End of Summer

Summer quarter ended two weeks ago, and today I packed my bags and will head to the farm early tomorrow morning. Before I leave, I'll catch you up on the last few days at school. After we had finished our rotations, we were allowed to work independently the last few days. We were to choose two items to make for the Pastry Case, and one item for the Grand Buffet. I wrote about the apple cake that I made for the Grand Buffet a few posts ago.

I finished my celebration cake a day ahead of schedule, so I ended up making three items for the pastry case: hand pies, cream puffs, and my first attempt at baking a large batch of multi-day bread: twelve loaves of Pain Rustique. Here is the bread:



Can you believe we sell these one pound loaves for $1.50? I made the poolish (sourdough starter) one day, and finished the bread the next day.



I chose to make cream puffs because I wanted to practice making Pâte à Choux and also wanted to practice piping. As a bonus, I made some small-batch blueberry jam for the filling (end of the quarter, blueberries needed to be used up) and topped it with lemon whipped cream (cream with sugar, lemon zest and juice whipped in). We sampled a few of these and they were very tasty. Can't miss with blueberries and lemon. And cream.



For these hand pies, I made a batch of pie dough, then cut 3.5 inch circles, and filled them with two kinds of jam that were leftover in the fridge: peach, and tart cherry. I used a small star-shaped cookie cutter to make the vent on the top crust. These also were very good and sold quickly out of the case. A good item to file away for using up leftover jam or whenever you want an easy-to-make treat that looks fancy.