Saturday, October 18, 2008

Petit fours

I never thought that superior patisserie can be such a lonely affair. It makes you want to rendezvous with cuisine. sigh.

On to the second week, we started making edible items (finally!). Beginning with choux pastry, we have to produce mini eclairs, profiteroles and st. honore. Each is filled with pastry cream and glazed with fondant. Swan necks can be piped and added to the profiteroles to give a swan. So cute! These swan necks are pretty delicate things, I broke so many of them! On your left is by Chef Keith. Right is mine.


Mini fruit tartlettes. Short pastry is baked with frangipane, layered with very minute amount of pastry cream and topped with fruits. Chef Herve made a chocolate version with chocolate ganache but without the pastry cream. Looks pretty cool and should taste good too. I didn't eat any of the tarts he made so I didn't know how it taste like. D:

My tarties~

Petit four glacee, more commonly found in Swiss, German areas. It is a genoise sponge sandwiched with apricot jam with a top layer of marzipan, then coated with fondant and decorated. And we also made caramel coated dried fruits with marzipan which is as hard as stone that I believe another function of it is as a self-defence weapon. ._. Left is Chef Herve, right is mine.

End.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Heidi
I wz surfing the net when i came across your blog. Awesome. I am from malaysia. i was thinking of going into biz of making chocs for door gifts, gotta to start from scratch. Was wondering whether i could get some pointers from you. Heehee :D
cheers

Heidi said...

Hi ct, nice to meet you! Wow, this is a hard question to answer. (So many aspects to consider.) For instance, what type of market are you targeting?

But I guess the most important thing is to make them (the chocolates that is) good. If it is within your budget, use quality couverture, they are the best for eating. Hope this helps! :D

Anonymous said...

OOps sorry I was vague with my enquiry. Well, u know in malaysia we have this malay weddings,as a token of appreciation to the guest, we used to give away tokens. Last time it used to be hard-boiled eggs wrapped in something, ribbons ets. Now taste have become sophisticated, so they give away cupcakes, sweets etc. Target market would be middle-income to higher, so economy wise, looking to cheaper cost but taste good, u know what I mean, hehehe. Maybe a short-cut way, rather than look for the beans to cook the cocoa, etc etc. Maybe if I buy blocks of the ready-made chocs, add something to it to produce the volume, maybe.

Heidi said...

oh, okay. then sure. you can purchase quality compound chocolate in bulk, then melt them down and fill into whatever cute molds you have. have them set in the fridge. Voila! you have your chocolates. You may even add nuts or other flavours that you like to it.

And, you may want to read up on chocolates before starting to make them. Trust me, it will definitely help you alot.

All the best mate!

Anonymous said...

Terima kasih Heidi.
Cheers