For the Love of Bread

Reunited and it feels so good
Reunited 'cause we understood
There's one perfect fit and, sugar, this one is it
We both are so excited 'cause we are reunited...

Is it wrong that I started singing this song to my dinner (lasagna, garlic bread & salad) when the delivery guy from Gino's dropped it off?

Oh bread...you are my dark mistress...

So yes, Passover has ended and my separation from leavened products is now behind me.  Just in time too - we made petit fours and macaroons today and we start our wedding cake projects tomorrow!  You know, it's not easy to pick your initial post-Passover meal.  Just ask my classmates, I polled many of them to get their opinion on what I should order for dinner tonight.  I also joked with Dave that when he comes home tonight, he may find me passed out on the couch, hugging a loaf of bread with crumbs everywhere.  Was that creepy?  Too far?  I never can tell these days.

So yes!  Petit fours!  Adorable, tiny cakes that are highly annoying to assemble.  As teams we prepared an almond sponge (the same base that's used to make rainbow cookies), cut it into thirds and stacked the layers with raspberry jam and stuck them in the fridge to be weighted down overnight.  Then this morning, we spread a layer of buttercream on top, followed by a layer of rolled fondant.  Then we had to cut them into 1" squares.  Do you have any idea how small that is?  It's crazy!  After that, we had to ladle poured fondant over the squares to cover them evenly and this is the point where I started to lose my mind.  The petit fours are so small that pouring fondant over them is like an avalanche of snow coming down upon my Mom's cat, Libby(no animals were hurt or attacked with snow during the writing of this blog).  Plus, Julie's and my poured fondant was always too thick or too hot, and just plain difficult to work with.  I now completely understand why they're so expensive - not only are the ingredients pretty costly, but they take a long time to assemble completely.  In the end though, I'm pretty happy with how my petit fours came out, aren't they cute?

Here's a picture of the chocolate macaroons that Julie and I made, they are soooo good.  Unlike the kind of macaroons that I'm used to (hello Manischewitz!), they're not made with coconut; This automatically bumps them up in my book.  These ones were actually made with almond flour, which is essentially finely ground almonds.  Since we flavored ours with cocoa powder, we decided to sandwich them together with a little ganache (as opposed to raspberry/lemon jam or buttercream).  I twisted Dave's arm into trying one when I got home from school today and he said that it was like eating an all chocolate Oreo.  To me, the cookies are much softer than that, but there's no denying that they are super-chocolaty.

One of my classmates made a comment that they weren't exactly lo-cal, but Chef Katie came right back with, "You're never going to see a tombstone that says, 'I shouldn't have eaten that petit four.' It's going to say something like, 'I should've been nicer to my kids', or, 'I shouldn't have made that internet video, even though I was young and needed the money...'"  Ha! Basically - everything in moderation people!!  Pastries are too good not to enjoy every so often, just don't eat them constantly and you'll be fine.

Like I mentioned earlier, our wedding cake project starts tomorrow.  It's kind of a practical-light.  Yes, we're graded on it, but not as critically as we will be on our module practicals next week.  Also, while the design for the cake will be our own, the cake base and icing are assigned to us randomly because we have to get used to having a client who may not have the same cake/icing preferences as you do.  Julie and I got chocolate cake with chocolate ganache.  This is exciting and nerve-wracking at the same time.  Exciting because I really do like the look and taste of a cake with a poured ganache finish, but I'm also pretty nervous, because you have to keep your crumb coat so clean and perfect, otherwise once your pour the ganache on, it'll show every imperfection or jagged edge underneath.  I think we've come up with a pretty cool design, and I'll be sure to post more about it as we work on it over the next 3 days.