Saint Honore, bread, and more!

I feel like I'm in a perpetual state of playing catch-up with my blog posts. I think it's because we bake so many things each day and I feel like every pastry needs to have its own blog post to reflect the amount of work that goes into them. But alas, waking up at 5 AM doesn't really lend a lot of energy to that, so instead... I have photos!




However I must touch upon another quite complicated pastry we made yesterday called a Saint Honore. Its almost as complicated as the tarte au cafe, but maybe it's because I've had a bit of experience working with choux pastry.

We started with some leftover puff pastry and rolled it out and cut it into a circle.



Next, we made some choux pastry, piped out small balls, and also piped it onto the puff pastry dough circle. So far two doughs. It's starting to get complicated. The puff pastry round and balls were baked off.





Next we made some Saint Honore cream, which is pastry cream flavored with Cointreau, and piped the cream into the choux puffs. We heated up sugar, glucose and water to use to adhere the puffs to the round. This reminded me of when I made a croquembouche for my final project at Mission College, and in fact the technique is exactly the same. So, so far we have two doughs, pastry cream, and molten sugar. Onward!





The center well was filled with a layer of pastry cream and then topped off with chantilly in a chevron motif.





It was quite a fun pastry to make and all of the Saint Honore pastries were carted away for some dinner going on at the school. With the left over choux pastry dough and chantilly, we made some swans! They're simple yet look so impressive!



And here are some petit pain loaves, a pullman loaf (pain de mie), pain au chocolat, and croissants we baked off today:

















And because sometimes, I just cant help myself. Chef Maurice told me to make sure that people know that this is not how he teaches students how to make croissants.