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After six months, pastry class is over. I already miss those big industrial kitchens, with their gleaming stainless-steel and marble-topped tables, those rows of brave white KitchenAid mixers, the endless supplies of bowls and wooden spoons and ladles, the amazingly powerful little Butane burners.  But much more, I miss my fellow students, and Chef Claude Perdriolat and his assistants, who shepherded us through

We didn’t suck at it after all. That was Chef Claude’s conclusion after our second session of tempering chocolate in our pastry techniques class at L’Academie de Cuisine. He waited until the three-hour session was over to tell us that given what he had seen last week, he figured we’d be a total loss when it came to tempering chocolate. But our second whack at it revived the optimist buried dee

The good people who teach our pastry techniques class at L’Academie de Cuisine warned us way back in January that tempering chocolate would be tedious and frustrating. Maybe that’s why they waited 17 weeks to make us do it. It lived up to everything they promised us.

It was a very meringuey night at pastry class at L’Academie. Chef Claude thought our meringues were piss-poor the last few classes, and since so many desserts involve meringue, he decided we needed a whole evening of them. Here was one of the Baked Alaskas we made: And here are some of the raspberry macarons:

I’ve fallen in love, and fallen hard. Here is a picture of my beloved: Let me tell you about her. She is delicate and light, rich and ethereal all at once. She is, in a word, enchanting.

When Melissa wrote in about her pastry cream crisis, I felt her pain. I had just had the same experience: Hours before 25 guests were to arrive at my house for a pie social, I awoke to find that the lovely pastry cream that had set up so nicely in the refrigerator at bedtime had turned into a pourable custard. This meant that instead of enjoying nicely formed slices of honey-vanilla pie with gingersnap crust, my gues

Pastry techniques class at L’Academie de Cuisine is totally joyful, but also very humbling. I can explain best in pictures: My Bavarois cake: Chef Claude’s Bavarois cake: ‘Nuff said. Soon I will try to post more details about how we made the little meringuey shapes around the outside, and how we made the raspberry mirror glaze. (For the rest of the cake, see last week’s post on how we made the

Just about everyone has heard of mousse, but fewer know about its light and airy cousin, the Bavarian. It’s a nice thing to have in your repertoire when a heavy main course begs for a mercifully light dessert. Make no mistake: this baby is still very rich, but it lands lightly on the tongue. You can serve it by itself, in a lovely little dessert dish, as I did for a guest the other night, or you can build it in

This is the sort of delight we experience in pastry techniques class: a bowl of chocolate mousse two feet deep. No, we didn’t get to dive in head-first. But we did get to take home a little terrine (loaf) of the mousse, topped with a rectangle of baked pâte sucrée. Mine is sitting all wrapped up snugly in plastic wrap in the fridge, waiting to be unmolded and turned upside down for a sufficiently beloved friend

We had so much fun rolling cakes in pastry class the other night. And no, we didn’t roll them along the floor like so many bowling balls, silly. We learned to make roulades, which is just a fancy way of saying we rolled them into swirly designs with fillings. One type of roulade was familiar to me: the kind that looks like a log when it’s all done, and each round slice has a neat little spiral design in i