Winter Garden

Yes it’s Le Petit Paris time again! Busy work week so for a break I last minute joined this afternoons class [workshop] at Le Petit Paris to have fun making lemon [meringue] tarts (here’s a link to their class details in case you want to try one).

The lemon tarts were of course more than they could be – Stefan always wants to teach and today we had five maybe six steps before the final assembly (and the order in the workshop was different for time management). The workshop included making sweet pastry dough, genoise sponge, lime jelly, lemon/lime cream filling, and Italian meringue. The photos below give an idea of what we spent the afternoon doing …

Once again fun, educational, and tasty – here’s one tart that I enjoyed this evening:

And here are some video clips I took during the afternoon, showing some of the steps that Stefan demonstrated to us …

Another trip to Le Petit Paris today, to learn about multigrain bread; I’ve wondered whether the difference in multigrain is just the addition of “grains” and it turns out yes that is basically it – the dough is pretty similar to the sourdough we made last year, except that Stefan added toasted sunflower and flax seeds:

We then were given three separate pieces of dough which we flattened to get out the air then folded into a basic bread shape, with one going in a tin to bake and a second just on a tray. For the third dough I wanted to make small multigrain rolls so Stefan demonstrated cutting the dough into three and hand rolling each to a round shape. All three shaped doughs were rolled in a mixture of oats and seeds, before baking …

This dough takes a long time to work with – it needs resting time after mixing, a lot of proving time, and a 40 minute bake – and for the tin we ran short of time so I suggested that we take the tin and bake at home; the tray bread and my bread rolls needed a bit less proving time so we baked them, and they all came out really well! And when I got home I baked the tin (which had risen really well by now) and it also was delicious:

Another fun morning at the bakery, with lots of flavor to enjoy at home.