I suck at this. I am always at least a week behind. I'm sorry for any of you who are actually reading this, haha!
Anyway, last week we had our second practical and my group did good-we got an A. We made challah again and cinnamon rolls. I had missed class the day Chef demo'd cinnamon rolls, so I was just following my teammate's lead on that one. My challah loaf wasn't as good this time around as it was a couple weeks ago. I'm not sure what was off, but something was just different. Oh, and I also underbaked it. Yeah, that'll ruin a loaf of bread! Our cinnamon rolls didn't stay as spiralled (is that a word? in this context?) as they should have and our icing was too thin. And we forgot to put in the raisins. Oops. But they tasted good!
Jump to today...we started a new section. We are now covering stirred and frozen custards. Today we made creme anglaise, pastry cream, and ice cream. I've always been intimidated by making yummies (what I like to call anything sweet) on a stovetop...I hate cooking and am not good at it. But I had to do some of that today and it wasn't too bad. We did curdle our first batch of creme anglaise and had to start over, but we got it right the second time. Creme anglaise is a vanilla custard sauce made of half and half, sugar, vanilla, and eggs. You have to cook it just right so that it'll thicken up but not curdle the eggs. Who wants sweet scrambled eggs? Certainly not this girl who doesn't even eat eggs! (unless they're in something, like cake) After we made the sauce, we turned it into ice cream. We added some semisweet chocolate to it to make chocolate ice cream. It turned out quite yummy! The group next to us had the genius idea to make coffee ice cream and it was the best coffee ice cream I had ever tasted, and one of the best ice creams-period-that I had tasted. I will be trying to replicate their recipe sometime.
We also made pastry cream, which is just a basic cream that goes into pastries (as the name implies). Pastry cream can be flavored with pretty much anything, but we made the basic pastry cream that has a neutral sweet flavor and a pudding-like texture. I want to experiment with different flavorings and using it as a filling in my cakes. I'll be sure to report back whenever I get around to doing that! :)
