Bake Shop Part 2

We're learning all of these new techniques that are pretty specific to baking and not to cooking, so it's been a rough week for me so far. I feel a little out of my element. I find myself double and triple checking each baking recipe because in baking, once you skip something, there's no turning back. I think cooking is a lot more forgiving in that way. Sure, there are recipes in which you can't skip a step, or mixing up the timing for certain ingredients can change, improve, or ruin a dish, but in baking, there's little to no forgiveness in these cases. You dump it out and start from scratch.

So, Day 2 of bake shop was all about foaming. The foaming method is any method where the eggs are whipped or beaten to incorporate air before they are folded into the batter.

For Pate a Choux, or eclair paste, is not made by following the foaming method, it's done using the creaming method, which we spoke about yesterday. The dough must be thick enough to be piped through a pastry bag, and the dough will stay together and not bleed into each other.

Now back to the foaming method. I know, I get sidetracked. So, we made this delicious pastry filling (it had a custard-like consistency). We were going to be piping the filling into the eclairs. So, the pastry filling was made using the foaming method.

In a saucepan, we heated the sugar and milk until it became hot, and in a separate bowl, whipped the eggs, cornstarch, and sugar to incorporate as much air as possible into the eggs. Then, we tempered the egg mixture into the milk/sugar mixture. You don't want your eggs to cook or becomes scrambled eggs once they hit the hot mixture, so you add a little bit at a time, off the fire, and slowly bring down the temperature of the mixture, and raise the temperature of the eggs as they hit the heat. If you do this slowly, the eggs will be incorporated into the mixture. After it's all mixed together and tempered, butter is added so the cream becomes thicker. We used a vanilla bean to flavor the cream, and before we cooled it, split it in half, added melted chocolate to one bowl and instantly had two flavors!

Once the eclairs (or cream puffs) were out of the oven, we filled them with the cream and drizzled with chocolate icing and royal icing.

Tip of the day: When using vanilla to flavor things while baking, you can choose between vanilla extract and vanilla bean. Extract is easier to deal with and it's cheaper, but the flavor in no way compares to that in a vanilla bean. When using vanilla bean, split the bean down the center and use your knife to scrape out the insides of the bean to add to your dish. If you choose to use vanilla bean, add the flavor at the beginning of your baking process. In this case, we added it to the milk and sugar before we put it on the fire. This way, the cream gets the maximum flavor out of the bean. If using extract, add it at the way end. It has a stronger flavor and doesn't need to be in there for so long.