Chocolate Tart, Exam 1

Today we finished our Chocolate Tarts. The shell is a chocolate sweet dough, which is filled with a thin flourless chocolate cake (essentially a chocolate mousse which has been baked), then filled with ganache. The tart is then topped with a chocolate nougatine, which is kind of like a very thin chocolate almond brittle. The end product is very good, but very rich. I brought it home for my lovely preganant wife, Ali, who I'm sure will appreciate it. The tart pictured here is the "stepchild" to our main tart, which Carlos took home. It was made with our leftover scraps, so it is smaller and not as nice looking as our main tart, but it's still pretty tasty.

We also got our results back for the first exam covering Chocolate Candies and Cakes. I got an A- overall, which I'm basically happy with. I thought I performed pretty well on the practial piece of the exam, but there were also a few points that I wish I had done better, so I feel my grade was fair. Some of the others in class were a little more disappointed, while others were not.

We also made Pate Choux today. Pate Choux is best known as the dough used to make cream puffs and eclairs. Tomorrow we'll use the Pate Choux which we baked today to complete our St. Honore, of which I'll try to post a picture. Come back tomorrow for the picture and description of the St. Honore, which also uses the inverted puff pastry I explained previously.

Another note on Inverted Puff Pastry that I omitted yesterday. Another significant difference between Puff Pastry and Inverted Puff Pastry is that since with the inverted form the butter is wrapped around the dough, the end results are different. Rather than a large puff, the butter kind of encases the dough, in essence frying it and creating lots of crispy layers. Mmmmm.... butter....

Finally, I haven't mentioned it yet, but there always seems to be a song floating around our class which ends up in everyone's head. One of the first was "One is the loneliest number that you'll ever do" although the word "One" was substituted with "Juan" to poke fun at someone in class. Go ahead, sing it out loud to yourself. You know you want to. And now try not to sing it for the next hour.

Anyway, the song of the day today was "Kung Fu Fighting" for some reason. As usual, I think it was started by Pete. Danny also spreads different tunes, which he normally picks up with his alarm waking him to the oldies station. Poor Chef Bob even feel victim to the song curse, and threated Danny's grade because of it. This from the chef who sings "I gave my love a cherry, that had no stone...", compliments of Animal House, while making Black Forest Cake.