Vols-au-Vent

Goat cheese filled round puff pastry cases. So cute!

Fruit Tart using Puff Pastry

This tart was filled with Creme Legere which is pastry cream lightened with whipped cream.

Oooooooooooooh Palmiers

crunchy caramelized sugar. flaky dough. buttery goodness. perfect.

Pate Feuilletee

Pate feuilletee, or puff pastry has always been surrounded by mystique. It's delicate, rich, flaky, and crispy dough can be used for countless savory and sweet items. Pate feuilletee literally means "leaved dough" which refers to its layers. It is made by wrapping a layer of butter with dough and then rolling it out, folding, rolling it out, folding until many layers have been formed. The layers grow exponentially as it is folded. When the butter in between each layer of dough melts and creates steam it leaves air pockets that give this dough its flakiness. I make it sound much simpler then the whole process really is. It is quite time consuming and care must be taken at each step. However the end result is very impressive. We learned how to use this dough to make paillettes- spicy cheese straws, palmiers- better known as butterfly wings by us Americans, fruit tarts, goat cheese filled vols-au-vent, mille-feuilles: napoleon, and fruit galettes.

...and now the bride will cut the Croquembouche

Croquembouche is the French traditional wedding cake. It is a high cone made of pate a choux cream puffs stuck together with caramel. The name croque en bouche literally means "crunch in mouth". It is eaten by cracking off pieces of cream puff one at a time. How fun! This pastry may look easy to make and harmless but put a bunch of novice pastry students in a room with hot boiling sugar and it spells disaster! This was my first time making caramel and it burnt before I could even say "Holy Croquembouche!" All of us burnt our finger tips dipping these little cream puffs. We had to work super fast because the sugar kept hardening in the pot. Poor Sara got a spoon that was coated with the searing hot caramel stuck on her arm. She reacted before she could think and yanked the spoon off skin and all! Not so festive when you think about the blood and tears that goes into one of these croquembouche!