The day started with caramel cutting and wrapping and the moments of truth – did the caramel get cooked to the right temperature to be cuttable this morning? The raspberry caramel was all okay (that was ours – absolutely delicious), the salted caramel varied from softish to spreadable/unusable but the softish was manageable with a brief visit to the blast freezer and some quick cutting (yumm). The chocolate caramel was bitter (in my humble opinion) but good texture.
Marshmallows, anyone? Every table made a different flavour of marshmallow yesterday which had been left to dry out overnight and they were cut by guitar this a.m., separated and rolled in marshmallow sugar (dextrose/powdered sugar mix). Surprisingly good – that diversification yielded flavours of apple, vanilla, banana, pear, orange, clementine, yuzu, raspberry, strawberry, kalamansi and blackberry.
As we just allowed the natural colours to come through and vetoed food colouring, they all came through in white or shades of yellow or pink so the flavour is a surprise! Yellow could be lemon, yuzu, kalamansi or banana….
Next we unmolded the jellies we had made yesterday, the tiny bilayered frogs being the most challenging. Again, lovely fruit flavours but each taste is a surprise as they were all jumbled into one container…
Pate de fruits in several flavours was next, again cut by guitar and rolled in a mixture of sugar and citric acid powder. It gives a nice twang!
And so to the final item of confectionary – mint pastilles! Adding the mint essence was quite interesting, as a lot was aerosolized and scented the kitchen for quite awhile afterwards. They garnered good reviews though I just took one for the photo as I’m not a huge fan.
Several types of jam were made to conclude confectionary section, which will be used during entremet week. We also made chocolate hazelnut spread, and hazelnut spread (greatly preferred the latter – the former is “Nutella” without the chemical additives and definitely better than the branded stuff but not my cup of tea).
After moving back to the baking kitchen after three weeks in the chocolate kitchen, we set up the stations for wedding cake decorating next week (thankfully a short week, again not my cup of tea). This will include more sugar pulling, and cake decorating – there are a number of excellent and experienced cake decorators in our group so should get some great results. We made the Italian buttercream to use on the “cake” and will also use a thin layer of fondant on top of our three tier sytrofoam centres. A lot of foreign looking tools and pieces to work with, from my perspective. Should be interesting.
After the end of the week deep clean of the kitchen, we finished with a discussion of kitchen design essentials, and the essence of a dream commercial kitchen. Some people want a wok kitchen, I would build a chocolate kitchen if I won the lottery ha ha.