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.