Happy birthday to me! Today was a great day as I was showered with gifts, laughter, love, and baked goods.
We started off the day by working on our tart cases, we made a plain tart shell, a spiced tart shell, and a cocoa shell. We also worked on the vegan tart from yesterday, cutting the dough to size of small tart shells and baking them off. The vegan tart shells were a little too thin and since the vegan butter we used was more like a margarine they did not work out. We ended up having to mix some flour into the dough to make it more stable and then made one larger tart shell to fill tomorrow.
To shape the tart shells we used perforated tart rings and perforated silicon mats to make sure the heat hits all parts of the tart shell evenly. We cut strips of the tart dough to push around the inside of the ring and then trimmed it before pushing it into the dough to get the bottom piece.
To show us another technique, Damien cut circles out of the cocoa tart dough and the regular tart dough to show how to make a polka dot pattern in the tart shell. We then par baked the tart shells to cook them slightly before filling them and baking them again. The cocoa shell is getting a pistachio chocolate filling, the plain shell is getting a lemon filling, and the spiced shell is getting a passion fruit caramel filling.
We moved on to create the fillings and toppings to prep for tomorrow. We created the passion fruit caramel filling and let it cool in the fridge, the lemon filling will be mixed tomorrow and baked. We made the chocolate filling and piped it into the cocoa shells. We made some namelakas and ganaches to use as toppings tomorrow and we will make a marshmallow and Italian meringue topping tomorrow. Damien also showed us a rolling technique to freeze a namelaka in a tube using plastic wrap.
Tomorrow we will finish up all of the tarts and head into the weekend before the final week. At lunch today Damien made a batch of brownies for me and everyone sung happy birthday, it made me appreciate even more this school and journey I have been on so far. So sad to be going into week 5 already!
Happy Birthday! 🎉🥳