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.....