Baking - Tarte Aux Fruits, a white exam

On the first day of school, Chef Marc introduced himself, talked about rules and regulations and roughly painted a picture of how school and classes will be. He also took the chance to inform us that we will be having a White Exam on our Practical Class #13.

At that time, it seemed so far away, it was 13 lessons away.

But as with good times, the minute and days and week were gone in just a blink of an eye. Practical #13 arrived, so did the white exam a.k.a mock exam.

Why call it 'white exam', you may ask?

It is a skill and technical based exam, we have to create the pastry in question without our notes; and mind you, we depend on our notes every single practical to recreate the same patisserie constructed earlier during demonstration. The recipe with the ingredients will be given, and we'll have to depend on our memory to remember the techniques to use for each component, like making pastry cream or dough, for instance. I'll touch up more on that later.

Meanwhile, Chef Marc did a demonstration on baking Tarte Aux Fruits, Tarte Aux Citron, Tarte Aux Noix Et Au Caramel, as well as showing us an example of a good fonçage for the tart.

Here, we have a perfectly fonçage tart, at first look, you can see that the thickness of the pasty dough is exactly the same all around the ring mold. That is what the Chefs will be looking for during the final exam, they will cut a small triangle in the middle and pull it up like a flap to measure the thickness.

You can also see, that around the tart on the bottom, the edges are all 'pushed' in nicely to have a 90 degree angle, this is important to prevent the dough from collapsing during baking and resulting in lopsided, uneven side. 

It was a tough task for me to even roll out the thickness to exactly 3mm throughout, before doing this fonçage, all of which, is worth it when, at the end of everything; you marvel at the fact that you can create something exquisite as well using your own hands.

At this stage of school, I find things like a beautifully lined tart, an exquisite piece of work.

Next, we have the tarte au Citron a.k.a Lemon tart.

The tart consists of the sweet pastry dough, lemon cream (or curd) and with Italian Meringue for decoration.  Chef Marc have created two different looks for the same patisserie. On the left side, we have the lemon tart assembled with meringue borders using the St Honoré tip, with caramelized top.

The right hand side, has meringue spread all over and got the blow torch treatment to have its gorgeous brown hues. The tart is super yummy! Those who loves a good lemon tart will know what I am talking about, it's light, sour & sweet yet refreshing at the same time!

I would love to recreate this when I get back! But Ben won't be a fan of this - he can't take sour food items. Blah.

What you're looking at, my friend, is the topic for our white exam - tarte aux fruits.

Here, we have the two different styles created by Chef Marc. There's the tropical fruit paradise (I named it myself) consisting of pineapples, mango, dragon fruits, oranges, strawberries, kiwi and apple on the left and Berries Galore, consisting of cherries, raspberry, kiwi, strawberry, redcurrants, blueberry and apple on the right side.

When Chef Marc started assembling the fruits on the tart, he repeatedly said that he don't want an organised tart, he wanted a beautiful mess. A mess of fruits all over the tart, filing up every gap and inch of the pastry cream, but yet to be beautiful and appealing at the same time.

First look at the finished tart and I was thinking "what the ****, is this! Looks like crap man! Really messy!!"

I mean, come on...you probably think the right one looked so much more beautiful AND appealing, isn't it?? And, really, I have seldom seen apples on fruit tarts! Wasn't feeling this tart at all, and to think we have it for our exam, man. I'm screwed.

The final tart for the day, is this Tarte Aux Noix Et Au Caramel, which is a caramel and walnut tart.

There is only two component for this tart - sweet pastry dough and caramel & nut garnish. You basically bake the tart and then prepare the filings by coating walnuts in caramel and then fill the tart up. That's it.

I don't really appreciate nuts that much to have it as a dessert. A small piece of this during the tasting, had me feeling like I just had a crunchy walnut candy - and I won't go for a second serving.

 Ready to see what I presented during my White Exam???

Ta dah!! My Tarte Aux Fruits!

I had a much better attempt at foncage the tart mold, it was in prim and proper and at the 90 degrees angle. It was baked and came out really nice, I didn't have much to trim at the sides for irregularity.

Then, we made the pastry cream for the filing of the tart. This was something I was quite worried on, because if the pastry cream isn't pasteurized properly, it will not be firm during the cooling stage, and that will be quite obvious that my pastry cream is not of the right consistency. The only way to prevent the wrong consistency situation, is to know exactly when to remove the pastry from the stove when it's done. (When the pastry cream mixture is bubbling).

The pastry cream is then spread onto the tart, and is now ready to be decorated with fruits.

We have seasonal fruits like Kiwi, pineapple, strawberries, dragon fruit, orange, mango and apple to play around with. The apples is sliced to create a flan, and then the mango and dragon fruits is cut out with a parisienne spoon to have the round shape. Even the kiwi has been beautified with a cookie cutter, hence the lovely floral like shape.

I started off with putting the mango balls, followed by the kiwi and the orange segments...then, I placed the apple flan in the middle and worked on distributing the fruits around the tart, filing in on any pastry cream gaps I can find with smaller sized pineapples which I've cut to size.

It was by accident that everything falls into places nicely, and the colour distribution is even. I just wanted to spread my fruits out and around because I didn't have enough of some fruits and I had to make sure that it's not too cluttered. 

Then we had to glaze, within 3 minutes because that's all the time we have left prior to presentation. Did I mentioned that we had Chef Willy overseeing this practical? With him in charge, I always feel like I'm in one of the episodes for Master Chef - he is always shouting and reminding us on the timing.

He usually goes "You have one hour, fifteen minutes ah! Present at 6.30 ah! Don't worry, you can do and present on time!"

Master Chef or not, I always try my best to present on time.

So, during the presentation, Chef Willy came to my tart and was turning the rack around to see take a 360degree look. Then, he took a look at me, and at my name tag and said "Well done, Christina, well done". Then he went off.

That's it. No other skills related comments - and that's a first, in my many practical classes. Usually, it's like "need to glaze more, need to control the piping, need to this and that". Of course I am damn shocked and pleasantly surprised that I did well for this mock exam!

My confidence was boosted up like a G6! I was on cloud nine! Well, I never knew. Never knew that I can create a mess...always thought that was my brothers' forte! HAHA!

& with that, I looked forward to more minor successful bakes!

Till then!