Me: What should we name him?

Bob: (no hesitation whatsoever) Paco!

Me: Um, why?

Bob: Because we love Mexican food.

Me: True. Ok.

Up until last week my idea of cooking Mexican food involved chicken mixed with a jar of salsa. I headed on over to Auguste Escoffier School of Culinary Arts for the class. All of my other classes were taken at Culinary School of the Rockies but they have since had a name change and I can no longer pronounce it.

The class divided and conquered the menu. Here was the Tortilla Soup:

The soup was yummy. I thought I wouldn’t want it on a hot summer night but it had a lighter summer flavour with cilantro in it and it ended up being the perfect summer soup!

My job was to make the masa dough to wrap inside the tamales.

We added pork to the masa dough and wrapped it in corn husks to be steamed.

Everybody was busy slaving away on various sides: red chile sauce, creen chile sauce, chile rellenos & sopaipillas.

We sat down to eat dinner at the end of the evening and everything looked fantastic!

To be honest, I didn’t really care for anything on the menu. Don’t get me wrong, I love fajitas and chimichangas. This was more “authentic” Mexican food and it had a lot of spice to it. I can’t handle spice. The rest of the class loved everything so I have no doubt that the recipes were great. It was just my personal taste that got in the way.

As for my favourite part of the meal: dessert with cinnamon ice cream.

First we added eggs and sugar to a bowl and I whisked away until the mixture was a very pale yellow. Have you any idea how long that takes? My arm was very sore and I don’t even think I could lift a skittle as soon as I finished whisking.

While I whisked for approximately 20 minutes, Martha was busy simmering the heavy cream and vanilla bean seeds. When both mixtures were ready, we combined them and put them through a strainer to make it as smooth as possible. It looked very silky.

We poured the mixture into small roulade dishes and baked it for about 50 minutes until the creme barely shimmied when shaken.

After they cooled off, we got to play with fire. We didn’t use any dainty kitchen torches. Oh no, our head chef brought torches from Home Depot. I sprinkled the tops of the creme with sugar and torched them until the sugar melted and browned into a hard crust.

I also made puff pastry dough. Most people buy this pre-made dough in the frozen food section but it is very easy to make. It is only water, flour, butter and salt. I combined all ingredients until it formed a very shaggy pile in my bowl. “Shaggy” is an official term the head chef uses. It looks like this.

I rolled the dough into a rectangular shape and folded it. Then I rolled it out again, and folded it. I did this four times. This dough is called the “pastry with 1,000 layers”. I think 1,000 layers is a bit much, but re-rolling and folding the dough does create several flaky layers when it is cooked. We were using the dough to make fruit chaussons but let’s just call them apple turnovers.

I cut the dough into circles and filled them with an apple mixture which was just cooked apples and cinnamon. I left some of them open and folded some into the shape of pierogies. Then I brushed them with an egg wash and sprinkled the tops with sugar.

The end result was a fluffy, flaky breakfast pastry.

Other classmates made Chocolate Pot De Creme. This was almost like pudding/ uncooked brownie mix/ custard. It was rich and amazing and worth every calorie.

Sweet. Soft. Nutty. No, I’m not describing Bob. The sticky buns from class would put Pillsbury to shame. In fact, Chef Deb had a plumbing issue at her house and was quoted $1,900 for repairs. The plumber showed up when she was making these sticky buns so she gave him one. The plumber said he wouldn’t charge a dime for repairs if he could take the entire tray of sticky buns home. According to my calculations, if a tray of sticky buns is worth $1,900 then I could sell these and be rolling in dough (get it?).

There was also Pumpkin Caramel Custard which was like flan. I’m not a huge fan of flan, but tried it anyways. It was ok, but not my cup of tea.

Lastly, there was bread pudding with raspberries and apricots soaked in brandy. I’m not a fan of bread pudding either. This was ok, too. I think it would be good if I liked bread pudding to begin with.

Tomorrow is chocolate truffle and souffle day so I am fully prepared to get diabetes and slip into a food coma.

We started by slicing two vanilla beans and scraping out the seeds. Ever wonder what the microscopic black dots are in your vanilla bean ice cream? Those are vanilla seeds and they are oh so tiny. If you get vanilla ice cream without the tiny dots, then it was made with vanilla extract and not the real thing.

We simmered half & half with sugar and the vanilla bean seeds for approximately 10 minutes. It looked like cookies & cream at this point.

Then we mixed in egg yolks and whipped them together. Since the mixture was still hot from simmering, it actually cooked the eggs a little (which is normal). Nobody wants eggs in their ice cream, so we put the concoction through a strainer to get out the scrambled egg bits and soaked it in an ice bath. We ended up with a scrumptious-smelling bowl of pre-ice cream.

We poured our mixture into the ice cream machine to churn for an hour. The machine did all of the work to get it frozen. I don’t have any pictures of my finished product because I gobbled it up as soon as it was put in front of me. I can’t resist. It was so creamy!

My favourite ice cream today was the coffee parfait. I do not like coffee at all. I thought I would be nice and try another group’s creation and I planned on saying I liked it even if I didn’t. By golly I didn’t have to fib. It was amazing. I tasted more of the Kahlua & Heath bars in it than I did espresso powder. It was served with a dollop of whipped cream and shaved chocolate.

Another group made blackberry sorbet & grapefruit & vodka granite. Both were very tasty and would be perfect for a hot summer day.

My group finished somewhat early so we made vanilla tuile paste & chocolate tuile paste. It is pretty much a very thin cookie that is used more for decoration & you can shape it when it comes out of the oven before it cools. We cut out patterns then scraped the paste onto parchment paper and baked it for only about 5 minutes.

As soon as it was out of the oven I had to peel the cookie off the paper and shape it into a bowl or curved shape while it was still hot. We didn’t do anything else with the tuile today, but I could have eaten it with the ice cream.

First we made the cakes, which were about 6″ round. Wendy and I made the batter together and divided it amongst 4 pans so we each could have a layer cake.

While the cakes were cooking and cooling we started the buttercream icing. The original buttercream recipe calls for vanilla, but we had options to modify it to mocha, raspberry, or hazelnut. We opted for the mocha icing. It started out as whipped egg whites & sugar until it looked like marshmallow fluff. It took about 20 minutes of being whipped in a KitchenAid mixer to get to the white fluff part.

Then we added a lot of butter and whipped it for another 10 minutes in the mixer. When it was stiff enough we added the mocha and melted chocolate for the flavour. It smelled divine.

By the time the cakes cooled we sliced them into layers. I opted to make a 4 layer cake and Wendy made a 2 layer cake. Piping the scalloped edge wasn’t on the class schedule but I knew how to do it from my Wilton classes so I decided to fancy mine up a bit. Not too bad, eh?

We also finished the cream puffs from yesterday by piping the filling inside and dipping the tops in chocolate. Mmmmm.

Here are some pictures of what my classmates made. This is vanilla roulade with lime curd and fruit compote.

Raspberry Hazelnut Genoise.

Coconut layer cake.

And now a class photo.

The culinary school offers a variety of classes including a knife skills class. The student make vegetable soup so they can learn how to slice carrots, taters, zucchini and a bunch of other stuff. Since they make a lot, we get to eat their hard work for lunch every day and it is quite delicious!

We started out by making two types of pie crusts. Pate Brisee is the basic pastry dough. We didn’t get a chance to use this today so it is wrapped up in the fridge for tomorrow. We also made Pate Sucree which is a sweet pastry dough and it is almost like a shortbread cookie. It is very crumbly when rolled out and had to be put in the pie dish in pieces and then squished back together. We used Pate Sucree in our fruit tart.

Once the crust was done we made Pate a Choux which is a fancy way of saying Cream Puff Pastry (hey I’m not French). We piped the pastry dough through a tube onto parchment paper and baked it in the oven. Here is what came out!

While the cream puffs were baking we made the Creme Patissiere (fancy for Pastry Cream). It is pretty much a more delicious version of Jell-O pudding. Sorry Bill Cosby, da puddin’ from da class was better than yours! This pudding has two purposes- we filled the fruit tart crust with it before layering fruit on top, and we will use it again tomorrow to fill the cream puffs.

Here is the fruit tart! Pate Sucree crust filled with pudding and some yummy fruit sliced on top. I did all of the fruit slicing and arranging. See how purdy it looks?

The best part about this class are the magical clean-up fairies. Whenever I set a dirty dish aside, a fairy swoops in to clean it and returns it to the proper shelf in the kitchen. I checked Target but they don’t have any clean-up fairies on clearance right now.