This was the first project I did on my third day there. On my second day I learned how to make the bread and I had to get up early for this one because it was cold in the morning. When it's cold the bread is easy to work with but when it's hot or warm, you would have to be working fast with the dough. I made my first batch of eight, each piece of dough has to weigh between 12 1/2 lbs to 13 lbs. My first try I accidently used instant yeast instead of the block of yeast. Those two are very different from each other. The block of yeast is slower and the dough process is slower so you have more time. I accidently used the instant yeast and I had to work fast because it was going to be reacting soon. This is the giant mixing bowl I had to use to mix the ingredients together. That machine is also at least 50 years old and originally from France.
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This elephant cake was made for a graduation. It's a chocolate cake with whipped cream topping. Jean Pierre has his own way for making cakes, I didn't need water or any oils. The only main ingredients I needed was flour, eggs, baking powder and sugar. If I wanted to add any flavoring it would be 10 ounces of cocoa powder. The most challenging part of making this cake was steaming the eggs and sugar together. The reason why I had to steam the eggs and sugar together is to skip adding the step of adding oil into it. The steaming process was hard because I accidently cooked the eggs a few times. The amount of eggs I used was 25 eggs for a medium sized cake. The other part that was challenging was the designing and whipped cream topping. I used food coloring to make the rainbow. This reminded me of painting so that's how I was able to pull through this part. I thought of it as painting because I had to lightly smooth out the whipped cream and blend it into the next color. Another challenging part was cutting the cake in half. I filled the cake with sweet cream cheese. Cutting the cake in half wasn't as easy as I thought it was going to be. After cutting it in half I needed to flip it over to even the top part out.
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This cake I made for my mom for Mother's Day. For this project I did this all by myself while the the other bakers were working on the other special orders. I made three cakes the all the same size as the very last cake on the bottom. They were all that size. The part I had a hard time with was steaming the eggs and sugar again and this time I went through 3 1/2 lbs of sugar and 36 eggs because I kept cooking the eggs. I had one of the bakers named Nain check to see if it was steaming right. WIth the third try I finally got the eggs and sugar to be steaming without cooking. Then I used different colors of food coloring to make the whipped cream designs.
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This cake is called, Bauaroi and this is one of Jean Pierre's cakes. It's half moose and half cheese cake in one. He showed me how to decorate using certain pipe tips. This is something that they made every other day in the bakery. Each time they make it, the decorating process is different. He also showed me something that he does for the cakes, on the side of each Bauaroi, he puts tape around it to make sure the cake doesn't get messy. So when he takes the tape off it leaves a clean, sharp look to it. I really like watching the bakers decorate these cakes because they all have their own way of decorating. After that they load the cakes, bread and pastries onto the truck.
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This project is for Jean Pierre's restaurant this is the only project that was presented in his restaurant. I made a small batch of six pastries. The crust is a tart crust filled with an almond filling. I knew how to make a strawberry rose but I never actually tried to create it. This part was really challenging because I needed to make a total of six of them and a few extra for my parents. These roses were my very first attempts to make them. I took pictures as I went step by step. I put strawberry jam on top of the pastry. and then melted some chocolate. I only put the chocolate on the bottom of the strawberry and placed it on top of the pastry. To finish it all, I added some powdered sugar on top.
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