Chocolate and Buttercream

Today's lecture was about chocolate and buttercream. We were able to do a taste test with about 6 types of chocolate. Chef Lisa also started talking about where they harvest the cocoa pods. The only way it grows is in hot climates that have a lot of shade. They grow quite well at placed near the equator. The whole time she was talking about it, it made me think of the honeymoon because we went to a cocoa plantation and saw everything from the trees to the cocoa pods out fermenting in the sun (see pic above). The chocolate lecture was fairly quick and then we moved onto buttercream. There are 2 types of buttercream. One is made with egg yolks, sugar, and butter and the other is made with whipped egg whites, simple syrup and butter. The lecture's demo was of the buttercream made with whipped egg whites. It's a pretty quick process, but it doesn't taste as good and the one with the yolks or the really quick recipe I usually use which is loaded with butter and confectioner's sugar.

The recipe I received was Pistachio and Strawberry Cake with Pistachio Buttercream. Once we were in the kitchen, it was a fight for the stand mixers as we all had to make buttercream and our cake batters. Once that was squared away, I started putting together my batter. It was a normal batter with the addition of crushed pistachio. Once that was in the oven baking, I started making my buttercream. The uniqueness of my buttercream was that it was actually a pastry cream with the butter whipped in. I had to steep the pistachio in cream for an hour. Once that is done, I whisk together the yolks and sugar and then incorporate the cream along with the pistachio and cook it until it thickens. Once it's thickened, it went into the food processor to pulverize the nuts which made the pastry cream a cool green color. Once the pastry cream cooled, I had to put it in the stand mixer and start putting in the 1.5 cups of butter a tablespoon at a time. When it was done, I had to taste it of course. It was very, very good! To assemble my cake, I took one of the two baked cakes and layered the top with buttercream, sliced strawberries, buttercream, strawberries, buttercream. Then I put the second piece of cake on top and covered the top of that with a smooth, thin layer of the pistachio buttercream. To decorate it, I whipped cream quite stiff and piped it up the side and made rosettes on the top with a large star tip. I am really proud of the way it came out!

Today's Recipes:Chocolate Orange Dobos Torte, Chocolate Kahlua Fantasy Cake, Chocolate Angel Food Cake, Checkerboard Cake with White Chocolate Buttercream, Devil's Food Cake with Caramelized Bananas, Gianduia Mousse Cake

In between baking and lecture my team, for the restaurant project, went out to find our menu cover and paper. While we were there, we found a postcard that was perfect for our name, Spring Chicken, and the concept. It's a watercolor picture of a baby chick in one of those soft-boiled egg cups, on a dining table with a spoon in front and a salt shaker in the back. It is PERFECT for our concept. That will be our cover page.

During lecture we talked about menu engineering. We looked at an example menu that was from Newport. It was clearly geared towards tourists. It was all crammed onto one page and had lots of nautical clip art. We discussed how to make the design better. Derek and I went out to dinner to a new restaurant the other night and I was noticing that their menu sucked as far as appearance. I think it has ruined me now, because I am focusing on their menu setup, not the food! We also talked about how you can keep track of the dishes that are ordered each night and how to rate them based on the price it costs you to make them minus how much you charge and the percentage rate at which they are ordered. Once you get that information over a period of time, you can see what items can be taken off the menu or what items can be adjusted to make them more popular. We only have 1 more lecture before we have to have our group projects in and do a presentation on our new restaurant. I have a lot of work to do because it's coming up fast. I think we have a good idea, now we just need to get it all down in a menu form!