All Things Food: Lesson 20 - Buttercream, Foam Cake, Creme Anglaise, & Puff Pastry

For lesson 20, we started to make puff pastry to be used in lesson 21. It is basically dough with a huge stick of butter in the middle:

Then folded and rolled...

And folded and rolled...

The puff pastry has to rest in between foldings and rollings, so it wasn't until the following Tuesday that we could actually use it.

So, we began our foam cake:

This is Chef Bruno's foam cake with a coffee flavored buttercream and toasted almonds (you know, of course his looks professional because he owned a bakery in Florida for 20 years):

This was my foam cake with regular buttercream and completely covered with toasted almonds. It was good, though it dried out pretty quickly.

The buttercream was very simple to make:

14 oz sugar

5 oz water

6 egg yolks

25 oz butter, softened

Mix sugar with water in a pan; should be similar to wet sand.

Using a wet pastry brush, clean all sugar crystals from the side of the pan before heating. This reduces crystallization of the sugar. Cook to a soft ball stage (235-240 degrees F and syrup can be shaped into a ball that flattens out when removed from water). Do not stir the sugar while cooking.

Whisk egg yolks in a mixer. After sugar has reached the soft ball stage, pour it down the edge of the bowl with the whipping egg yolks.

Change to paddle attachment.

Add the butter. The directions in the book stop there, but I am pretty confident that you need to keep mixing until the butter is fully incorporated and the buttercream is smooth.

Fun fact: buttercream may be kept in the refrigerator almost indefinitely because the high sugar content inhibits bacterial growth. Doesn't that make you wonder how long restaurants keep it around???

Because our course was ending soon (and I am guessing he was bored), Chef Bruno made this decoration with icing: