I chose to make russians (or pistachio stacks, as I like to refer to them), paris brests, chocolate eclairs, and chocolate financiers with candied ginger and cacao nibs. For the russians I made a dacquoise of both almond and hazelnut flours, and then piped the batter into little circles. They were spongy and soft inside, with a slightly crisp exterior. Pistachio mousseline was sandwiched between two of the dacquoise circles to create a close cousin to a French macaron (commonly spelled and pronounced macaroon in the U.S.) . The pistachio mousseline was pastry cream, buttercream, and nut paste. My only regret was making the mousseline the day before, and so the buttercream in it curdled from being refrigerated. In my effort to redistribute the fat globules the mousseline lost some of its structure, so the sandwiches didn’t sit up quite as high. These were probably one of the favorites of the four.

I also knocked out a batch of pate a choux dough. It always fills the kitchen with a very comforting smell as its made, like butter, flour, and eggs cooking, I love it. Pate a choux is the most remarkable dough, as it bakes it forms a hard shell and the insides become hollow, perfect for filling, since the crunch is a beautiful contrast to the filling.

Paris brests are “wheels” of pate a choux filled with a hazelnut mousseline. The pate a choux was sprinkled with sliced almonds before baking, and afterwards, dusted with confectioner’s sugar. Some of the pate a choux was piped into little eclairs, which I filled with a bittersweet chocolate pastry cream and dipped in a chocolate icing. The eclairs are easily a one-bite treat, and the chocolate explosion in your mouth is glorious!

Lastly, I made chocolate financiers. Ground almonds add an incredible amount of moisture to these. I added candied ginger and cacao nibs to the financiers, which added an element of spice and chocolately crunch.

It was a fun working on all of the different petit fours and I look forward to the next opportunity. Petit fours are meant to be one or two bites and they are perfect tastes of bliss.

I’ve also been experimenting with quick bread recipes that don’t use oil. If I come across any delicious breakthroughs I’ll post it.

Summer is the most bountiful time of year for stone fruits. We had a lot sitting around, so I made a lemon rice pudding with roasted peaches and plums. To roast fruit, top with a small cube of butter and brown sugar, and bake in a 400 degree F oven until golden brown and a pool of juice sits underneath each fruit.

Tonight I was in another petit four mood and cut out circles from a chocolate apricot torte I made today. Two thin layers of a rich chocolate cake (tasted similar to a brownie, but less dense) surrounded a chocolate truffle ganache and apricot filling. Then the whole thing was covered in another chocolate ganache. Intense!

Best eating my friends,

Megan

I had an order for one of my personal favorites, red velvet cupcakes. For those of you unfamiliar with red velvet, it is a buttermilk cake, tinted red, with a hint of cocoa. The buttermilk helps make the cake really moist and soft. It satisfies those chocolate-sweet cravings without being too much.

Traditionally, it’s paired with cream cheese frosting, which I find extremely delicious, but I’ve also seen variations in either a white chocolate or chocolate frosting. I made a light milk chocolate buttercream for my cupcakes and was really pleased with the result.

I also punched out some fondant circles (aka wafers, a la Martha Stewart) and stamped them with the letter “D”, to celebrate the birthday girl monogram-style. Of course to do this required clean, unused stamps and a trip to Michael’s Crafts revealed quite the upgrade in stampery…they make clear stamps now that allow you to create your very own stamps in endless combinations! Quite the find and definitely something to consider for future personalized projects.

A few days later I was making miniature-size cupcakes from a yellow cake batter enhanced with ground ginger. This time I topped them with a bittersweet chocolate buttercream and sprinkles, of course, since they were cupcakes and they were indeed created for a birthday celebration, so it was only fitting. Yellow cake with chocolate frosting seems to be an American birthday classic.  I was very impressed with the chocolate buttercream experimentations this week, they tasted even better than I had predicted!

Of course, once the cupcake production ceased I had time to do other things, like pay a visit to one of the farmer’s markets on Wednesday. I keep returning to buy organic blueberries, which happened to be just right last week: large, firm, and sweet.

We had some ricotta cheese leftover in the fridge so I channeled Tyler Florence and plopped a few spoonfuls in the food processor along with some lemon zest and powdered sugar, just to sweeten it up a bit. The blueberries were sugared and slowly simmered in a pot with some strawberries, raspberries, and fresh lemon juice until soft and compote-like, about 12 minutes.

A few spoonfuls of the berries over the lemon ricotta mixture with a chocolate wafer (leftover from ice cream sandwich-making) and you have yourself the quintessential summer dessert: light, fruity, fresh.

I finished off my weekend with herbal tea and freshly baked croissants (pain au chocolat for my mom), because I have missed them eating them in pastry school.

This week I am looking forward to creating an assortment of petit fours for my mom’s book club. More to come on this later!

We made brioche dough again, but this time we shaped it differently. The brioche has been one of my favorite breads we’ve made, especially when it is sprinkled with pearl sugar.

Photograph (right): Chouquettes

We also made a variety of breads- farmer’s bread, country bread, and sourdough multigrain. The country bread was dotted with walnuts. Croissant dough was made again (practice makes perfect!), but this time they were made into almond croissants and chocolate croissants.

On Friday we began making doughs for our petit fours unit. These included sweet dough, chocolate sweet dough, and two sable doughs.

Week 5 marked the start of our petit fours unit. French petit fours are small bite-sized desserts and pastries, which I like because not only are they cute, but they are perfect for having ‘just a taste’. We made pate a choux dough that was piped into a couple of shapes: mini eclairs, salambos, paris brest, and chouquettes.

A very rich, chocolate pastry cream was piped into the miniature eclairs, which were then topped with a chocolate fondant icing.

Salambos are shorter, fatter miniature eclair shapes that are filled with vanilla pastry cream and dipped in hot caramel, which hardens as it cools, creating an addictive crunchy, sweet, soft, and creamy experience in your mouth when you eat one.

The paris brest are circles filled with a praline cream and toasted almonds. Chouquettes are miniature cream puff shapes filled with a mixture of hazelnut paste, pastry cream, and buttercream.

Photograph (below): Salambos

Photograph (below): Pain au chocolat

Photograph (below): Country bread

Photograph (below): Farmer’s bread

We also made dacquoise, which are delightful nutty meringue wafers surrounding a rich filling. Then we made miniature blueberry tarts and almond-apricot tarts. The week was finished out by a large batch of French macarons.

That weekend I staged at a very cute bakery called Le Flour. The chefs and advisors here highly recommend we stage at restaurants, pastry shops, bakeries, and hotels as much as we can. To stage, you usually work one shift for free. While you may only be doing simple things, you can still check out the activity taking place and the best part is that it is just a short-term commitment.

One thing I noticed at Le Flour was how much fun the staff were having, working. They were all family and friends and that really got me thinking…

Photograph (below): Chouquettes

Photograph (below): Apricot almond tartlets

Photograph (below): Blueberry tartlets topped with streusel

Highlight: Getting my pastry tool kit filled with all the goods.

Lowlight: Sanitation and food safety class. I think I’ll be afraid to eat out for awhile.

The more I get to know my chef instructors and the staff of the school, the more I realize how truly lucky I am to have this opportunity (thanks again, Mom and Dad). The French Pastry School is great. I haven’t spent any time in the kitchen yet but I know spending a semester here is the right move for my career goals.

I’m also really excited to get to know my classmates more. I’ve had food conversations with some of them already and we all share the same passion and creativity for baking and pastry arts. It’s a good feeling. My classmates come from all over and there is a wide range of ages.

The first “unit” my class will be focusing on is bread and breakfast pastries. The FPS recently acquired a new chef instructor, Jonathan Dendauw, who is a master bread baker, so this will for sure be a unique learning opportunity. I won’t be  posting recipes or material from class, but I can take photographs and I will share my experiences as a pastry student and my time in Chicago.

Once I get more settled into my new lifestyle and apartment, I also plan on resuming my own baking experiments, which I will be sure to post.

Photograph (below): My loaded pastry kit

Of course there were more cupcakes to be made, which I will discuss later in my posts on Kat Rohrbacher, the artist I worked with for her thesis project, and on Christmas Red Velvet Cupcakes. Update: You can see Kat’s cupcakes here.

My wonderful and generous father flew my Grandma Jone in for a surprise visit on Friday. It was so nice seeing her around this time of year because many of my fondest holiday memories took place at her house on Christmas Eve. My Dad is one of six kids, so our family get-togethers with his side of family are always quite large but it’s great when we can all converge in one place.

You know what they always say, that mothers are the foundation to a family? Well I can see the truth in this because when my Grandma Jone is in town, it brings my Dad’s whole family together again. And it feels just like it did when I was growing up and she still lived here. So this weekend was kind of nostalgic for me, having her around for the holidays.

This visit certainly inspired some baking. With the possibility of other family members dropping in all morning and afternoon, I baked Let’s Make A Date Muffins and Gingerbread Muffins for breakfast. That evening I made some roll-out sugar cookie dough- in gingerbread and chocolate variations. My younger brother Cam and I were up late decorating them, but laughing the whole time, as we enjoy making them a bit…inappropriate at times.

We had a huge ice storm this weekend and it was devastatingly beautiful, if that makes any sense. Tree branches are drooping under the weight of the thick ice coating them, but they also look like a glass forest when grouped together. It has been snowing off and on, so the flurries stick to the icy branches and its a winter wonderland outside.

Well, this ice storm caused my Grandma Pat’s power to go out on Sunday, so she sought refuge at our house that day and night. My Aunt Sherri also slept over that night because we had our Christmas party with my Dad’s side and she didn’t want to drive back in the bad weather. We had a full house. You know what that means! Breakfast for them in the morning. Plus I couldn’t let them leave without something in their stomaches.

I made Gingerbread Scones, which like the Gingerbread Muffins, are the perfect wake-up call to sleeping guests and family. The house will fill with an intoxicating, warm scent of spices like cinnamon, cloves, and ginger. If you are feeding these to younger mouths, I recommend cutting back on the spices just a bit, so they are not as spicy.

What was also valuable about spending time with my grandmothers this past week was that I was reminded of family history that I had forgotten about. My Grandma Pat’s mother was a very Greek woman who was a wonderful and passionate cook. My Mom’s Great Aunt Mary created many of her signature recipes that my family still enjoys. And my Grandma Jone’s parents owned a candy shop where my Great-Grandpa made his creations using the recipes in his head. This was during WWII when sugar was rationed and my Great Grandpa was still able to get it because the shop was his business, and they received lots of customers seeking to satisfy their sugar cravings. Hearing all of this was just so wonderful to me, because I realize more and more that my passion and interest in cooking and baking has been passed down to me through generations for family.

All of our guests are gone now and here it is Christmas Eve! Unfortunately I ran out of time to make a gingerbread house this year, but I feel like next year at this time I will be able to make a magnificent one after completing pastry school.

Tonight we will be going to mass then spending the evening with just our family this year. I am looking forward to this time together. For dinner we are each going to make a seafood dish that is fast and relatively simple- like crab legs, seared ahi tuna, and shrimp with homemade cocktail sauce. My wonderful friend Jen got me a cookbook (and a gift certificate to Sur la Table!) for fondue and I may concoct some cheesy goodness to go along with our dinner.

And then it will be the most magical time of year-Christmas- and my 23rd birthday. Happy Holidays to everyone!

We chatted for a long time last night about her project and I am excited to get the opportunity to do some very creative custom cupcakes. She is painting portraits of people she’s known throughout her life who have passed away. Each painting will also have a cupcake in it that channels the personality and traits of each individual. 

What’s great about Kat is that she seems as obsessed with cupcakes as I am, so I think we’re going to work really well together. The cupcakes will be completed in the next two weeks for Kat to photograph while she is in town for the holidays.

I will be sure to post pictures of the cupcakes and updates on Kat’s thesis work. The photograph pictured above is one of her paintings. You can check out her website at www.katgallery.net and her blog at http://appleseed.tumblr.com/.

Some other things that are adding a skip to my step:

1. I received information from the French Pastry School today about my schedule for the first week of classes. Exciting!

2, Seckel pears, lady apples, and red currants. The pears and apples are miniature-sized. I was able to find them at Meijer and they make beautiful, edible table decorations.

3. www.chefscatalog.comhas free shipping on all orders until the 15th. They also have Cuisinart Green Gourmet cookware on sale. It is eco-friendly. Also related, not in a food way, but an online shopping way, is  www.retailmenot.com. My Mom is currently obsessed with this website. You can find coupon and discount codes for websites when online shopping. Score!

4. Eclairs. I am going to make eclairs this weekend that have a spiced pate a choux dough, dulce de leche pastry cream filling, and a milk chocolate glaze. Check back for the post and recipe!