Days 35-39: Confections and Shelling Chocolate

Last week we worked on confections! It was super fun and nice to do something different. We worked in teams to make different kinds of caramel. My team made a creamy caramel.

Creamy Caramel Setting in Bar Molds

We individually wrapped all of the caramels

I made marshmallows from scratch!

My marshmallows setting

We tried to cover some in coconut, but it looked strange...

Covered in Organic Sugar

Covered in Cinnamon Sugar
(Unfortunately, the camera revealed all the inconstancies in the cinnamon sugar)  

We also made dragées (nuts with a caramel coating which are then coated with three layers chocolate). 

Pâte de fruit was also on the schedule. It is fruity gummy that is congealed with fruit pectin.

Pâte de fruit

I got to make passionfruit gummy rhinos! They were so stinking cute!

Look at their little faces!

Stop it!

The other students made peanut butter cups and root beer float lollipops.

Peanut Butter Cups

Root Beer Float Lollipops

Two layers!

Root Beer Side

Vanilla Ice Cream Side

Everyone had to practice shelling, because we got to do some really cool shelling work at Feve with Shawn Williams later in the week. 

Practice Shells

At Feve, we got to design our own chocolate shells using colored cocoa butter (and gold dust). These are pictures the insides of my molds before I shelled them with chocolate.

 My shells once they hardened and were turned out of the molds.

And now for a bunch of pictures of shells that Shawn made... 

The last two pictures are of shells that my classmates made that I thought were super pretty...

Days 31-34: Tarts, Cookies, and Boxes...Oh my!

Hey Everyone! I'm so sorry I haven't been posting regularly. I've been really tired and overwhelmed lately. The plan is to get caught up over the weekend and then post twice a week. Last week was kind of crazy, because it ended with bakery box day. I'm not going to break this post up into each day like I normally do, because we did prep for the bakery box every day. I've decided that I'm just going to go through the things that we made, so that I can get caught up. After this weekend, there should be better content word-wise.

We spent a day with Annie Baker from Annie the Baker. (I know it's crazy that her last name is Baker, right?) We made lemon meringue tart and peanut butter pie. 

Lemon Tart with Brown Sugar and Molasses Meringue 

Peanut Butter Pie with Oreo Crust

We made a ridiculous amount of cookies over the course of the week...

Left to Right: Devil's Slide, Chocolate Chip, Oreos (back), and Candy Cap Buttons

Left to Right: Rochers (hazelnuts, egg whites, and sugar), Chinese Almond Cookies, Ginger Jumbles, and Peanut Butter Buttons

Snickerdoodles (left and right) and Saffron Snickerdoodles

We also made fortune cookies. A template is used to shape perfect circles and then baked them. Once they were out of the oven, we had to shape them into the classic fortune cookie shape before they cooled off and hardened. 

Coffee Fortune Cookies waiting to be baked

Chocolate Fortune Cookies cooling

We also made two pastries with apples and rough puff pastry.

Apple Borsellini 

Apple Tart with Almond Paste

We spent one afternoon decorating cookies with royal icing. 

A classmate's cookie

Another cookie decorated by a classmate

And finally the bakery boxes...

Clockwise spiral from the top left: Rosemary Matzo, Lemon Lavender Rochers, Cherry Chocolate Granola, Pistachio Cake, Candy Cap Button Cookies, Chocolate Linzer Cookie, and a Praline Rocher Truffle 

We sent out twenty five boxes and they seemed to be a hit from all of the feedback we got!