Final Pastry Exam: Easy as Pie

It has been a busy week at cooking school. We wrote our final exams last week, and spent the last five days-- after a very short 1-day weekend-- rushing to finish up our last demos and practicals while studying for the final practical exams that make up 45% of our final grades for Basic Cuisine and Pastry. For the students continuing on to Intermediate Cuisine and Pastry at LCB, it was an especially stressful time, as students must receive a passing grade to move on.

The Final Exam

I had my final pastry exam this morning, and while I wasn't exactly nervous, visions of curdled buttermilk frosting and fallen sponge cakes still invaded last night's dreams. Three weeks ago, we were given a list of ten pastry recipes to study from among the twenty we already produced in class. Three of these recipes were chosen secretly by the chefs for the test, and we would each be asked to make one pastry that would then be graded by a panel of chefs from outside the school.

My class assembled outside the kitchen door fifteen minutes before the exam, and the overseeing chef (not the Mean Chef-- hurray!) presented us with a bowl filled with fourteen tokens, one for each student in the class. The tokens were either red, yellow, or green, and each color represented a different pastry. I selected red, which I soon learned was the Caramelized Pear and Crunchy Almond Meringue Tart. It was, in my opinion, one of the easiest recipes we'd done all semester, and the five of us lucky enough to fall upon it sailed right through our exam.

1. Make pie dough.
   
2. Caramelize pears
   
3. Make meringue
   
4. Assemble pie: roll out pie dough, pipe out meringue, spoon pears on top, pipe out meringue pattern on top, sprinkle with almonds and powdered sugar, bake, and voila.

Caramelized Pear and Crunchy Almond Meringue Tart

My classmates did not all get off so easy, which wasn't exactly fair. One group got the St-Honore, a "cream-puff cake" that I practiced this weekend and that I would gladly have made for the final exam (it's technically quite demanding, but fun to make, and it tastes great!), and the Pithivier, an almond-cream-filled puff pastry cake that my class made during the one practical that I missed, so I didn't have any practical experience to fall back on. I mistakenly assumed the Pithivier would never be on the final, and would have been a goner if I'd selected the yellow token. That was a close one!

We each also had to perform one technical test: the making and rolling out of a sweet short pie crust, pinched edge and all. Easy as pie.

Ready to be graded

I'm fairly confident everyone did well. The chef even helped some of us out during the exam, rolling out our dough and lending a hand in whipping egg whites or cream. Now if only Monday's cuisine exam goes as smoothly... though after having a gift like the Pear Tart fall on my lap, I expect my luck to change. I'll soon have visions of beheaded and disemboweled fish keeping me awake... or I could get lucky and wind up with roasted chicken...