Lesson 77: A sunny day for puff pastry

I cannot tell you how happy I was to see sun peeking through my window this morning! My brother was even extra joyful this morning and came into the kitchen singing "It's a beautiful morning!"

I was excited for class today so that we could bake and taste the puff pastry we made yesterday (my forearms were sore from yesterday's labor-intensive class!).. Chef Chad was also back today despite still feeling a little under the weather. Almost everyone was feeling unmotivated with pastry after yesterday's class, but we were back in the game today with Chef back to get us excited about what we were doing.

We started out by taking a portion of our large batch of puff pastry to make apple puff pastry strips. Here is the one I made. It's not perfect because some of the walnut frangipane went over the sides, but it was still tasty! :
Next, we made palmiers (or what us Jersey folks call "elephant ears"). My batch actually started unrolling halfway through, but Chef helped me salvage the pastrys and they came out perfect! Lots o'sugar in these babies!

One of my favorite puff pastry creations today were these paillettes. They were just strips of puff pastry rolled with parmesan and paprika.

Once we finished making these traditional pastries, chef assigned each table to make a large batch of a different savory pastry. My table made a very large batch of mozzarella and prosciutto turnovers. These were AMAZING. We formed disks of the puff pastry and made a filling with fresh mozz, parsley, and fresh prosciutto. After adding a small dollop of filling to each disk, we folded the dough over like a mini calzone and sealed them closed with a fork. Yum yum yum!

I got to bring home a lot of puff pastry treats to my family. Despite most of them being on a diet or being allergic to everything, they couldn't resist the buttery, flaky creations!

Tomorrow we're making bagels and pretzels! Maybe we can make green bagels for St. Patrick's day.. That was always a tradition when I was younger on St. Patrick's day--to go to the bagel shop and get a green bagel. Sooo I may have to bring green food coloring to class tomorrow and do a little convincing ;)