Napoleon

Napoleon is a dessert that most people love once they've had it. It is also known as Mille feuille which translates into "a thousand leaves". Now to make this pastry, you start off by making a simple puff pastry. This is good for using up your extra dough and scraps. You make a sheet of it and then proceed to cut it into 3 equal parts. Once you have this you spoon a layer of diplomat cream, which is equal parts of pastry cream and whipped cream, on top of one layer of the puff pastry. Then you repeat this so you have two layers of puff pastry and two layers of cream. Keep the top layer of puff pastry off so you can put fondant on it. This kind of fondant is a glaze and is made of mostly sugar and water. When working with this fondant you have to move fast because it will set very quickly. So you take your top layer of puff pastry and pour some fondant over it and spread it out with a spatula so that it is smooth. Then to decorate your napoleons you can pipe straight lines of chocolate all the way across the pastry. Then by taking a skewer just run it through the chocolate going across in the opposite direction. This just makes it look
more presentable. Let this set for a few minutes just so it can harden and then place it on top of the other layers. Then you can cut out your different pieces. And there you have your napoleons.

Petit Fours

Petit fours can be classified into many different categories but the most common form of petit four is a small bit sized cake filled with jam which is then covered in fondant. The most common type of cake used to make these petit fours is frangipane but pound cake or sponge cake would work as well. You start by taking a layer of the cake and then putting a tiny bit of jam on top. Now I seriously mean a tiny bit, you don’t want there to be too much that the jam will squeeze out; you only want a taste of the jam. Now on top of the jam you will place another layer of frangipane or cake on top. At this point you will roll out a thin layer of marzipan and place that on the very top. Marzipan has a consistency of

play dough and is often used for decorations on petit fours or bigger cakes.  Once everything is stacked you will then proceed to cut it into 1 inch by 1 inch pieces. It is very small but this is traditionally how they are made. These small cakes are then covered in fondant which is just a glaze. All that is left is to decorate them. You can make small marzipan fruit or pipe chocolate on top. They have a lot of little pieces and but they turn out really nice. They look very fancy and will be impressive to everyone.

  

Decorated Cookies

We have many different kinds of cookies but this was the only cookie that we got to decorate. You start by making a simple dough. We used a 1-2-3 dough and a gingerbread dough. A 1-2-3 dough means that there is 1 part water, 2 parts fat and 3 parts flour. So it doesn't matter how much of an ingredient you use as long as the other ingredients are related through this recipe. Once you make this dough you then need to chill it to make sure that it stays together. Once it is chilled for a few hours you can then roll it out and cut different shapes using cookie cutters. If you have extra dough then you can ball it up and re-roll it. When you have them all cut, put them on a sheet tray and bake. When they are done let them cool so you can ice them. We use royal icing because it dries very quickly and gets really hard. So then for the fun part you can use different techniques to decorate these cookies. You can pipe different designs, you can add egg whites to the icing which will make it thinner so you can dip the cookies in it, or you can outline the cookie with one color and fill it with another. There are many possibilities so you can be as creative as you want. These are just a few examples of what we came up with.

Blond Brownies

The new class that I am in now is Cookies and Petit Fours. We have made lots of cookies but these brownies are delicious. My group put chocolate chips and peanut butter chips in them but you could add whatever ingredients you wanted. Below is the recipe:

Blond Brownie 

15oz Butter

3# Brown Sugar

9 Each Eggs

2# Pastry Flour 

1.5oz Baking Powder

¼oz Salt

½oz Vanilla

2# Chocolate chips, Semi-sweet (Can also put peanut butter chips, white chocolate chips, or butterscotch chips)

Method of Preparation (MOP):

1.      Melt butter and add brown sugar.

2.      Sift flour with salt and baking powder.

3.      Put in a bowl and mix in flour, salt and baking powder mixture.

4.      Mix in ½ nuts and chips.

5.      Put in prepared pan buttered and floured sprayed or sprayed with pan spray, lined with foil overlapping for easy removal.

6.      Sprinkle rest of chips and nuts on the top.

7.      Bake at 350 until skewer comes out clean. DO NOT OVERBAKE.

8.      Cool and cut.