Lesson 87: Profiteroles & Ice Cream

Today I got to play with fire (torching yesterday's creme brulee) and make ice cream!!! Such a fun day!

Since there was only 1 ice cream machine, each group had to take turns churning their ice cream. In the mean time, we worked in teams to make pate a choux. This is the pastry shell for profiteroles, or as most of you know them, CREAM PUFFS! Yum were these good! The pate a choux was a bit of a tricky process since we had to cook the dough until it was dry, yet didn't scorch the pan. Then we had to beat in as many eggs as possible to make the dough shiny, but not too liquidy. We were all successful and continued to pipe and bake the pate a choux.

Once they were golden and puffed up, we took them out of the oven and filled them with flavored pastry creams. Allison H. and I made a delicious chocolate sauce to glaze the tops (made with dark chocolate, butter, and corn syrup). We had fun using different techniques that Chef showed us to fill and decorate our pastrys. He even showed us how to make a profiterole SWAN (even though he begged me not to mention it on the blog... sorry, chef!) Hahaha.. he actually only made it for us because we asked him to. I wish I could have gotten a picture of it, but he threw it in his mouth immediately to destroy the evidence!

Anyways, back to the fun part.. ICE CREAM! It was finally my group's turn to churn ice cream in this industrial ice cream machine:

Allison and I wanted a picture while making our ice cream and chef told us to stop acting like we were on vacation! But, he got in the picture with us anyways :)

Our ginger-flavored ice cream turned out AMAZING. I have never enjoyed ice cream so much..not to mention it was soft-serve (my favorite!). The ginger flavor was not too overpowering, but added a nice kick to the ice cream.

Towards the end of class we took out our creme brulees that we made yesterday and froze. We coated the tops of the custards with sugar and torched them. The heat from the torch de-frosted them and formed a nice crusty glaze on top.

I had fun playing with fire!

Here's one of my finished creme brulees. We had to throw out a ridiculous amount of creme brulee, which totally broke my heart because it's so delicious. We made so much of it and weren't allowed to bring them home in the ramekins ..boo.

Hope everyone has a wonderful holiday weekend. I'll be sharing some more Easter recipes this weekend (Lemon cake with fresh strawberries and vanilla buttercream, Easter meat pie, my great-grandmother's dumplings, leg of lamb, etc)