First dinner service, millefeuille, and babas

So my blog posting lately feels like its taking a back seat to my social life. Its a good thing though since I am in Paris and should be out and about meeting and mingling instead of glued to my laptop.

Wednesday we were at school for a ridiculously long time: 10AM to 11PM. We did our first restaurant service and it was quite hectic, but with all the tasks divided amongst ten people, it wasn't too bad. The stressful part plating ice cream or something that needed to be served hot when you have a small window of opportunity. The dessert would be ready, but the servers MIA, and with melting ice cream... well you can imagine the mayhem.

Here is a tarte au chocolat with cocoa sorbet atop a tuille on marmalade served with raspberry coulis. The tuille was a pain in the butt to make. I burned myself about six times. There are only about three seconds between when the tuille can come off the baking sheet and when its too hard to mold around a metal tube. Funtimes.




Below is a chocolat fondant cake (like molten lava cake) and assorted mignardises (small dessert bites).





On Thursday we made a couple different millefeuilles, which translates to "thousand sheets". They're also known as napoleons, though I'm not sure why. I like how the raspberry one looked, but we filled it with pastry cream flavored with pernod, which is a anise/licorice flavored liquor... gross in my opinion.





We also made some baba au rhum and barquettes aux marrons. I omitted the rum because I'm pretty much sick of rum at this point. We've been putting it in all our almond cream and its starting to gross me out. The barquettes aux marrons are little complicated boats with chestnut cream in them. They were quite fun to make.







This is the barquette with a cross section. Chef cut it in half to make sure it looked okay (unnecessary I think).





And just for fun, since it was Friday and I was excited for the weekend, I made a baba portrait of chef.