Day 12: Let It Snow

I've dodged plenty of icy bullets over the years, (i.e. Boston, Buffalo, and CT) but I never imagined that moving to the City of Light would bring me my earliest and coldest winter in recent memory.  While it snowed, and snowed, and snowed last year we still had plenty of sunshine and warm days and none of it started in November.  Much to my dismay when I stepped out of my house on Monday morning, November 29th, I was met with frigid temperatures and snow covering cars, grass, and some sidewalks.  Not okay.  Not having watched TV or read a newspaper in about 5 weeks I'm not sure what it was that led me to wear two pairs of pants that morning, but I'm sure glad I did!  I walked to the metro, went to school, and was all too happy to begin baking my Gateau Basque in practical class.

On Saturday we had our demonstration class on how to make Gateau Basque and since my family was still in Paris my Mom, Dad, and sister, Jex, were able to come observe the class.  They had a great time and it was all we could do to get Dad back on the plane to Dulles on Sunday morning after seeing what I do every day.  He was sold after the first five minutes and is seriously considering signing up for next year's intensive 5 week program to study either Basic Cuisine or Basic Pastry.  I told him if he studies Basic Cuisine maybe I'll join him.

Gateau Basque is a traditional dessert from the Gateau region of France and consists of a cake base with a pastry cream and cherry filling covered with a pie shell.  It is traditionally decorated with two hooked S shapes and it looks like a pie, but tastes more like a cake.  After the demo the chef was very nice to my family and offered them one of the extra cakes he had prepared.  After being told the Gateau Basque is best eaten two or three days after it is made my Mom bought a tupperware container and brought the entire cake back to Virginia.  They had it for dessert on Sunday night about 36 hours after it had been baked.

Chef Cotte's Gateau Basque

Monday morning was my turn to try my hand at Gateau Basque and from the beginning it did NOT go well.  When we go to practical class we have to bring our recipe and any notes we've taken on how to prepare the dish we'll be baking.  My first mistake was leaving the recipe for the dough in my locker.  While this was not a detrimental mistake, as I could share a friend's recipe with her, it made things difficult because I didn't have my own reminders to look at and subsequently ended up with dough that was much too sticky and very hard to work with.

My next task was making pastry cream.  I did have the recipe for that and since it was the same cream we made to fill our eclairs with on Friday it turned out very well once again.  While making my cream, my dough spent about 10 minutes chilling in the refrigerator.  It started to firm up, but not enough.  The dough was still very soft and was therefore pretty difficult to roll out and move into the pan.

As I mentioned, this recipe traditionally contains cherries.  It can be made with whole cherries or chopped cherries or cherry preserves, but for our purposes we were using whole cherries.  This would have been fine, but after I piped in the pastry cream and topped the dessert with cherries I didn't realize I needed to push the cherries all the way into the cream.  So since my dough was so stretchy and sticky when I put the top layer on my pie the dough fell into the mold and looked very bumpy because it had cherries poking through all over the place.  Again, this was a challenging day!

When it was all said and done Chef Bernarde told my three friends and me that he was very pleased with our organization and our ability to work so quickly.  He told me that my cake was still very tasty and that since my mistake had been making the dough too thin, it was something I could easily change for next time and have the perfect Gateau Basque.  While I appreciated his words of encouragement, and my cake was very delicious to eat, I was so disturbed by my first terrible result that I forgot to take a picture of my cake!  Oh well, I'll try to remember next time!

Until next time Au Revoir and Bon Appetit!