C is for Cookies

This week I'm on the Cookie rotation, and it's going far, far better than last week's Purgatory of Bread and Dish-washing. My partner (another 1st quarter student) and I have a worktable to ourselves, and report only to the chef instructor. The pace is more relaxed than in Breads; we've generally only been working on two products at one time instead of the four or five in the Bread rotation. We've even had 15 minutes for lunch each day! Today we made the cookies above (Jammers or Jammies) and the Florentines below.

The Jam cookies are made by rolling out and cutting scalloped circles of pâte sucrée (sweet rich tart dough), then making a soft almond paste dough and piping it around the edge of the cookie. The dough goes into the fridge for a while to firm up, then we spooned raspberry and apricot jam into the center and baked them.

As you can see, we also got to do some chocolate work today. We chopped a couple kinds of dark chocolate and tempered it by heating it over hot water (using a bain-marie improvised from a metal bowl and a saucepan). We piped chocolate drizzles on the jam cookies, and painted chocolate onto the flat side of the florentines using a small offset spatula.

Both of these cookies are very sweet, but tasty! And yes, we get to taste everything we make - it is considered good practice to cut up one item of each thing made for the chef, ourselves and fellow students to try. You want to find out you put in too much salt (or forgot it) before it goes downstairs to the pastry case.

Goof of the week (so far... it's only Wednesday after all) was that we mixed up a laborious dough for some tri-colored petits fours, put it in the oven and then forgot to take it out. It didn't burn, but it got very, very tough. We'll be trying again tomorrow. Also on the deck for tomorrow is to bake up some Cocoa-Espresso dough we made this afternoon. It's chilling in rolls in the fridge overnight.