Meyer Lemon Bars

Meyer Lemons are grown in California and they are different from regular lemons because they are less acidic, and have a sweeter flavor. Meyer Lemons were brought to America from China at the turn of the century by an employee of the United States Agriculture Department, the Meyer Lemon was named after him. Meyer Lemons are thought to be a cross between a regular lemon and a mandarin orange. Since we had Meyer Lemons in the fridge, and there is a grove of trees at school, I decided to make a Meyer Lemon Bar, instead of a regular Lemon Bar.

Due to the Meyer Lemon these bars did not have the tart flavor that a Lemon Bar is known for, but they were still delicious.

Cookie Monster Should Not Come to the CIA

With the number of cookies that my class has produced in the last 3 weeks, we could keep Cookie Monster sated for at least a couple of hours. If he was to arrive at the CIA, he would not be a good example to the children who watch Sesame Street. There is also a lot of cookie dough that is frozen in the freezer; therefore we could probably feed Cookie Monster for a couple of days.

Here are pictures of the varieties of cookies that we have made over the last few days:

Pictured on the right is Biscotti alla Mandorle, which is a cookie filled with a brandied cherry and an almond paste filling. The white and brown cookies are a chocolate and white sable dough that has been carefully cut and arranged to look like a checkerboard.

This is a linzer cookie, which is a hazelnut cookie that has raspberry jam sandwiching it together.

Here is Almond and Anise Biscotti. Biscotti means twice baked in Italian. Biscotti is baked in a large cookie, which is then cut and baked again.

This is an Italian cookie called Pinolate; the cookies main ingredients are a meringue, almonds and hazelnuts. The dough is rolled in pine-nuts, left to sit overnight, and then baked.

These are Riciarelli cookies. They are supposed to be shaped like the eye of the madonna. I do not think that I achieved that exact shape. The main components of this cookie are almonds and egg whites, which is common in Italian Cookies.

Macaroon Confusion

The macaroon is a name for a cookie that has numerous variations; these variations have quite different appearances but they are all based on the same ingredients, which are egg whites and sweetened ground nuts or coconut.
Pictured Below is a traditional American coconut macaroon. It is essentially egg whites that have been folded with sugar and coconut, and then baked in a low oven. They are also known as haystacks.
Here are macaroons that are made out of ground almonds, sugar and egg whites. The cookies are baked and then two are sandwiched together with a chocolate ganache. These are the more traditional European macaroon. We will also be making later in the program a traditional Parisian macaron. Note the different spelling. A macaron is made by folding egg whites that have been whipped into almond powder, and icing sugar. These macarons, when baked, are shaped like round meringue domes, with a flat base. That flat base is perfect for sandwiching ganache in between. The main difference between these macarons and the macaroons that we made is that we did whip the egg whites, therefore the cookies did not rise the same way macarons should.
Almond Macaroons can be traced back to an Italian Monastery in 1792, but there are many conflicting tales about the history of macaroons, therefore I will not elaborate.

Cookie Mania

Cooking school is essentially a pseudo replication of working in the industry; therefore when we make cookies we just don’t make 24. Our recipes for cookies usually yield more than 100 cookies. The key to a successful cookie is to not over cream the butter. Almost all recipes for cookies have in their directions to cream together the butter and the sugar. When you are making cookies you do not want to mix the butter too much or the cookies will spread in the oven, which means that they will get too thin.

Today we made 4 different variations of cookies

1. The Mudslide

I would assume this cookie is named due to the fact that after it is mixed it needs to set up before it goes into the oven. If you bake the cookie too early it spreads like soup in the oven. This cookie starts it’s life (before it goes into the oven) as a miniature mountain, and it comes out barely recognizable as a hill. The cookie had a very cakey consistency, and is similar to a brownie with walnuts.

2. Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip

The traditional standard

3. Oatmeal Raisin

Even though I refrigerated these cookies for over an hour they spread a lot in the oven; I am not sure if there was enough flour in the batter.

4. White Chocolate Macadamia

These cookies are probably the most popular at school. They can be used as tools to bribe people… I think they will one day replace the chocolate chip cookie for the title of most popular

Does Anyone Not Like Doughnuts?

Doughnuts are the quintessential American treat, and they are also a lot of fun to make. Take a journey with me on the art of frying doughnuts. (Prior to the below pictures, we had mixed the dough, allowed it to rise, divided and then shaped the doughnuts.)The first trick to successful doughnuts is to ensure that your oil is the proper temperature. If the oil is too cold the doughnut’s crust is not properly developed in a quick time frame and the finished doughnut is very oily when you bite into it, because the oil seeps into the doughnuts interior.

Here are our doughnuts frying, and being flipped. The doughnuts rise when they hit the hot oil, the mark of a successful doughnut is to have a white line all around the middle of the doughnut (as seen in the pictures below), which is a sign that the doughnut has been proofed properly. The wider that line, the better the doughnuts have been proofed.

Flipping the doughnuts is a lot of fun; you have to get a skewer under one end and quickly flip it over. Once they are flipped it is important to cook the other side to the same colour as the side that has already been cooked.
From the picture it is obvious that these are doughnut holes frying. Doughnut holes are fun to cook because they do not flip over easily. You have to stir them in the oil, or submerge them, to get both sides to cook to a golden brown.
Cake doughnuts are my favorite type of doughnut; therefore even though they were not on the list of recipes for the day, I asked if I could make them as well. Cake Doughnuts do not have yeast in them instead they use baking powder as a leavening agent. Here are my cake doughnuts frying below:
Once the doughnuts were cooked, we drained the oil off with paper towels. When the doughnuts were cooled we decorated them in a variety of ways.
We also made jelly doughnuts (filled with raspberry jam and dusted with icing sugar) and apple fritters, which are essentially the scraps of extra doughnut dough mixed with apple pie filling.
Here is a picture of a glazed cake doughnut. The cake doughnuts that we left plain were not sweet enough for my liking. The recipe only had 1 oz of sugar, hopefully next week I will be able to try a new recipe.
Pictured below is the Perfect Glazed Yeast Doughnut! How I know this, you ask… Well the culinary degree students have been in the bakeshop for last week, and on Wednesday they made doughnuts. The chef instructor who is teaching them joked with my class that his students had made better doughnuts than the ones that a previous group had made. With that challenge having been thrown down, it was on my group’s shoulders to prove that we could bake better doughnuts than students from the hot side. While frying our doughnuts the instructor sidled up to us, and told us that our doughnuts were very nice, and during evaluation our instructor presented that instructor with one of our perfect doughnuts on a plate. The instructor who had thrown down the challenge, declared our doughnut to be perfect… Therefore pastry side 1, hot side 0 in this doughnut challenge.

Breakfast Anyone?

I would consider breakfast the best meal of the day; few people say no to pancakes, eggs, and bacon for dinner, and many restaurants serve breakfast all day long. Here are a few traditional breakfast items that we made, starting with quiche.Pictured above is a fresh mozzarella, squash and tyme quiche. This was a specialty quiche that my teammate and I researched, and we even picked the tyme from the school gardens. This quiche was very yummy, my only complaint is that we made it in a tart pan, and the mozzarella cheese took up a lot of the pie plate (we should have sliced it thinner) therefore there was not a lot of egg filling. Below is the standard quiche Lorraine, which is traditionally made with guyere cheese and bacon. Since there was no bacon to be found in the whole school we substituted ham. Quiche is essentially a savory egg custard.
We also made ham, cheddar, and chive scones, which are very popular with the faculty and students.
The last item that we created was strata, which is a savory bread pudding with cheese, Italian sausage, and hot peppers. We layered this together with brioche, poured the egg custard overtop, let it soak for a few hours and then baked it in the oven.

AreYou Tired of Banana Bread?

Banana Bread has a reputation. It is the quick-bread that everyone knows how to make, and you can find it in almost every single coffee shop in North America. Therefore I am pleased to introduce two new quick-bread options. (Quick-breads are essentially a loaf that is leavened by a chemical agent like baking powder or baking soda.) Here are the two varieties:

1. Sweet Olive Oil Bread

With Cherries and Pine Nuts (the cherries could have been more evenly distributed).

2. Pumpkin Bread

Filled with Raisins!

A Birthday Cake For Myself...

One knows that they have entered the pastry world, when they have to make their own birthday cake. Making a cake for a pastry professional takes guts. Pictured below is my belated birthday cake to myself, although I only ate one bite (therefore can I really call it my birthday cake?). My belated birthday cake was a blueberry lemon geniose with whipping cream icing.

This cake was our first attempt at filling and icing a cake, and it was cool to watch our chef instructor demo this for us, it was like watching an artist at work. I’m sure he has filled thousands of cakes. To create our cakes we sliced the genoise into three layers, which, while we were shown a good technique to use, is difficult to do consistently. I’m definitely going to have to practice. To assemble the cake we drenched the bottom layer with simple syrup and then spread whipped cream on top of the layer in a bowl shape. Inside this bowl we filled it with fresh blueberries that we covered with whip cream to make the whip cream layer level. This technique is used to ensure that the berries do not escape out of the filing, which would make it difficult to ice. We then repeated this layering, and finished with the final layer. The cake was then covered in whipped cream. Although the cake took a good picture, it is difficult to work with whipped cream without overworking it and causing it to break. As this was our first attempt at a cake, we spent a lot of time trying to perfect it, therefore we overworked the cream.

The cake still tasted delicious! How can one go wrong with whipped cream?