A Hole in the Wall & Baker's Delight

Yesterday was the long anticipated cake & pastry segment of the Basic Skills course at Palate Sensations. The day started well - met 3 of my women friends and fellow-foodies for lunch at Buko Nero, a lovely "hole-in-the-wall" ( that's what the name means ) restaurant run by Oscar & Tracy on Tanjong Pagar Road. The reservation had been made 1 month in advance ( the place is SO popular ) and we were certainly not disappointed. All the good things we heard about this tiny & unpretentious place were true ! Great food with a lovely ambience, jazzy music playing in the background, pleasant & unobstrusive service, reasonable pricing - what more could anyone ask for ? Fangs brought champagne ( corkage is charged ), so the mood was all the more mellow. :-)

We all had the 3-course set meal ( great value at $23++ ), which consisted of a choice of starter of either a bisque or a salad, choice of main of either pasta or pork cheeks with mushrooms, and finally choice of dessert of either home-made vanilla ice cream or My Grandmother's Cake, a flourless white chocolate cake. Somehow we all chose the pork cheeks(very tender, melt-in-the-mouth), which came on a bed of lovely mash potato & mushrooms(some of my favourite things !), as well as the cake, which turned out to be really yummy. I also really enjoyed my salad of watermelon, mango & rocket & stuff, which was a very refreshing start to it all. Unfortunately, I was not allowed to take any pictures of the food, so you will just have to use your imagination or better still, make your own way down to the restaurant to try the food for yourself (or check out the photos in the link above). All this, plus coffee to round off the meal, at under $40 per person ! We have plans to return in October, to celebrate Fangs' & Ming's birthdays.

Back to the baking - after the wonderful lunch, I made my way to PS, a little late but definitely in a great mood even though I had only had about 4 hours sleep the previous night. Walked straight into the thick of action - the class had been divided into 4 groups of about 4 people each & our handsome teacher, chef Francois ( yes, Lynette, as promised ! ) was busy trying to get everyone doing the right things with their ingredients.

On the menu were the following cakes & tarts :
Alsatian Tart
Almond & Blueberry Tart
Chocolate Mousse Cake
Framboisier ( Raspberry Mousse Cake )



We all had great fun, making the Genoise sponge base for the cakes, as well as short-crust pastry for the tarts. I was thrilled with the lightness of the sponge - resolve to get my as-yet unopened Morphy Richards electric mixer ( bought on sale from Tangs ) out from the box on the shelf for future baking endeavours. That would definitely make it much easier then using my hand-held mixer, which can be a bit inconvenient, although it makes for easy storage as it comes without the mixing bowl & stand.







Also learned how to make chocolate & raspberry mousse, as well as how to decorate the cakes with the mousse. "Man-power" was certainly most welcome - we had the guys in the groups doing some of the whisking by hand ( thanks ! ), which worked out very well for the way the groups were divided. We also had to learn to share our ingredients & improvise as unfortunately we did not have enough raspberry puree ( there were more students/groups than originally planned ) & cream. What a lovely way to learn about teamwork, sharing & co-operation ! :-)
( BTW, PS actually also conducts cooking classes for up to 25 people especially for team-building exercises - do check out their website for more details. )

Alas, the final picture will only emerge after next Saturday as we did not have time to finish decorating the cakes as they need to be chilled first after being"moussed". Our group also decided to exercise our creativity by making rectangular cakes, as opposed to round ones ( okay, we were just trying to save & use every bit of our Genoise sponge ! )

So we left our "moussed" cakes in the freezers at PS & the finishing touch will be done next Saturday, which, sad to say, would be the last lesson in the course.

Am looking forward to that - can almost never say no to dessert. :-) Also another chance to exercise more creativity - I think half the fun is plating the dessert & making it look irresistible. The same goes for pastry & cakes - although I would rather it looked ordinary, but tasted great, as opposed to looking great but tasting terrible ( "Ho Kua Boh Ho Chiak", as the Hokkiens put it so well ). I think my almond & blueberry tart turned out quite well - we had it for dessert ( my sibs & I ) that night & they liked it. Can you just make out the "smiley " on my tart ? :-)
Guess I'll be making more of these in future !


Our Alsatian tarts were actually supposed to have been made using apple, but we used the raspberries instead as we did not have apples. So here's how the group's tarts looked :


This is a custard filled tart, as opposed to the almond one for the almond & blueberry tart. Personally, I'm partial to almond, so I definitely preferred the other tart. For the not so nutty people, this would probably preferable. Note the nice, slightly caramelised surface of the custard filling, which is what it should turn out to be. So, in other words, the class did a good job - hurray for us ! :-)

Here's a picture of some of my fellow students & of course our very dashing & patient teacher. :-) Hope things turned out alright for him as he had to serve dinner to over a hundred people that evening at his restaurant while having a shortage of staff as 2 of his guys were on MC. Despite that, he remained cheerful & joked with us constantly during the class, even when some of us made "special", unauthorised versions of the recipes. ;-)

It has been great fun & I look forward to working with my fellow students for the final time (sob, sob) next Saturday. Maybe I'll bring a bottle or 2 of dessert wine to share in honour of the occasion.....

Fishy Business

After the wonderful experience a few weekends ago at the pastry class at Palate Sensations, I decided to sign up for a few more classes - more adventures in cooking.
This time it was a class on preparation of seafood dishes, one of the food groups that I definitely enjoy eating but always felt was more difficult to master when it came to cooking and preparation.
This was actually Module 6 of the Basic Skills series of classes at PS, conducted by one very good-natured & humourous French chef, Francois Mermilliod, who is Executive Chef at Flutes at the Fort. Must confess that I have not been to Flutes, but after the very pleasant encounter with Chef Francois, it will defintely be on my list of must-visit restaurants. The web site for the restaurant also looks really good - the setting of the restaurant looks & sounds fabulous, not to mention the menu.
But I digress....

Anyway, on the menu that day at the class was fish fillet cooked 3 ways, prawn cocktail with avocado & mango salad & salsa, and fresh oysters which we would learn how to shuck ourselves !
This class was much bigger than the last one I attended - I think there were about at least 12 to 15 people in the room. Cooking was done on both individual & group basis - we all had to learn how to fillet a fish properly, and each person did his/her own fish mousse roll thing(1st way), as well as shuck oysters & plate the prawn ccktail with avocado & mango salad. However, the making of the beer batter for the fish fillet (2nd way), the aioli/mayonnaise for the fried fish fillet in beer batter, the fish paste for the fish mousse roll, the teriyaki sauce (the above pic is of the flambe-ing of the sauce !) for the baked cod (3rd way), the avocado & mango salad & the tomato basil salsa for the prawn cocktail, were all done in groups. This picture below shows the "magic hands" effect of several group members preparing the aioli/mayonnaise.

Meanwhile, Boon Seh from Sensus Wine Studio, brought some Spanish wines for us to try, to go along with the food we were busy preparing. This kind of reminded me of the Cookworks program on the Asian Food Channel, where a bunch of people are taught how to cook by the affable Donna Dooher, who "takes the inept & makes them adept". On this program, they have an inhouse bartender who prepares complementary cocktails for the aspiring cooks, so they all have a very enjoyable time with good food & drink during & at the end of the whole cooking lesson. And if the dishes didn't turn out as great as hoped for, well, the drinks would have made it all better ! :-) Unfortunately for me, all the wine had run out by the time I had some food in me so I missed the chance of tasting them. I was told that they were great. I did get the chance, though, to try some lovely olive oils & olives brought in from Australia by 2 ladies from D'Light Pte Ltd for us to taste. Ended up buying both types of olive oil, one fruity & the other peppery, for future culinary attempts at home.

I am proud to say that we all acquitted ourselves rather commendably ( including this newbie to the class ). Even picked up some tips on how to cut vegetables properly (since I missed the earlier classes). Am rather proud of how my prawn cocktail with mango & avocado salad looked after I plated it....

Also proud of the fact that I now know how to shuck an oyster, having opened 3 during the class & gobbled them down with just a squeeze of lemon juice on top...yum....
Had loads of fun and am looking forward to the next class this saturday, which is on cakes & pastry ( my favourite things to make ! ). Watch out for the next post....

Pastry Inspirations

Went for my first cooking class in our dear Lion City today, and was inspired to start blogging again.Realised that my last entry on my previous blog was on March 14 2006 !


Something about pastry - never fails to make me feel happy and generally excited about creating more edible works of art. Guess it has to do with the therapeutic process of making the pastry dough ( all that whisking, beating, stirring, folding, kneading etc ) and smelling that heavenly aroma emanating from the oven after all the effort. Of course the final step of putting each wonderful morsel into your mouth is the peak of the whole experience. Also, the satisfaction of seeing others enjoy the fruits of my labour just gives me that buzz as well.

Today's class was on making that old favourite : the eclair.

Eclair cases are made of choux(pronounced "shoe", just in case you were wondering) pastry. Had actually attempted making cream/custard puffs ( which use the same pastry ) more than 10 years ago, so with the memories being rather faint as to the whole process, I decided to sign up for this class, run by Palate Sensations.


Here are the results - they tasted as yummy as they look. :-)
They are filled with chocolate cream or coffee cream, via little holes made at the bottom of the cases ( see above photo ).

Have to thank the teacher, pastry chef Nan Ong, of Classique Gateaux, who made the final chocolate glaze to finish the product, as well as my dear friend, Carmen, who attended the class as well & did the traditional ( log-shaped ) ones. My little touch of inspiration was the addition of almond slivers on top of the round ones. Thanks also to Lynette, the person behind Palate Sensations, who generously offered the almonds even though they were not part of the ingredients included. :-)

Am gonna make more for the upcoming birthday celebrations for our nation. Maybe I'll try some other flavours and add fruit as well. I have some nice ripe strawberries in the fridge. Yum.....