For the vacherins we piped round meringue caskets and lids. When they were cool we put small bits of sponge, soaked with an orange syrup, in the bottom (mostly to fill it up probably) We piped a bit of cream on top of the sponge and decorated with a bit of fruit. I tried one and I really liked the contrast of the crispy meringue, the soft sponge, and the sweet cream and fruit.
My cheesecakes were made, but they didn't set in time! The college has been missing deliveries, so the class didn't have enough soft cheese for everyone, so some of us had to wait, and that meant the cheesecakes didn't set by the end of the day - not cool! They're still in the freezer, I just need to take them out of the moulds.
The next day we worked in teams of three to make three recipes: two types of doughnuts, and stollen. The two others that I was with made doughnuts. They actually made two types: yeast raised, and cake-type doughnuts. These are the cake doughnuts. They were rolled out and cut with a doughnut cutter, fried, and then topped, or sliced in half and filled with cream. The yeast doughnuts were rolled like you would a bread roll, proofed, fried, and then filled them with custard and jam. The teacher explained that because of the equipment used, mass produced doughnuts will always be better. I thought that these were okay, but the teacher was right: Tim Hortons will be better than any doughnuts I could make. I liked the ones coated in sugar the best, with a nice cup of tea. They were definately greasier than the mass-produced ones, and really not worth making at home, for me, anyway.
While the girls were busy with the doughnuts, I had my hands full with the stollen. I love stollen, -in fact, I would go so far as to say that's my favourite thing about christmas. I made stollen before at college in Canada, so I was keen to see the differences. Big difference #1: Fruits. The fruits we used here were mixed into the dough dry, but in Canada we marinated the fruits in rum for about three months before making the stollen, which really let the flavour soak in. I made a starter for the stollen, which had to sit for about an hour while I got everything else ready. I mixed the dough, and then divided the it so that everyone on the team got to shape their own loaves. I also had some premium marzipan put away (that I had been using in one of my chocolates, which I'd scrapped,) so I pulled that out for our group to use in place of the regular marzipan the rest of the class was using. The teacher showed us how he shaped the stollen. I wasn't particularily happy with it though, so I made mine a bit more rounded. Big difference #2: Dipping. After baking, while the stollen was still warm, we dipped it twice into a rum syrup, brushed the top with melted butter, and then dusted the top three times with icing sugar. In canada we had dipped the entire stollen in clarified butter, coated the whole thing with vanilla sugar, dipped in the butter again, and a final coating of the sugar. No matter of the difference, I always like stollen. I don't usually take much home, but I did take two of these -one of which is still in my freezer, the other didn't last a week.
Also did lots of chocolate this week, more coming up on that next week though.
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