Introduction to pastry and bakery September 2014

Tuesday, 4 November 2014

Hectic Friday!

Hi people!

Last Friday, (31 November 2014) was a hectic day in pastry class for us DC 9 group 5.
There's quite a lot of things to do that day, and one of the recipe that we made were meant for assessment. And yes we had to finish on time!
So here's the rundown.. *drum roll*

Danish Pastry Dough
Cream Caramel
Assessment on Aumoniere Crepe

Let's start with some histories and fun facts about those desserts above

Danish Pastry

We call a certain kind of pastry, filled with cheese or fruit, “danish pastry.” Is this pastry really from Denmark?Well, danish pastry may have come to the United States from Denmark. But its name in Denmark suggests that it did not originate there.

The Danes call this pastry Wienerbrod, or “Vienna bread,” and Vienna is a city in Austria! superbeefy.com

The ingredients include flour, yeast, milk, eggs, and copious amounts of butter or margarine.

Butter is the traditional fat used in Danish pastry. In industrial production, other fats are also commonly used, such as hydrogenated sunflower oil (known as "pastry fat" in the UK). A yeast dough is rolled out thinly, covered with thin slices of butter between the layers of dough, and then the dough is folded and rolled again and again into numerous layers. If necessary, the dough is chilled to ease handling. The process of rolling, buttering, folding and chilling is repeated multiple times to create a many-layered dough that, once baked, is fluffy, crispy on the outside, buttery and flaky. However, although this is the traditional method, not all Danishes are made this way. The dough is sometimes not even laminated.

Danish pastries as consumed in Denmark are usually topped with chocolate, pearl sugar,glacé icing and/or slivered nuts and may be stuffed with a variety of ingredients such as jam or preserves (usually apple or prune), remonce, marzipan and/or custard. Shapes are numerous, including circles with filling in the middle (known as "Spandauer's"), figure-eights, spirals (known as snails), and the pretzel-like kringles.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danish_pastry

Cream Caramel

Caramel Custard, crème caramel or caramel flan is a custard dessert with a layer of soft caramel on top, as opposed to crème brûlée, which is custard with a hard caramel top. The dish is eaten throughout the world.

Caramel custard is a variant of plain custard (crème) where sugar syrup cooked to caramel stage is poured into the mold before adding the custard base. It is usually cooked in a bain-marie on a stove top or in the oven in a water bath. It is turned and served with the caramel sauce on top, hence the alternate French name crème caramel renversée.
Flan is found in recipes as far back as ancient Rome. It was during Roman times that domesticated chickens were first kept for laying eggs. The Romans, with eggs in surplus, and consulting the Greek’s knowledge of the art of cooking, developed new recipes, one of which turned out to be a custardly concoction known as flan.
October 3rd is National Caramel Custard Day.
When does caramel become caramel? When the heat on the milk solids combine with the sugar ingredients, a caramel flavor is created, therein creating the caramel.
According to Platina’s De Honesta Voluptate,(On Right Pleasure and Good Health), an Italian cookery text published in 1475, custard-type dishes were considered health food. mobile-cuisine.com

Aumoniere Crepe

In French, the word aumônière is derived from the word aumône, which means “giving money to someone in need”. An Aumoniere represents a small purse (the pastry) with coins inside (the filling). To make an aumônière, you typically place a sweet or savory preparation in the middle of filo pastry (you can also replace filo with crêpe for dessert) which you then close so that it has the shape of a small purse. Eating an aumônière is about creating excitement and suspense of what you are about to discover inside. mslimalicious.com

Interesting, right? Now i'll show you some photos on that fun Friday in the pastry class, enjoy!

Curious about the Danish Pastry dough? we'll show you some more next Friday! have a good day, good people:)

Thursday, 30 October 2014

Preparation of Danish Dough / Cream Caramel WEEK !! DC9 /Group 1

Preparation of Danish Dough / Cream Caramel WEEK

29th of October, in this week we're doing the preparation of Danish dough for the next week's class and Cream Caramel. We've got assessment too !!
Which is Crêpe !!Here's some story for cream caramel, Cream Caramel or also known as
Caramel Custard is a custard dessert with a layer of soft caramel on top, as opposed to crème brûlée, which is custard with a hard caramel top. The dish is eaten throughout the world.

Crème caramel used to be ubiquitous in European restaurants; food historian Alan Davidson remarks:

In the later part of the 20th century crème caramel occupied an excessively large amount of territory in European restaurant dessert menus. This was probably due to the convenience, for restaurateurs, of being able to prepare a lot in advance and keep them until needed.

As always we started with our preparation for the dough.

After kneading it till it's elastic and smooth, it's time to do our windowpane
test !! It's the best way to tell if u sufficiently kneaded your bread dough.
If you can stretch the dough without it breaking, that means ... You're ready to go !!

Windowpane Test

Form into a ball, in a mixing bowl with a little bit of flour and cover it to place it into the chiller the chiller for 30 minute.

Before bringing up to our next step, we insert the tray with water and bake inside the oven first.

Preparing the Caramel sugar.

Finishing the dough, let's follow up to our next dessert, Cream Caramel .
We split our job to speed up our process.Yes, teamwork !

Firstly, measured our ingredients and started doing the Caramelized sugar.

Easy, it's just made of sugar and water ;) ....

And of course, there's a very important thing we need to avoid. Is to prevent crystallization !! We need to brush the side time to time with water.

My friend brushing the side with pastry brush.

After assisting the steps above, we went to make our Egg Custard.
The making of egg custard is quite similar with Crème anglaise.

We combine the vanilla and milk and put on the stove to warm.
Meanwhile, we mixed the eggs and sugar in a bowl until it's creamy white. And then,
we slowly pour the warmed milk into the mixture. ( Do not overheat the milk or pour
all of the milk directly into the mixture as it contain raw egg that would be cooked
instantly )

Stir it with wooden spoon.

Stir it with a wooden spoon ( not a whisk ), because we dont wanna form bubbles inside the mixture.
After that, we strain it .... let's go back and look at our caramel sugar.

Caramel sugar in the mould.

My friend did a great job ^_^

Yup, line mould with caramelize sugar as u can see. Then, pour the mixture in and sent to bake in hot water bath at 180*C degree for about 35 to 45 minutes.

Crepe week~! [DC9 G1]

On the 15th October 2014, which was a Wednesday, we produced a baking good which was called- crepes.

Crepes consists of basically flour, eggs, milk, butter & seasoning. It's supposed to taste sweet but some people like it in it's savoury variation as well, but we decided to make the sweet version of crepes, which were crepes topped with:-

Apple Stew (Crepes Normandes)
Pastry Cream (Crepes Forrees)
Chantilly Cream & Custard Sauce (Aumoniere de Crepe Creme Anglaise)

Here you can see the different types of layouts for displaying the crepe for a guest.

By the way, I find this crepe recipe very unique and may want to try it one day. According to some people this recipe contains the heavenly ingredient, hmm ... I wonder what would that be?

In this diagram, you can see that our awesome and charming Chef JM is teaching us how to garnish the crepe in various styles. He made one himself which we all found it amazing as well!

Composed by,

Lee Simon (DC9 G1 W7)