I don't know if you've ever seen my Mom's buche de noel before - it kind of looks like this, but way more awesome. I've always wanted to be able to make that cake as well as my Mom does, so you can imagine my excitement when I found out that last Friday we were making swiss rolls, which are the same base. It's made with a sponge recipe, which is kind of tricky - it's a very thin, flat cake made in a half sheet pan and it's very annoying to roll up!! We used raspberry jam mixed with whipped cream as the filling, and I'm pretty sure that when my Mom rolls hers up, she rolls it up on the same parchment that it was baked on, but Chef Katie had us invert them onto another sheet of parchment and roll them up from there. This almost made things more difficult, because the top of the cake kept sticking to this new sheet of parchment, but Julie and I managed to roll it up in the end.
In an effort to not wind up being 500 lbs by the end of this class, Dave and I both agreed that I wouldn't take home every single thing that I wind up making. It's so difficult because unlike most of my classmates, I don't have a lot of family nearby, so I can't give perishable items to them. Plus, I no longer work at a job where I have a plethora of co-workers, so I can't share with them either. Therefore, the last 2 products I made I wound up donating to the culinary students, which serves 2 purposes - someone gets to eat it and it gets me in good with the culinary students so that when they're doing their menu projects, they'll ask us to taste them :)
Here are some pictures of the swiss roll that I split up and gave to the students in kitchens 2 & 3:
Yummy Goodness!
On Monday we did more prep for the rest of the week and also wound up making a German's Chocolate Cake. Despite popular belief, this cake didn't originate in Germany. In fact, the chocolate used to make it was invented by an American named Sam German. He created it for the Baker's Chocolate Company and they named the chocolate bar after him, hence - German's chocolate. These cakes look really amazing, but since neither Dave or I are fans of coconut, I had no problem donating this one to the rest of the school as well. We made a fudgy chocolate cake base, and then the filling is made of butter, eggs and sugar cooked together which is then mixed with vanilla, coconut and chopped pecans. Then we applied a crumb coat & top border with chocolate buttercream and stuck chopped up nuts, coconut and cake crumbs to the sides and put it in the fridge. Once it was chilled slightly, we poured a cooled ganache on top and let it pool in the middle of the border we'd piped - it looked so cool!! Again...too bad I don't like coconut!
Then, Chef Katie showed us how to pipe with white chocolate. Just like with my genoise cake, I didn't really want to write anything typical, so I wrote the first thing that came to mind:
Happy Rex Manning Day!!
When one of my classmates saw this, she came barreling at me and gave me an attack hug. Nothing brings two people together like Empire Records :)
On another note, I've started practicing some of the cookies from my last module at home. So far I've made chocolate chip, double-chocolate macadamia nut and peanut butter cookies and yes - I will be sending out carepackages this week. Don't be sad if you don't get one because chances are good that if you don't get one of these, that you'll be first to get one of the next ones! I hope you like cookies!
Also - We haven't gotten our final grades for the first module yet b/c the computer system at school crashed, but Chef Katie did give us the grades for our practical and written exams. I got a 90.5 on my practical (respectable) and 106 on my written exam (!!!!!) 106? I guess I really did get all of the extra credit questions right. ;)
I hope that you all have a great day, and that you get your stomachs ready for cookies!
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