Caramels And Finger Condoms

I reached a major milestone last night…my first culinary school injury. That’s right, I had an incident with a serrated knife, and it was stupid. To add insult to injury, I had to wear a freaking finger condom on my finger all night….fail.

Anyway, fun stuff in last night's class, folks. We started working with caramel, and it was awesome! We sliced apples for our mini tartes tatins, a quick upside-down caramel apple tart. We boiled sugar and water together, until the caramel turned almost black. The goal was to achieve a caramel that had a slight bitterness to it.  Chef Cynthia called my caramel “perfect,” which I only mention because I am my father's son. We poured the caramel into our tartlet molds, arranged the apples, and covered them with discs of pâte sucrée. Once out of the oven, we unmolded them, and here they are!

We then assembled our dough for our pecan bourbon cookies. What what!! Two of my favorite things in one cookie?! Yes, please! We haven’t baked them off yet, but I can’t wait to try them on Saturday.

Next, we got to work on our tarte aux noix et caramel, our caramel nut tart. Mom, this one’s for you! We made our caramel, which we then “slacked off” by adding heavy cream and a little bit of glucose, then adding chopped walnuts. We cooked the mixture further to thicken. Then, we spread it into our tart shells and then covered that with a thin layer of almond cream. I have not tried this one, but it looks AH-mazing. I didn’t get a chance to dust it with powdered sugar, so it's not quite as pretty, but take a look.

Finally, we made the dough for our Linzer tarts. We’ll be making these on Saturday, but we had to give the dough time to rest. Goody, more raspberry.

Well, that’s about it. You can all ask Todd how this stuff is, since I’m unloading it all on him today. What, you think Adam and I eat it all?! Are you crazy?!