All posts filed under: Baking

Black Sesame Orange Tart

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What better to do with a Saturday afternoon than to hole up in your kitchen for several hours experimenting? It all started with my relatively simple idea to actually practice some of what I learn in school on my own time and in my own kitchen, but then as all ideas I have tend to do, it quickly snowballed as it encountered the semi-jilted feeling I had of not having my recommendation to use black sesame in an entremets be well received. One thought led to another, and before I knew it I was dragging three bags of groceries home filled with more butter and eggs than any normal person would consume in an entire week, and I was ready to go. Even when I started baking though, I can’t say that I really knew what it was that I would be making. I knew the elements and I thought of ways I might combine and shape them into creating one dessert…but it wasn’t until about an hour into the process that I had an ‘ah …

Coconut Mango Entremets

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Baking for my younger brother allows me the chance to reach into the crazy section of my creative side and try things and combinations that I usually wouldn’t try out on other people. I’m just going to come out and say it; he’s a complete weirdo. Since he is returning home from college this week, I decided to be a nice sister and bake something for him. This time my train of thought started out with a layer cake. Maybe I’ll make an exotic layer cake covered in coconut, I thought. Then I flipped to Miette’s Coconut Mousse Cake and thought maybe I would add in some coconut mousse layers… and then that led me to thinking about adding in some mango…and before I knew it, the idea had changed into an entremet with a never-before-seen liquid mango juice center. So I started in with my experimental creation–making a mango puree and simmering it with some simple syrup before straining it and putting the juice into some silicon molds. At the same time, I made …

Honey Matcha Castella Cake

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I told myself I wasn’t going to do any baking this week. I was going to avoid the kitchen in lieu of being productive and getting important things done in all the other areas of my life. And then the spark of an idea led to me tumbling down the rabbit hole–flipping through a handful of cookbooks and spending a solid hour furiously Googling subsequent ideas… Until not only was I in the kitchen, but I had about four projects in various stages spread across every available counter space as I vaguely listened to 30 Rock playing from my computer while sitting cross-legged in front of my oven, carefully regarding the cakes inside. Despite not understanding how the oven in my parents new house can simultaneously over and under cook the things I try to bake, my evening baking adventure turned out to be quite a success. Half following some recipes and half throwing in ingredients haphazardly like the rebel I am, I ended up with a Honey Castella Cake, Almond Matcha Mousse, Matcha Spread, …

In the Kitchen at Château de Bégude

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Sometimes life throws you opportunities in ways you are not expecting. Last week I was invited by a friend to come watch the preparation of a wedding cake in her kitchen. Her chef was willing to have me, I had the day off—it seemed like all the stars were in alignment. A few days later, after a long week of working and returning home around midnight the night before, I woke up at 7:00am (after a maximum of 5 hours of sleep) in order to get myself together and be ready to spend another day in the kitchen. I woke up early enough to shower, and more importantly go find coffee, before Babette kindly picked me up—and soon we were pulling up at her hotel–Château de la Bégude. 9:30am and we are in the kitchen. I’m ready to get going, thinking that there will be a lot of mise en place and calculated running around as soon as we walk in the door. Wrong. To my surprise, after getting a tour of the kitchen and …

Gastronomicom Week 12: Final Plated Desserts and Cocktail Party

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Chef wanted to teach us how complicated it can be to thoroughly carry one single flavor or ingredient throughout all parts of a plated dessert—but also that it is possible if you set your mind to it. We started the day on Monday by pulling out the whiteboard and listing all the things that are important in a dish—color, texture, flavor, and emotion—and then the different kinds of recipes we could use to get all the textures we were looking for—since the other elements such as flavor were already decided (strawberry) and emotion comes from the chef as the dish is being made and plated. After we decided on eight elements for the dish, Chef divvied out the recipes to each of us and we set to work. One by one we finished our recipe and divided it between all the students, getting ready to combine everything. Chef demonstrated how to plate the dish…but then told us it was free plating and that we weren’t allowed to copy him. T_T My dish didn’t exactly end …

La Passagére: And So It Begins

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“Tu as l’oeil du tigre, Maddie?” What the hell is my chef talking about? I turned to my coworker who speaks English, and she thought for a moment before asking me, “Do you have the eye of the tiger?” and then she rephrased it and said, “Are you always hungry?” Equally confused, I said sure and laughed it off. But day two, when Chef asked me the question for the second and then third time, and then started singing the song Eye of the Tiger, I finally got it. Chef wanted to know if I was in it to win it. He wanted to know if I was dedicated enough to come out the champion on the other side. I’m still not sure if the battle at hand is the dinner service (during which time Chef seemed to take great pleasure in saying “Welcome to Belles Rives” and then laughing just as things started to heat up) or if it is more generally describing entire time at La Passagere, or even my path down the …