Wrapping up Introduction to Baking and Patisserie

This is the last week of our first class.  We have done cakes, phyllo, and petit fours.  Cakes are going to be a challenge with Splenda since adjusting cake balance formulas can be tricky.  I will try some cake recipes next week and that will wrap up our first class.  My conclusion after these first trials is that Splenda is inferior to using sugar.  It has been difficult to replicate taste and texture of my favorite baked products.  The process gets complicated because Splenda only replaces sugar's sweetness.  However, sugar has many functions after providing sweetness, namely: tenderizing, moistening, improving shelf life, brown color and caramelized flavor, assisting with leavening, providing bulk, stabilizing whipped egg foams, providing food for yeast fermentation, reducing hardness in frozen desserts, preventing microbial growth, adding sheen to icings, promoting a crisp curst, promoting spread, and providing nutrition.  I've noticed that taking a recipe and reducing the sugar noticibly affects at least one of these other functions.  Then the game turns into adjusting the formulation of the other ingredients or adding other ingredients to reconstitute the texture of the original baked good. 

Concluding with this first phase I've included some pictures of the petit fours and layer cakes we made during the last week of class. 

Pastry Cream Part II

Our practical tomorrow is on pastry cream, so I decided to try using the Gisslen pastry with a Splenda substitute (instead of using the recipe from the Splenda book).  I prefer the adapted recipe here much more over the one from the Splenda book.  Besides adding the correct amount of vanilla :P, the cream tastes much richer than the first recipe I tried. 

Here's my adapted recipe

2 c milk
60 g sugar
45 g egg yolk
60 g whole egg
40 g cornstarch, sifted
8 g Splenda
30 g butter
1 1/2 t vanilla extract

Makeup: Stir milk and sugar in a saucepan and bring just to a boil.  Whip egg yolks and eggs .  Beat in cornstarch and sugar into eggs until perfectly smooth.  Temper egg mixture with hot milk mixture.  Return the mixture to the heat and bring to a boil, stirring constantly.  Remove mixture from heat and stir until mixture cools to 100 degrees F.  Stir in butter and vanilla.  Mix until completely blended.  Pour into a shallow pan and cover with plastic wrap placed directly in contact with the surface of the cream to prevent a crust from forming.  Cool and chill as quickly as possible.

The only thing I would try differently next time, is to use Splenda in the milk mixture and sugar in the egg mixture (instead of the opposite which I use above) since sugar slows egg coagulation in custards.  It is more important for the sugar to be blended with the egg mixture than the milk mixture, but I didn't think of this when I was making it.

I'm excited!  I feel ready for my test tomorrow.  :0)

The pastry cream came out pretty well.  Compared to the pastry cream in class, there is a lack flavour and sugar due to the missing sugar, but I'm not sure it would be that pronounced of a difference within say, a fruit tart.