely.

Veronica, a blogger who attended a macaron class at Pierre Hermé in Paris (they have stopped giving these now) reported that their filling quantity is equal to the weight of the two cookie halves. If two shells weighed 11 grams, there should be 11 grams of filling. I didn’t weigh the shells so I have no idea what the average weight would be. Next time I make these, I’ll check that.

In this second phase of our Macaron process, we pick up a neat little money saving tip (who doesn’t like to save a little money, raise your hand… and send it to me). You have an urge to make macarons but have no ready source for almond flour or you’ve seen it on the store shelf and the price made you swoon.

Not to fear, you can make your own almond flour and be whipping out macarons in no time at all.

Here’s what you’ll need to make almond flour:

• 115g blanched almonds (whole, slices or slivers, doesn’t matter)
• 230g powdered sugar (confectioner’s)
• A food processor and a sieve.

Note that this quantity is the amount needed to make the Macaron recipe listed here. You’ll also note that the sugar is double the almond so adjust as needed.

Directions: Put all the almonds and about half the sugar (doesn’t need to be exact) in the food processor with the blade attachment. Process for about 1 minute, keeping a watchful eye so you don’t get almond butter (the sugar should help prevent this). Sift the resulting product through a standard sifter into a bowl.

Take the remaining larger chunks and put them back into the processor with the remaining sugar and give them another minute of processing. Sift again into your bowl . By this point, you should should be down to maybe a tablespoon or two of slightly coarse nut bits left. If this is all you have left, toss it into the main almond flour pile. If ti’s much more, give that a third whirr.

That’s it. You’ve got almond powder ready!

This process is based on info from BraveTart.com

You can also follow this same process if you want to make your macarons with different types of nut: hazelnuts, pistachio, whatever you prefer.

ProTip: Store your almonds (or any other nuts), whether ground, whole or pieces, in the refrigerator so the oils don’t start to go rancid. If you buy a fair amount when they go on sale, you can have some on hand at any time the macaron bug hits.

Next: Making Macarons
Before: Making Swiss Meringue Buttercream 

Whether used for cakes or cookies, this Swiss Meringue Buttercream is light, not too sweet and pretty straight forward to make. Swiss Meringue differs from Italian Meringue by the fact the egg and sugar are heated up together (145ºF minimum) before whipping, where Italian Meringue cooks the beaten eggs whites by adding very hot (245ºF) sugar syrup. Both of these are used to make buttercream frosting. A third type, French Meringue, is simply egg whites beaten with sugar, what most cooks would put on their lemon pies then bake.

Swiss Meringue Buttercream basic recipe

* 4g is about 1/2 teaspoon. Only add salt if you use unsalted butter (recommended). If you use salted butter, leave the salt out.

You can use either fresh eggs or the pre-packaged carton stuff, both will work just fine.

Equipment: You will need a mixer (or whisk and strong arm) and a thermometer.

The full sized batch will give about 10 cups or 2.3 liters of buttercream. You can freeze any extra and use it later; just let it warm to room temp them re-whip it. For the Macaron recipe, the 300g, 1/5 size batch, which I made below, will be plenty for 40 cookies.

For the milk chocolate version (full size batch), cut the vanilla in half and use 225g milk chocolate chunks plus 140g dark chocolate chunks. For the 1/5 size shown above, I reduced these to 45g milk and 28g dark.

If you don’t know what the baker’s percentage means, simply ignore this column.

Swiss Meringue Buttercream Directions:

Prep: Get butter out early and cut it into 2 inch cubes and set aside to get to room temp. Measure out your egg whites as well so they get to room temp too. Clean your mixer’s stainless steel bowl and whisk impeccably to get rid of any trace of grease or your meringue will fail; use a little vinegar on paper towel if needed.

Once you’re ready to start, add the egg whites, sugar, salt (if needed) and vanilla (if needed) to the stainless steel bowl of your mixer. Give the mixture a little whisking. Place this on top of a pot with an inch or so of water, heated to just steaming. You do NOT want it boiling or even simmering or your eggs will cook. Nor do you want the bottom of the bowl in the hot water, merely over it.

Use your candy or instant-read thermometer to watch the mixture’s temperature. Whisk a little every now and then. Your desired temperature is between 145ºF – 150ºF which is the safe temperature for egg whites. This will only take a minute or three so don’t go anywhere. If you used eggs right from the fridge, it may take a minute or so more.

Once you have reached your desired temp, remove the bowl from the pot and place it on your mixer.

Whip the egg whites on medium-high until they are doubled and snowy white with a medium peak. This will take a few minutes. Then turn the speed down to low and mix until the temperature of the bowl/meringue is cool. Test the bowl with your hand, you want no trace of warmth. For this reason, you do not want to use a glass or ceramic bowl as they’ll keep the heat and continue to cook the meringue.

Chocolate version: While the eggs are beating, put your chocolate chunks in a microwave safe bowl (I recommend a cup with a handle) and heat it in 30 second sessions. Stir the chunks with a spatula after each session until they are almost all melted. It only took me two full 30 second goes to almost melt my chocolate. The bowl I used got really hot; too hot to handle, ergo the cup recommendation. Note there are still a couple of small chunks left not fully melted. Stirring got these finished up nicely.

Next: don’t do what I did. Instead, slowly add the softened butter to the meringue, a chunk or two at a time, mixing at med-low, until it is well incorporated. Scrape down the sides often, continue until all the butter is added. If you are making plain vanilla flavoured Swiss meringue buttercream, taste the meringue and, if needed, add a few drops more vanilla to taste. Then you’re done at this point. If you are making other flavours of Swiss meringue buttercream, you would add this now, generally as follows:

Now you can add the chocolate (I added it before the butter – still worked out ok but..). The original recipe says to turn the mixer to low and add all the chocolate at once. You may want to stop the mixer and take the bowl off to add the chocolate (or other flavour component) directly into the meringue, avoiding it getting onto the cold bowl where it will seize. Use your spatula to get most of it incorporated, then pop it back on the mixer to whip it in well at med-low speed.

Once the chocolate is well mixed in, you are done! The 1/5 batch I made here gave about 2 cups.

And there you have it: Light, creamy Swiss meringue buttercream for your macarons or cakes!

Other flavour variations for Swiss meringue buttercream:

Dark Chocolate: Same amount as the milk chocolate version except the whole 365g  is dark chocolate (~75g for 1/5 batch).

Caramel: Melt 20 oz caramel squares (4 oz for the 1/5 batch) before you start and let this cool to room temperature. After the butter is mixed in, whip at low speed while drizzling the caramel in. Whip until completely mixed in.

Peanut Butter: Measure out as much peanut butter as there is butter. Once all the butter is mixed in, add the peanut butter, a little at a time and whip in at med-low speed, until it is “to taste”. You may well not use up all the peanut butter, depending on how deep its flavour is.

Look on the interwebs for other flavour possibilities.

STORING: Swiss Meringue Buttercream freezes well. Just be sure to thaw it out before use and give it another run in the mixer. It may look like it has “broken” at first but keep beating it and it will come together again nicely.

Want to Print this Recipe? Easy! Click the handy “Print friendly” button below to get a cleaned up version of the page, edit out superfluous yakking and get a tidy end product!

This recipe is based on the Swiss Meringue Buttercream from BraveTart.com

Next: Making Almond Flour
Then: Making Macarons

Macarons. Little almond/meringue based cookies with creamy fillings that seem to be all the rage these days or for the past several years at least. There are elite shops set up that sell just macarons in all varieties of flavours and colours, the most famous of these being Pierre Hermé (left and center pics below) and Ladurée, both out of Paris, natch.

Researching these cookies, one is left with the distinct impression that they require not only skill of the highest degree but intricate steps and rituals known only to the anointed.  Mere mortals can expect endless failure, best to leave it to the pros, kids.

And at prices tipping the $2 – $2.50 mark per cookie, it’s understandable that those who make them want to keep them pretty exclusive. It would, for example, cost you about $700 for the cookies visible in the photo of the display case seen above. Of course, you’re also paying for the high-brow location, the perfectly appointed stylish shop (yes, it is lovely), extra fancy packaging and a fairly large dose of lah-dee-dah.

Inspiration for Macarons

Enter Stella Parks of BraveTart.com and pastry chef at Table 310 in Lexington, KY. Her viewpoint: They’re just cookies, people! There’s nothing magical about them (although they are pretty damn tasty) and you don’t need to set up a sacrificial altar to the macaron gods to make them successfully.

And Stella knows what she speaks of. She makes these by the hundreds each week so has developed a very successful process that knocks out all the finicky, excess steps. And best of all, she shares her recipe and tips on her blog: Basic Macaron Recipe here, the Ten Commandments of what you must do here, and lastly, Ten Macaron Myths Busted here.

Naturally, I decided to give these little goodies a try. In fact, two tries at this point.

What I’ll do is break the process down into three parts:

1. Swiss Meringue Buttercream
2. Almond Flour (pretty simple, really)
3. Making Macarons

I’ll give each of these their own posts so it doesn’t turn into a ginormous long essay and you can print each process out individually, using the very handy PrintFriendly button below every post on the blog.

Speaking of, did you know you can nab a bookmark bar button that lets you print any page easily without lots of excessive info and graphics? Check out the PrintFriendly page for details and add it to your browser(s) now. It will make grabbing recipes and info SOOO much simpler for you! Do it before you hop over to Sally’s pages, too.

Alrighty then, let’s get going on these babies, shall we? Next up: Swiss meringue Buttercream!

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And into the third week of the Bread Baking section here at VIU, we enter the Wood Fired Oven station. This is, undeniably, one of the stations I have most been looking forward to. I have it somewhere in my brainpan that when I get a bakery going, one thing it will have that helps differentiate it from most other bakeries, and most certainly from grocery store bakeries, is the use of a wood fired oven.

Although I doubt it would be wise to use this sort of oven exclusively because there will be many things that a bakery pumps out that will need a very regulated temp and it would be really unwise to forego the use of a more standard oven completely. Patisseries, for example, would be a lot more difficult to produce in a wood oven, needing to have the timing just right to catch the heat as it passes through the temp range pastries need. However, it could be a wise move to make use of a wood oven for a bulk of the bread baking.

So there we were, well before the crack of dawn, getting the oven started for the week.

After beginning a small fire with some small scraps left over from the week before, Kevin tackles the chopping of the firewood. Over the next two days, he filled about 6 crates full of small kindling to fair sized pieces of wood, as seen in the two different crates in the bottom right of the photo.

Setting a pile of kindling alight, a few larger pieces were placed in the opening, near the fire, in order to help dry out the already seasoned but slightly damp wood before moving it onto the fire.

Not to long after this, several more pieces join the flames and the lot get pushed further back into the oven.

This, by the way, is a design based on the Allan Scott plans and it has a cavity of about 4 ft by 6 ft so there is a fair bit of space in there, needing a fair bit of heating up to get it up to temp. There are two probes in the base if the stove to indicate what the temperature is right under the fire and a few inches below this. A heat sensor gun give us info on the inside of the cavity. Eventually, we would get the heat on the ceiling to about 1000ºF while the flames were burning strongly, as in the photo at right.

After several hours and stoking with more firewood and sawdust briquettes, we had a large bed of hot coals keeping the ceiling temp near 700ºF with a floor at 500ºF. The probes, however, noted the insulation base was hovering in the mid 300 ºF range. It would take a fairly long time for the mass there to get very hot and maintain that heat.

On day one, we were able to get the wood oven hot enough to handle a batch of bagels wich the team of Taina, Andrea and Paul C produced. Kevin baked these off beautifully while I was prepping the veggies and other aspects of the lunchtime pizzas. These, however, would be done in the deck oven as we did not need to temp the baking gods and mess up dozens and dozens of pizzas.

And that, in effect, was basically our duties for the week: in the morning, fire up the oven for a couple of hours (for the next few days, already hot from the previous day), clean out the coals and ash, bake up bagels and whatever bread was headed to the wood oven, prep all pizzas for the 11 a.m. lunch crowd, including making the dough, dividing and rolling out 30+ small pizza shells, top said pizza shells with prepped veg and and bake. This would get us from 6 a.m. (or earlier) right through to noon when the class would head off for Theory and the pastry class took over the bakery.

I actually managed, with some help from Taina, to get a fair number of photos of the pizza making process. Wanna see? Of course you do.

Each day, we prepared all the condiments needed and made a selection of Meat Lovers (sauce, ham, salami, mushrooms, green onion, pineapple and cheese mix), Vegetarian (sauce, green onion, mushroom, olives, roasted red peppers, topped with feta , Parmesan and mix cheeses), pesto (pesto sauce, feta, mushroom, onion, black olives, chopped tomato) and a “special” which was up to us. We fire roasted some eggplant and later in the week, Mr B roasted some chickens so those were the main components of our “specials” this week.

Here, Kevin is ready to start loading the oven with some of the just prepared pizzas. Next, I am helping get a batch of baked pizzas into the pans.

Some of our pizzas baking in the oven. Although not at the highest possible temp, these pizzas bakes in about 5 to 6 minutes. In an oven that is dedicated to pizzas, you would keep a small fire going to one side and your temps would hover in the 900 to 1000 ºF range, where you could cook the pizzas in about 1 to 2 minutes.

Here we have brought the hot pizzas inside and are slicing, plating and about to deliver them to the lower caf (directly behind us) for the hungry folk waiting.

During this week, we also had a few catering orders come in (it’s getting to holiday time now so I am guessing there are a few staff parties going on in the University) and we had to produce some 30 large size pizzas for different department. I am pleased to say that Mr B was told by the Dean that the pizzas Kevin and I made were excellent. I have to assume that this means we did a better than normal job to warrant a special note back from the Dean to say so.

I even bought one (pesto) myself. We do pretty darn good pizza!

We also had to produce some 120 par-baked pizza shells for another special order, dunno who needed that many. But that was an interesting experience on its own. The bakery isn’t a mass production sort of place, most everything is done by hand with a little mechanical assistance, so pumping out that many shells, on top of what we are expected to make each day on TOP of the 30 special order large pizzas, was an interesting trip into high gear work.

Fortunately, we do have a big ol’ machine that helps with the shaping of loaves, an Acme Molder. Although the one in the photo isn’t ours, it is the same big-ass machine as ours. Connor and I spend a good couple of hours feeding dozens and dozens of little dough bals into it (Kevin was tending the oven outside and making bread). After just a dozen or so, we got the hang of it and were able to pump out nearly perfect sized round(ish) circles of dough. Connor is DA MAN!

That’s about it for Wood Fired Oven week for Kevin and I. It went incredibly fast and, in fact, this Bread Section is wipping by at a crazy pace; we’re already halfway through our stations! Next week, we do Ovens, meaning baking everything that needs baking in the deck and convection ovens, making sure the morning deliveries are ready to go out and all special orders are being attended to. It will be a little crazy because it’s the last week before holidays so a lot of extra stuff will come in.

And speaking of other stations, here are some shots of the work done by the other teams.

Taina and Sandie work on braiding a few loaves. Happy braiders!

A few of the breads made by the yeast teams, including a braid-on-braid loaf (bottom right) from Andrea. I baked these in the wood oven myself; it only took about 20 minutes for them to get to 200 ºF inside!

You know how I noted that I didn’t get any photos of our doughnuts in last week’s post? Well, I’m going to vicariously enjoy these photos of doughnuts, produced by the Sara, Alexis and Ally team – and I think it’s fair to say Ally is the mastermind in the doughnut department here. Hers are obviously very festive, something I had thought of doing but passed on last week, as we were still in November. Nice job, ladies! Enjoy Wood Oven next week! (They follow Kevin and me.)

Connor (Mr Dang Helpful Dude), helps with pizzas. Shay is part of the Oven team this week, along with Josie and Leah, and are the team Kevin and I follow.

I may have mentioned this before but Connor is always trying to avoid being caught on camera and here Paul is trying to help him get over his camera phobia. Not sure if it’s really helping much.

Josie “eats the evidence” of a failed chocolate dipping while some decorated gingerbread cookies await packaging for another special order.

Paul C displays a nice Pullman loaf (a.k.a. Pain de Mie), heading soon for the slicing machine.

Lauren, Andrea and Sara help pump out more holiday treats for special orders, while Alexis and, way in the back, Ally make fondant decoration for some christmas cakes.

Part of the Holiday Treats brigade: Lauren, Sandy, Andrea, Sara and Josie.

Chocolate dipped shortbread cookies wrapped with a bow and candy canes, and chocolate truffles rolled in chocolate and white chocolate shavings (I think).

And that does it for this week’s activities!

This weekend, Mr B has invited everyone to his house for a Sunday get-together before he heads out Tuesday for his vacation to Australia!!! Standing in for the remainder of the week will be Chef Gower. That will be our last week for 2011 and we’ll return Tue January 3rd.

But I may well have a post or two in the meantime so don’t go too far, hear?

Oh, and because someone (Taina) was saying I’m never in the pictures (being behind the camera seems to do that, doncha know) here’s a shot Taina took of yours truly: