Chocolate Cake Bombes

Yesterday in baking class my new baking partner, Grace, and I got fancy in the kitchen. We whipped up chocolate cake bombes.

Here's the first stage of production: cutting round circles from thin slices of chocolate cake, then pressing the circles into the mold forms:

After the cake base, the bombes are filled with piped mousse.

Then a second chocolate cake circle, this one smaller than the bottom layer, is pressed onto the mousse. After a lengthy chill in the fridge, the bombes are ready to be flipped over and covered with chocolate ganache.

Grace removes the bombes from their flexible rubber molds:

Here we place the bombes on a wire rack we set atop a parchment-lined sheet pan, so we can catch and reuse the ganache that flows from the bombes:

Here Chef demonstrates one technique for applying the chocolate ganache:

Grace finishes up the job and we pop the bombes back in the fridge until they can be sold in the Statler dining room on Monday. (They better save us one!!!)

My Bagels Rocked!

I've been meaning to whip up a batch of bagels for several weeks now. This weekend I finally got around to it. YUM!

A good bagel is hard to find -- most lack that wonderful chewiness that only a boiled bagel produces. So I'm happy to report that my batch were nice and chewy AND they toasted up wonderfully. There's something about a bagel slathered in melted butter to make your day perk up. Even better, the hubby paid me the highest compliment: he ate THREE that day (quite a gift, as he tends to avoid carbs like the plague! HA!).

Anyhoo, from the recipe in Peter Reinhart's book, The Bread Baker's Apprentice, here are the steps I used to make my bagels:

Day One
Because Reinhart is a big fan of extended retarding in the fridge, this recipe takes two days. The first step, obviously, is making the sponge. So I mixed 4 cups high-gluten flour, 1 tsp. yeast, and 2.5 cups of water together, then let that ferment on the counter for a while. Reinhart says the sponge needs 2 hours to get "foamy and bubbly," but my batch took almost 4 hours.



When the sponge was finally ready to use, I added another 1.5 tsp. yeast to it, then another 3 cups of flour and 2.75 tsp. salt. I tried using my mixer to incorporate the flour, but the dough became so stiff that I eventually had to take it out and finish mixing it by hand. Once I got the rest of the dry flour mixed in, I kneaded the stiff dough on the counter for 10 minutes, until the dough was, as Reinhart says, "satiny and pliable but not tacky."



Then I quickly divided the dough into 4.5-oz pieces, using my digital scale. Note: The bagels turned out quite large, so in the future I would reduce this to 3.5-oz pieces.

Now the real fun began! I rolled the scaled dough out into tubes. I covered them with damp paper towels and let them rest for 20 minutes on the counter. While they rested, I lined 2 half-sheet pans with parchment paper and lightly misted the paper with cooking spray.



After the dough strips rested, I rolled them out a bit more, then wrapped each strip around my hand, overlapping the dough by several inches. I sealed the edges by pressing the overlapped area onto the counter as I rocked my hand back and forth.



After shaping each bagel, I placed it on the prepared baking sheet. When all the bagels were shaped, I misted them with cooking oil, wrapped them loosely in plastic wrap and let them rest another 20 minutes. (There's a lot of napping in baking!)



To see if the bagels were ready for their overnight retarding in the fridge, I put one to the "float test." Reinhart says the dough must float within 10 seconds or it needs more nap-time. My bagel floated right away, so I put both pans in the fridge.



Day Two
After my 5-hour baking class, I came home tired, but hungry. So I decided to get to those bagels. I cranked the oven up to 500 degrees, and set a large pot of water to boil, adding baking soda to the water. Here are my plump, retarded bagels about to take their dip in the hot tub. ;-)



I boiled the bagels about two minutes on each side, then placed them back on their pans. While they boiled, I sprinkled the pans with cornmeal, to make sure they didn't stick during baking. After taking each out of their bath boil, I topped the bagels with sea salt and seeds.



Here are my finished bagels. They only take about 10 minutes to bake!

A Few Tips

This posting is a compilation of tips I've recently learned in class.

Need to soften up your butter fast? Then do what I did here. Chop refrigerated butter into small blocks, then put it near a heat source, such as the top of an oven. Do NOT, however, put it near a pilot light. It will melt before you realize it.



Want to make sure your tarts hold up, i.e. don't get soggy? Then brush the tarts with melted chocolate BEFORE you add your pastry cream or other fillings.



Want to make sure your cheesecakes bake up without cracked tops? Then bake them in a water bath. You can cook the cheesecakes on one rack, while placing the pan of water on another. Or you can bake the cheesecakes directly in the water.

My instructor prefers the latter, because he believes the cheesecakes cook most evenly this way. Just don't forget one crucial step: cradling the pans in foil -- to make sure the water doesn't creep into the springform pan.

Profit & Loss

Today my baking partner, Amanda, and I made Italian bread. Here is a photo of the proofed, shaped loaves:



And here's a photo of our baked product:



But here's the photo I really want you to focus on:


No, I'm not showing off Chef's choice of kitchen footwear.

What you're looking at is LOSS. This photo represents a 2-ounce portion of dough -- or what would have become a baked soft roll, if I hadn't dropped it on the floor.

Seeing me do so (drat!), Chef quickly cried out, "THERE GOES YOUR PROFIT!"

(And then he patiently stood there while I snapped a photo. HA!)

Fabulous Fourteen

One of the tasks a newbie baker must master is portioning a round cake into even slices. It's a no-brainer if you're talking 4, 8, 12 or even 16 pieces, because basically you're dividing the four initial quarters into thinner, even wedges.

But portioning 14 *equal* slices takes practice. In the photo below, my classmate Alyssa has marked 14 slices on the top of her buttercream-iced yellow cake by pressing the large knife shown on the counter into the icing. The lines serve to guide wait staff during plating. Alyssa is adding rosettes both for decoration and to clearly identify the fourteen servings.

This photo, of the top of Alyssa's cake, more clearly shows the fourteen slices. Alyssa's done a fabulous job here. Good thing, because she, along with the rest of our class, is being tested on the skill during Saturday's class!

Let's show off a bit more of Alyssa's decorating job before I tell you the trick for getting 14 *equal* slices from a round cake. Notice that Alyssa has decorated the outside edge of her cake with coconut, and the top of the rosettes with lemon-flavored pastry filling.

So, how do you get 14 portions? Obviously by getting seven slices from each half of the cake. Go on. Try it! 

Having trouble? Here's the key: 

Hold the knife above the cake so that it's perfectly vertical. Then, angle the knife a bit to the left of this imaginary vertical line, before lowering the knife into the icing. This line marks one side of the seventh slice. Raise the knife from the icing and angle it a bit to the right of the vertical line. You've now marked both sides of the seventh piece. This requires good visualization skills! Portioning out the remaining six pieces per half is easy; you simply divide the remaining spaces into three wedges. 

Fighting Off The Fog

Ugh-oh. Today my brain fogged up in hospitality math class. NOT a good sign.

I'll let the meat purchasing and costing problem on our class handout speak for itself:

A 15 1b. 11 oz. pork loin is purchased at $1.37 per lb. If 2 lbs. 4 oz. is removed by boning before cooking, 18 percent of the weight is lost due to roasting and another 9 oz. is lost in trimming and portioning, how much does a 6 oz. portion cost??

Yeah, I had to fight the temptation to yell out, "WHO CARES? LET THEM EAT CAKE!" 

But after I fought off the panic, and cleared away the fog, here's my best guess on how to solve this multi-part problem.  I'm guessing there's a 80 percent chance I've got it right. Anyone wanna take a bet on those odds? ;-)

My steps for solving this sucker:

1)  let's take care of the math parts that are easy. 15 lb. 11 oz. minus the 2 lb.  4 oz. lost in boning equals 13 lb. 7 oz. 

2) let's get that deboned, uncooked weight down to just ounces. We do that by dividing the 7 oz. by 16 (because there are 16 ounces in a pound), add the 13 lb. and multiply by 16 (to turn those pounds into ounces) to get a final oz. amount of 215 oz.

3) next, let's get rid of that 18 percent loss after roasting. 215 oz. minus 18 percent gives us our cooked weight of 176.3 oz. 

4) now let's minus the 9 oz. lost in trimming and portioning. 176.3 oz. minus 9 oz. equals 167.3 oz. (let's double check that this number is smaller than our original pork loin of 15 lb. 11 oz. Dividing our total 167.3 oz. again by 16 to turn them into pounds, we get a total cooked pound rate of 10.45625 lb. (or 10 lb. 7.3 oz.). So far, we've lost 5 lb. 3.7 oz. from our original loin.)

5) it looks like we're on track, so let's get to figuring out how much a 6 oz. portion costs. 167.3 oz divided by 6 oz. tells us that we can get 27.883333 portions out of our cooked loin. But in portioning, you always round down, as you can't serve up that .883333 portion. So we end up with just 27 portions.

6) to find the cost of a 6 oz. portion, we need to know how much we spent on our original 15 lb. 11 oz. loin. We're told we spent $1.37 per lb. So let's turn the 15 lb. 11 oz. into a decimal, so that our terms match. We do this by carrying the 15 lb. and multiplying the ounces by 16 to get 15.6875 lb. So, 15.6875 multiplied by $1.37 per lb. equals $21.50 for our original loin purchase.

7) we FINALLY get to that 6 oz. portion cost by dividing the total cost by the number of portions. So, $21.50 divided by 27 portions equals $0.7962962 per portion, or $0.796, as we typically carry the number to the third place.

Whew! Any chef, restaurant owner, or baker that can pound these types of calculations out quickly has my utmost respect!!

Onward and upward.  ;-)

Home-Made Bread - YUM!

Today I made my first bread dough from Peter Reinhart's luscious book, The Bread Baker's Apprentice. The recipe is called "Pain a l'Ancienne, which follows a delayed-fermentation method that depends on really cold water. Basically, you mix up the dough in about 15 minutes, then pop it in the fridge overnight. The next day you let it warm up at room temp for about three hours, so it can continue fermenting. 

After cutting the dough in half, you cut each half into 3 pieces, forming six baguettes. To bake, you pop it in the oven for about 20 minutes (or until internal temp registers at least 205 degrees).

The first batch I made by adding steam to the oven. But my kitchen smoke detector kept going off (which I'm sure thrilled my neighbors), so the second batch I made without adding steam. I don't think it made much difference in either appearance or taste.

The crust was nicely carmelized, but the bread didn't have as strong a flavor as I'd hoped, considering the recipe says the dough has a "natural sweetness" and "nutlike character." I plan to add some fresh herbs the next time I make it, and perhaps a sprinkle of sea salt to the tops.

But as this bread was so incredibly easy to make, and looked pretty enough to take to a dinner party, I definitely give it a thumbs-up.

Here are the pics: