French Pastry Fundamentals-Madeleines, Custard and Cakes

1. Intro for class: French pastry is magical, the feeling of crafting beautiful cakes and pastries for the people you love is so satisfying. In this class, we learn the building blocks of French pastry and then apply these concepts to take simple ingredients and create something truly amazing. We start the lesson by understanding the tools required for the class, as that is essential to succeed in mastering these recipes. Then we begin with our first recipe, by learning how to make my favorite tea cake, a blueberry financier. A soft and light cake made with brown butter, egg whites, and almond flour. The second recipe is an elegant crème caramel, a silky vanilla baked custard, with the golden liquid caramel exterior. This dessert will surely impress your friends and family. The third recipe is a beautiful French butter cake called madeleine from the Lorraine region in France. They are a little tricky to master, but the lesson will cover all the small details so that you can achieve the perfect results. I will show you the classic way of making them, and also my favorite way of eating them, dipped in a chocolate glaze, coated with crushed hazelnuts. To finish the class, we will make a fraisier cake, which is a showstopper, a lightly soaked genoise sponge layered with strawberries and mousseline cream. To take your skills to the next level, we will also learn how to assemble, finish, and garnish the cake. The class also comes with a detailed recipe book, with all the recipes and tips and tricks so that you can easily master these recipes at home. I'm so excited to get started, and I really hope you join me to learn to make amazing and beautiful French pastries at home. 2. Course Outline and Project: I wanted to briefly explain the outline of this class. I designed this class for you to feel like you're in a French pastry school, learning how to make beautiful cakes and custards and desserts. Every recipe has different elements to it and those elements cover different techniques of French pastry using different ingredients. The focus is to learn those techniques and those fundamentals and basically to take them and apply them to different desserts and different pastries. These are just some of the concepts. For example, in a frieza cake, you have a genoise sponge, a creme celine, a creme patissiere. You have these different elements which you can take and apply to make different cakes with different ingredients. Even in a creme caramel, you can basically take and make a custard and make a creme brulee. This is the concept of this class: to be able to master these recipes and to see how to bake these elements, and to learn, and to apply it to different recipes so that you can improve your skill as a baker. 3. Equipment and Moulds for the Class: I'm going to briefly introduce some of the equipment you might need for the class. The first one is a madeleine tray. This one gives a really nice shape to the madeleines. You can get this in any store or you can order it online. Make sure that it's got a coating, and it's quite strong because otherwise the madeleine will get stuck to the mold and you don't want that. This one is quite steady, quite strong as well. If you want to know to see if it has a coating, if you touch it, you will be able to feel that there is a slight coating on it and that's why it won't stick. The second one is a silicone mold. I'm going to use this for the financiers. You could use a cupcake mold as well for financier, there is no restriction as such, but I like using this one. This one is quite easy to wash, and it's really easy to take the cake out as well. Third one is for the fraisier. You can use either a ring or one of these cake pans, which can be removed from the bottom. Either one will work just as well, and make sure that you cover it with the acetate sheet. Acetate sheet looks like this. You get a roll, and what that does is that it prevents it from sticking so in our fraisier cake, because we have cream and strawberries on the side. This is really essential because otherwise when you demold it, it won't be able to come out properly and you get a really neat cake. Highly advised to get this one. For the creme caramel, we'll be using a ramekin like this. Make sure the ramekin is slightly thick and steady because it'll be easier to take it out and also it bakes really well if it's nice and steady and thick. I really like baking in this because it demolds really well, and you can use this for other custards as well. I really like this one. The next set of equipment, so piping bags. Really useful in making fraisier, and even if you are, say, piping a batter to make a cake, so really helpful. I've got a roll here. You could get it from any professional chef shop. You can even get it online. It really helps to have a big roll of piping bags available whenever I want to bake. But you could get a bag of 10 as well, so completely up to you. Also, I wanted to show you a silicone baking mat. This is really helpful because it bakes really well, and it can be reused and washed. Really sustainable way of baking, and also bakes very evenly. You could definitely get one of these when you're baking. Next one is piping tips. These are some I have, but we can use any when you're making fraisier. I like this one when I'm making fraisier, but you could even use this one which has a design on it. Honestly, there are so many piping tips which are available. You can order them online as well. You can get a lot of different types. This is a thermometer. I like to use this because it has a cord. If I'm making, say caramel, I can just put it and check the temperature instead of just putting the other one and it can be quite dangerous as well, but this one is really safe and very accurate as well. 4. Financier - Making Brown Butter and the Cake Batter: The first recipe we'll be making in this lesson is a financier. Financier is basically a French tea cake. It's really soft and it has a crispy exterior. The reason why it's so soft is because it's made with almond flour and egg whites. This is a really famous vegan crunts and they usually make it on Sunday evenings or if they want to have something with coffee. I'll basically explain the ingredients. This is almond flour and we will be using a little bit of cake flour as well. The almond flour, it keeps the cake really, really moist and also gives a really nice flavor. That's why I like using this in this recipe. A little bit of cake flour gives a structure to the cake, because almond flour does not have any gluten in it, you need a little bit of structure, which the cake flour gives. Also, I'm using white sugar. You could use brown sugar as well, but I like using white sugar in this recipe, and it also gives a nice flavor. I'm also going to brown this butter. The brown butter gives an additional layer of flavor to this cake and also gives an amazing texture. I'm using egg whites. Egg whites is basically a binder of all the ingredients, and it also gives a slightly crispier texture. At the end, I'll fold in some blueberries. You could use raspberries. You could even use peaches. Whatever fruit you have, you could definitely put that at the end. The first step in making this cake is basically putting butter on the cake tin we are using. I'm using a silicone cake tin because it's really easy to unmold. But you could use any cake tin you want for this recipe. You can even use muffin trays, you can use cupcake trays, anything is fine. Just line it with some softened butter. It will be easy to take it out once it's baked and also, it gives good flavor once the butter melts when it bakes. Once we've buttered the cake tin, we'll put the oven to preheat at 180 degrees Celsius for about 15 minutes and we'll move on to assembling the cake. By the time my butter is done, the oven would be warm to bake the cake. Before we mix the batter, we need to make a brown butter because it needs to cool down for about 10 minutes. Take the butter and just put it on the pot. Keep the heat at medium. What the brown butter is, is basically, it's just caramelized milk solids in the butter. You'll see that this start becoming brownish and hazelnut color, and it will smell really nice as well once it's ready. I'll show you the different stages and I'll show you exactly how I'm going to make it. Just keep giving it a swirl from time to time because you want it to evenly caramelize. You can see the color is slightly changed to golden. I'm just going to cook this further 10-15 seconds and I'll take it off the gas. Just set this aside for about 10-15 minutes because we want it to cool down slightly before we put it in the batter. For the batter, just put the almond flour, sugar, the cake flour, and just give it a mix. Add the egg whites. When you get paste consistency, we add the brown butter. Just whisk it for 10, 15 seconds and once the butter's nicely emulsified and you get a really nice batter, this is perfect, this is ready. Let's put this in our baking tin. 5. Financier- Baking and Finishing the Cake: We're going to fill it till about three-fourths of the way, because we don't want to fill it too much, otherwise, it just starts to overflow. There are a few ways you can do this. One is to use a spoon, so just gently guide it through and at the end just cut it like that. You can do it like that or you can even use a spoon and just slowly put it like that if you want. You can even use a piping bag. It's totally up to you how you want to do this. Before we put it in the oven, I'm just going to put a few blueberries and once they bake they'll breakdown and it will taste quite nice. You can use other fruits as well. To finish it, I'm going to put some flipped elements on top. This is also completely optional, but I find that it gives a really good finish to the cakes. Just sprinkle. You don't have to be really precise. Just a small teaspoon is good. I'm going to make this for about 20 minutes at 180 degrees Celsius. I'll show you how to check if it's completely baked or not. I baked these for about 30 minutes and you can see it's got nicely caramelized on the top. It's got a really beautiful color and you can smell the blueberries as well. It's so nice and these look really beautiful. What I do is I just let it sit in the mold for about 5-10 minutes and then I use palette knife and I gently just pull it out. Because if I take it out now, they're really soft and they will break. It's better to just let them cool down a little bit before you take them out. To check if the cake is done, just take a skewer, put it in the center, and if it comes out clean, that means it's done. Spend about 10 minutes and it's slightly cool to touch as well. Just gently put your palette knife on the side because you don't want to break it. Just take it out like that. We finish them. I just put a little bit of icing sugar on the top because it makes it look really nice. Just a gentle bit of, not too much. Cool the cake down for half an hour until it doesn't feel warm to touch, because it's still baking and you don't want to break it now because it still might be raw from the center, so you want to bake completely. What I really like about this cake is because it has almond flour. It tends to taste better the next day. When you store this, make sure not to put it in the fridge because it might make the cake like surely hard and you don't want that. Just put it in a container with a lid on it, and if you can wait for the next day and try eating it. But obviously it's really hard to not eat it straight away. What I also really like about this cake is that it looks really beautiful, and if you want to take it to a picnic or to someone's house for tea party, this is really nice. I hope you make this cake. 6. Creme Caramel - Making Dry Caramel and Custard: In this lesson, we're going to learn how to make a creme caramel. Creme caramel is a really classic French dessert and it's probably one of the first deserts I learned when I went to pastry school and I've also made it quite frequently in fine dining restaurants. It's really tasty and it's not that hard to make. The only thing with creme caramel is that you have to be careful in a few steps so that the custard comes out really smooth when it bakes. I'll briefly explain the ingredients. It's very simple. We have three eggs, we are going to be using two yolks and one egg. The reason I use two yolks is because I want the custard to be really creamy and the yolks will give that extra fat and creaminess to the custard. I'll divide the sugar in two bowls. There is this custard sugar. With this one, I'm going to make a dry caramel. The dry caramel is basically just sugar, which is caramelized. It doesn't have any cream or any addition to it, and that will coat the ramekin and we'll be boiling the custard over that. The second one goes in the custard and we're also using whole milk. Make sure to use whole milk because it has more fat and it makes a creamy custard and I'm also going to use half of vanilla. I want it to infuse and bakes really nice with the vanilla. You could also flavor it with coffee, even old gray. I've done a lot of variations of this, so you can definitely experiment with that as well. Another important aspect of making this is using a ramekin. This one bakes really well and it's very easy demolded as well when you bake it, so just make sure to use one of these. The first step is to glamorize our sugar and coat the ramekins. Just put a pot on the gas and put the sugar, and that's it. You'll just keep stirring it so it glamorizes evenly. With this one, you just have to give it maybe two three minutes and it glamorizes really fast as well. Just give it a stir after every maybe 30 seconds and you can see some of it started to melt already. You can see it's gotten a nice golden color. Immediately put it in the ramekin. Just castor it in and you have to do this when the caramel is still hot. Otherwise, it doesn't spread on the ramekin. Beautiful. Just to finish it off, just swirl it around a little bit so it coats the sides as well just slightly. I really like this color of the caramel. It's not too light and it's not too dark as well. What I'm going to do is set this aside so that it sets maybe 5-10 minutes and start preparing the rest of my ingredients. Take a vanilla bean and just split it into half. Perfect. Just take the knife and scrape all the seeds. Amazing. It's got really nice seeds, and this goes in the milk. The next step is to separate the eggs. One full egg and two yolks. Just add the rest of the sugar and we have to whisk this immediately. We cannot wait because it might burn the eggs if we wait for it. After we've whisked the sugar and the eggs, what we do is we take the same pot, which we use for the caramel, and you don't need to watch this. I like doing it like this because it saves a lot of time and it also gives good flavor. Just add the milk with the vanilla in the same pot as the caramel and also add the vanilla bean, which we scrapped because it also gives a lot of flavor. Just get this to assemble. We don't want to boil this, because if we boil it, the custard is not as creamy, just a light [inaudible]. When you start seeing bubbles on the side, that's the time we take it off the gas and slowly whisk it in our egg mixture. You can see it's starting to get some bubbles on the side, and that's the perfect time to take it out. Just slowly whisk it. The reason we pour this and temper the eggs is because we want to get it up to temperature slowly and this results in a more creamier custard rather than just directly putting it in the oven. Just mixing it in milk and putting in the oven. This is really nice technique as well and we use this in other custards as well. In pastry cream, if you're making ogres, it's the same technique. We always run for the eggs because eggs can go really fast if subject to really high heat, so this is really nice technique to do. What I also like to do is skim off the air bubbles on the top, because they don't really bake very nicely. Just take the custard and just sieve it. If there's any egg which was scattered, it just removes that, so the custard comes out very smooth. 7. Creme Caramel -Baking and Plating the Custard: Just take the ramekin and pour the custard on it. The most important bit when you bake this is that we bake it in a water bath. Just get a shallow container or a roasting tray, and fill it to about this much of boiling water. What that does is that because of the water, the temperature of the custard does not increase above a certain extent and it keeps it very smooth and really soggy. I've tried baking it without the water bath and it really doesn't come out well and it curdles sometimes. This is a really foolproof method. We're going to bake this for about 30 minutes at 160 degrees Celsius. It's been 30 minutes and to check if the custard is baked, just put a skewer in the center and if it comes out clean, that means it's done. Also, what we do when we bake it, we just take it out of the water and let it cool down at room temperature for about 30 minutes. Then we refrigerate it for at least four hours, but preferably overnight because then it tastes much better and also it's more creamier and it's easier to take out as well. Recheck if the custard's baked properly. It should have a slight jiggle in the center because when it's cooling down, it's still sort of baking. If it's slightly wobbly in the center, that means it's baked perfectly. If you see, it moves. It's got a slight movement in the center, which is really good. That's what you should be aiming for. After the custard has cooled down through about one hour, we just cover it with a plastic wrap so it doesn't get any flavor in the fridge from any other food. Chill it for at least six hours, but preferably overnight, so that you get the best flavor then. You can store this up to three days in your fridge. So if you have guests coming over, this is perfect to make. It's time to finally unmold the gram caramel. Take a paring knife and use the blunt side of it because you don't want to destroy the custard, and just drag it on the side, really gently. Because of the caramel, it will come out really easily. What you do next is you take a plate and just flip it, just hold it like that and it should come out. Let's taste this one. When I cut through this, it should be really smooth and silky. The custard should not be split at all and it should cut very easily. When I eat it, it's really light and really creamy. Also, if we see the color of the caramel, it's really bright and that gives a very good flavor. I usually don't like to take it darker than this because then you get a little bit of tones. I think this is really nice color. 8. Madeleine- The Complete Process: In this lesson, we're going to be learning how to make a madeleine. Madeleine is basically a French cake. It's a tea cake and it's from Lorraine region in France. It's super delicious and it's really easy to make. The ingredients are basically all-purpose flour with baking powder. The reason I'm using all-purpose flour is because I want the cake to have a little bit more chewier texture. Baking powder is because I want it to rise a little bit and have a fluffy texture. I'm using caster sugar. You can use brown sugar, as well, but I like using caster sugar in this. I'm also going to zest a lemon. You can use zest of an orange as well, that's totally up to you and two eggs. Make sure that the eggs are at room temperature. It's really easy to make, you just have to basically mix this together. We're going to store this overnight in the fridge and the next day you're going to melt butter, and you're going to pour the hot butter in the batter and bake it straight away. Whisk in the sugar. We don't want to aerate the batter at this point, we just have to mix it together, so don't worry about it, whisking it do much. Just add the lemon zest. Just whisk the zest in, and just take a sieve. This is really important because we don't want any clumps of flour. Then you get a smooth batter like this, that's perfect. Just keep this overnight, wrap it in plastic wrap, and we put the melted butter tomorrow and bake it. Before you mix the batter, just line the madeleine trace with some softened butter and we'll be just putting some flour on top of this. This acts as an assurance that it doesn't really stick and it comes out really easily. I really like these pans as well, it looks really nice. So just take the pan and just tap the excess flour out. This is the batter we made yesterday. What we're going to do is basically take this butter and get it up to a boil, and once it's completely melted in boiling, we put it straight into the batter. All the butter is melted and this is perfect, it's boiling. Just pour it straight in. Just take a whisk and mix it until it completely emulsifies. That's perfect. Then you get a smooth batter like this. The best way I find to put it in the tin is take a tablespoon, and just take your hand and gently just put it inside. We're going to bake this at the highest temperature possible in your oven. I would say maybe around 250 Celsius for about five minutes so it gets a good rise. Then you lower the temperature down to 180 centigrade for roughly about 6-7 minutes. They look really nice, and I bake them for about 12 minutes. The traditional madeleine, the classic madeleine has a hump on it, that's the sign of a good madeleine. This is the result of resting the dough overnight, and this is amazing. What we can do is, you can just directly take it out of the tray and put it like that. 9. Glazing the Madeliene: In this lesson, we're going to learn how to make a chocolate ganache, and ganache is something which is so fundamental to French pastry, and it's used in so many different things. You can do frosting with it, you can spread it as a glaze, you can make truffles out of it, you can do so many things with it. It's really versatile, and it's really easy to make as well. So if you want to make something really quickly, you can definitely make this. If you want to pour it over ice cream as well, perfect. Super easy. What you need to do is get some good quality chocolate, and full-fat cream, so 35 percent fat cream, and high-quality dark chocolate if you can get it. So when we make this, I'll chop the chocolate up, not too fine, but just that it melts really easily and I'll get the cream to a boil. When the cream is up to a boil, I'll pour it over the chocolate and then I'll just let it sit for it to melt slowly and then I'll just whisk really fast, so it just completely emulsifies into a smooth Ganache. The first step, you're going to chop the chocolate really roughly. Perfect. Not too much, just a little bit, so it just melts easily and you don't have chunks of chocolate remaining. So I find this step really helps to make a really smooth ganache, so I would definitely do this and don't skip this step. But if you're using chocolate chips, because they're really small, you don't really need to chop it. Just with the bigger chocolate chunks, you need to chop it slightly. The next step, I'm going get the cream up to a boil. Just put your cream in the pot. If at this stage you want to add some coffee, or any other flavoring, we could definitely add it in the cream to infuse it, and sometimes I even like adding a little bit of cinnamon stick, just to infuse it in the cream, or maybe coffee bean as well. So you can do that, definitely. We can see it started to boil. I'm just going to take it off the gas now. The cream goes directly in the chocolate, and make sure the chocolate's completely submerged. We're going to let this sit for about 30 seconds and what that does is that it basically tempers the chocolate in the hot cream and it melts it slightly because chocolate is really sensitive to high temperatures, so this is a really good way of doing it. I would also like to say there's another method you could do, is that you could put it in a microwave with the chocolate and the cream and just heat it in 30-second bursts, and after every 30 seconds just take a spoon and just mix it together. You could do that as well. That is also completely fine, but I like to do it in this way because sometimes the microwave can be too strong for the chocolate, so that's why I prefer making it like this. After 30 seconds, you can see that the chocolate is slightly melted, just keep mixing it until it completely emulsifies and becomes really shiny. If you see, it's really shiny, and really smooth as well, and just in case, if your ganache splits slightly or looks like slightly separated, what you need to do is heat about 10ml of milk and slowly pour it and keep whisking it, it will definitely come together, so don't worry if that happens. If you feel like it's too thick, just add a little bit more hot cream, like about a tablespoon, and it will definitely come back and become really smooth and really silky. If you want to store this and make it a day ahead, just let it cool down for ten minutes, wrap it up and put it in the fridge. So it will last for about five days in the fridge, it won't get spoilt. When you want to use it, just heat it up slightly and it should work just fine. To make the Madeleines look even more appealing, what I'm going to do is, dip it in some ganache. This is a one-part chocolate, one-part cream ganache, and I've toasted some hazelnuts here, so I'm just going to basically grind them, not too fine, just roughly in the pestle and mortar. So when you get something like a rough texture, but you don't want really big pieces, and this is perfect. So just take the top side of the Madeleine, and dip it in the chocolate like that and just sprinkle the hazelnuts like that. 10. Fraisier - Mascerated Strawberries and Mascarpone Cream: We have the elements of this cake, is macerated strawberries. It's really easy. What we do is we roughly cut the strawberries and put some sugar. The strawberry absorbs the sugar and it leaves its liquid. So that is why we can use it as an insert because if we put the strawberries directly in the cake, it might tend to lose its water. So this is a really good way I find to use strawberries. I wanted to give that texture as well in the cake when I use it. When you see the strawberries, they're not really fine, but they're not really big either. The concept of cutting it like this is that when you eat the cake, you should be able to basically bite into a chunk of strawberry, and it'll taste really nice. Take a bowl and the strawberries, just put them in that. You're going to add about two tablespoons of sugar. If you want to add, you can add one tablespoon. It totally depends on how sweet the strawberries are. In my case, the strawberries aren't that sweet. Just mix this through. You're going to set this aside for about one hour. You'll see that the strawberries will leave all its water, and then we'll sieve it out. To make the mascarpone cream, these are the ingredients. Really easy. Some mascarpone, sugar, and full-fat cream, so about 35 percent fat. You just have to whisk it together until we get a soft whisk. This will give a really good texture and also look really beautiful on top of the cake. Just put this in a bowl. Put the cream and sugar. If you want, you can flavor this with vanilla as well. It's totally up to you. I'm going to put about a teaspoon of ram. Perfect. After you've got the cream to a soft whisk, you can see that it's hanging but it's not really stiff, it's still moving. So that's really good. You don't want to whisk it too much as well. Just take a piping bag. After we've got the cream, I'm going to use a piping tip. You can use any piping tip you like, but I like using this one. This is the easiest way I find doing this. As professionals, we can hold it in hand and do it as well. But the easiest way to do this is put it in a glass. Take a bend scraper and just get rid of all the air bubbles. After you fill the piping bag, just take a scissor and take here maybe one-fourth, and just drag it like that. It should come off quite easily. 11. Fraisier- Genoise Sponge: For the base of the cake, we'll be making a genoise sponge. This is really classic white sponge. The first step is to put butter on the tray and line it up with the baking paper. It always helps to get everything ready before you actually make the cake, because then you're very organized and you're looking. Put a little bit of butter on the baking sheet as well, so that the cake comes out very easily. I'm going to set this aside and put the oven to preheat at about 180 degrees Celsius for about 15 minutes. This recipe only has three ingredients, and it's quite easy to make as well. We have caster sugar, some cake flour, and two eggs. Make sure that the eggs are at room temperature, and using caster sugar because it dissolves very easily, and using cake flour because we want the texture of the cake to be really soft. Make sure to use both of them and don't use all-purpose flour or bread flour because you won't get a really nice texture. The first step when we make this is to take some boiling water and put it in a pot, just take a bowl and crack the eggs in it, and whisk the sugar through. I've been whisking this for about 2-3 minutes, and if you can see that the sugar is dissolved here and the bowl feels slightly warm, that means it's ready. If you want to check with the thermometer, it shouldn't be about 38-40 degrees Celsius. At this point, you take it off the pot with the hot water, take a machine, and start whisking it. You see how it has become very thick and heavy, and if you can make a figure eight with the whisk and it stays that you can see it, that means it's done. Just take a sieve and the flour, and don't skip this step because you don't want clumps of flour, and gently fold in the flour because we want to maintain the airiness in the batter. When you bake the sponge, there are two ways we could do it. Either we spread this sponge here and cut it with a ring or we bake it in the ring itself. Whatever you prefer, you can do that, and if you don't have a ring, you can definitely just use a cup and take a knife and then cut a circle. You can do that as far. Another method of doing this is just to fill the cake in and then remove it, so we have less wastage when we cut the rings. Really easy. Just put half, and then let it spread evenly, then take the ring. Then take the rest, let it spread and just take it off. You know that basically, that's the size you need, and you end up saving a lot of sponge. You don't have any wastage. I find this method as well is quite efficient. I'm going to bake these for about 12 minutes at 180 degree Celsius. The best way to check if it's done is the surface will be quite nicely colored, it'll be golden brown, and when you touch the surface, it will feel quite stiff, you won't be able to feel any raw dough. I'll show when it's baked, how to check. This is how it looks like when it's baked. You can see it's got a really nice golden color, and when you touch it, it will feel really firm. That's a sign that it's done. You don't want to over bake this because it tends to get quite dry, and you don't want that to happen. It should still be quite soft. For me, 12 minutes is really good. What I like to do is, when I take it out of the oven, because I don't want to do over-bake, I want to put this on a wire rack. Let's take a wire rack and gently lift the paper and put it on the wire rack because the tray still has heat and we'll keep baking it, and you don't want it to get it dry. Just let it cool down for about 15 minutes and then we can cut out the shape we need. After 15 minutes, this is cooled down. Take the pastry ring ad just cut it, and drag it slightly so that it cuts it neatly. Perfect. To take the sponge off neatly, just take a palette knife and gently drag it down, just like that. That's the sponge. You can see it's really light. It's quite nice, the size as well. 12. Fraisier- Creme Patissier and Mousseine: In this lesson, we're going to learn how to make Creme Patisserie, which is also called pastry cream. This is something you learn probably on the first day when you go to pastry school because we use it in so many different applications in French pastry. What it is basically is that it's a thickened custard with starch. It's really stable as well. It makes a really good filling for a choux pastry, in eclairs, even in cakes. The ingredients we have today are eggs. I'm going to be using egg yolks because yolks is what give the silky texture to the custard. Also, I can't use whites because when I cook the custard, the whites will tend to color the custard that's why I'm using egg yolks. I'm using half of vanilla bean and sugar. What sugar does is that not only does it give sweetness, it also gives a really nice texture to the custard. Also, sugar increases the temperature we can take the custard to, so it prevents it from curdling as well. I'm using flour. The flour is a starch, which is going to gelatinize the custard to bring it together and it's also going to give a really good texture as well. This is just some whole milk. To finish the custard when it's cooked, I'm going to add some butter to it. This is called butter and this will emulsify it, give it a really nice and rich texture. The first step in the custard is to heat the milk with the vanilla. You can use vanilla bean-base as well, but I like using the bean. Split it from the middle like that. Just drag the knife like. That and it pulls out all the seeds. As you can see, really beautiful, it looks like caviar and it gives such an amazing flavor. I'm going to put this in the milk. I'll just boil the milk and the vanilla bean. We'll just get this to a light simmer and just cover it and keep it for about 20 minutes so that the flavor of the bean infuses in the milk. As you can see, it's started to simmer from the side and I'll just take it off the gas now. To infuse the flavor better, just cover it with glad wrap, and let this sit for about 20 minutes. Then we will heat it up again and put it on the egg yolks. The next step is to separate the eggs. The best way I find to do this, just take your hand and just, the other way you can do this is just use the shell. After we have separated the egg yolks, we just add the sugar. We have to immediately whisk it. If you don't whisk it immediately, it might tend to form a skin on the egg yolk and we don't really want that. Just whisk if for like 30 seconds. After that add the flour. It should be completely combined and form a smooth texture. Once the egg mixture is ready, we just take the milk and get it to a simmer and then we'll then put the eggs. Once you see it starts to form bubbles on the edges that's the time you want to take it off the gas, you don't want to boil it we just want to get it just below boiling. Just pour it in a really tense stream, very slowly. What this does is it gets the eggs to a sort of temperature it tempers so it doesn't curdle if you directly cook it. It's a really important step. Just put it back. After we've done the custard, we have to cook it to a boil and always keep a whisk at hand to keep whisking it because we don't want it to curdle. Cook the custard at medium heat and keep whisking it, otherwise, it will curdle. The reason we boil it is because we want to cook the starch out, otherwise, we can taste the starch in the custard if you don't boil it out, also it makes some more stable custard. As you can see it's started to come to a boil and that's exactly when I want to take it off the heat. As you can see, this cream is really smooth. At this point, just add the cold butter and we have to whisk really bad because we don't want the butter to split. The texture of the final cream should be really silky, almost like mayonnaise. When you store the pastry cream, put a plastic wrap, touching the surface and put it in the fridge. We do this because we don't want it to form a skin on top that's why we cover this. For the filling we're going to make Mousseline cream, which is pastry cream, enriched with softened butter. Make sure that the butter is really soft but not melted. If it's not soft, it won't really emulsify in the cream and it will split. Just add the butter and we're going to whisk this to soft peaks. Beautiful. So when you get a smooth texture like this, that's perfect. The best way I find is to take a glass and put a piping bag on it and just put it through. To put it neatly in a piping bag, take a bench scraper and just push it through like that so you don't have any air bubbles. And just take the end and just twist it like that. 13. Fraisier -Assembly: When we make the Fraisier cake, we cover the outside with strawberries. For the outside, use strawberries which looked like this. They're nicely shaped and not like this. If strawberries looked like this, we're going to use that in the inside. But for the outside, we want strawberries which are nicely shaped. Super easy, we need to cut this in half. Just take the top off and cut this in half. Basically, this will be facing outside when we lay the cake. It's been one hour and you can see the berries have completely left their juices. I'm going to sieve this out because I don't want any water in the cake. This liquid is going to act as our soaking liquid for the sponge so that the sponge remains nice and moist when we assemble the cake. One side of the sponge and we'll be putting it like this and we can soak the other side. Let's take the soaking liquid. The reason we soak the sponge is because it stays really nice and moist in the cake, and if we didn't soak it, it gets quite dry. I really like soaking it, and it also gives a lot of flavor. To assemble the cake, just take a flat surface like a plate, or you could even use a cake board. Totally up to you, any flat surface will work. Just cover the bottom with plastic wrap, so it's easy to take it out. Put the ring or the cake tin, whatever you're using. Put the acetate sheet, so that we can take it out really easily. The first step is to put the sponge in the base, just spread it slightly. Soak this side as well with the syrup. Then start arranging the strawberries, so that's really easy. What we'll do is we'll take this side and this goes down like this and make sure to stick it. Perfect. Once we've got it nicely covered with the berries, we'd put the cream on the side. Just cover all the gaps here, and just pipe a little bit just to cover the bottom. Take the palette knife and just spread it up, so it sticks quite nicely. Basically, we're trying to eliminate all the gaps because when we unmold it, we don't want any gaps. Put the berries here. This is the one we have basically put the sugar in, and they give really nice texture. Perfect. Just cover the rest with the cream. Take a palette knife and just spread it on the edges. Just make it as even as possible, and to finish it, put the sponge inside. Just press it gently, and just put the soaking syrup on the top. Perfect. So we're going to chill this at least for about six hours, but if you can do it overnight, that's the best because you want the cream to set, and it makes it easier to unmold this. Just wrap it as gently as you can. It has to be covered because you don't want the smell of anything from the fridge to get inside of the cake. This is a cake from yesterday. This is really easy to do. Just gently take it off like that. So you can see all the beautiful strawberries on the side, and fairly delicate, just search. Yeah. Perfect. Just take it off. Amazing. Because of the acetate sheet, you can see all the berries very nicely. What I'm going to do is take a plate and then just put it there because I don't want the plastic wrap when I'm doing the final presentation. This is quite easy. Just take a plate, put it at the bottom. Don't press it, just put it here and just gently twist it like that. Perfect. 14. Fraisier- Finishing The Cake: You could eat this cake as is, you don't need decorated anymore, you can just put icing sugar. But I find that putting a little bit of mascarpone on top makes it taste really nice. Just take your piping bag with the piping tip, and you can use any piping tip you like. I'm just going to make dollops like this. For garnishing the cake, I've cut this strawberries into quarters, and I've also got some flowers from my backyard. You can use any edible flowers you have, roses and pansies. Whatever flowers you have, you can use it as long as they're edible. To finish it, I'm going to put some mint leaves just to give a little bit of color contrast. It's time to finally cut the cake. Just take a glass with really hot water and dip your knife in it, so you can get really smooth cut. You can see it's really nice and soft. This bunch. I really, really like making this cake. It's super delicious. I really hope you make it at home because I'm sure you and your friends will really enjoy eating it. 15. Thank you: We've finally come to the end of this class. I'm so proud of you, of the progress you've made, of the techniques you've learned and I'm sure that you've learned a lot. I can't wait to see pictures of your recipes and of your cakes and tea cakes, and I'm so excited. If you have any questions or if you have any doubts, please feel free to message me. You can also follow my YouTube channel and my Instagram page and you can also send me messages on my Instagram page if you have any questions. Thank you for joining me in this class. If you want to learn different topics, please feel free to have a look at some of my other classes as well. I'm sure they will help you. Thank you again.