Sharing the sweet tricks of patisserie trade

Learning from pastry chef is messy but marvellous, says Loretta Lohberger

HAVE you ever killed someone?” our teacher asks, spreading a layer of plastic film over the bench top. “It’s the same process.”

The comment gets a laugh from the class — we’re used to his wicked Irish sense of humour by now.

It’s day five of an introduction to patisserie class at Savour School in Melbourne, and what pastry chef Paul Kennedy is talking about is nothing so violent as murder, but it is messy.

Kennedy is demonstrating a technique for decorating petits gateaux.

He takes a freshly glazed lime and pineapple petit gateau and splashes dark green colouring onto the side by flicking a paintbrush.

Our class of 12 is made up of home bakers — like me — who want to learn some new skills, a chef who has fallen in love with baking and pastry and is planning a career change, a pastry chef in training and others who run businesses and want to expand their menu offerings.

We start out with the macaron. The French delicacy reached peak popularity in Australia after Adriano Zumbo’s macaron challenge in the 2010 season of MasterChef. These days, Kennedy laments, the macaron is not as popular as it should be.

He teaches us three methods of making macarons — the traditional French method (using French meringue) is the most difficult of the three and that’s the method our group of four is tasked with.

It seems we over-whipped our meringue and our macarons, although delicious, are not good enough to sit beside the others (raspberry and coconut, coffee and orange chocolate).

The passionfruit macarons are re-made the following day and we all take a box home.

On day two — passionfruit macarons aside — the focus is entremets, mousse-based cakes.

There’s also a day of tarts, a day of chocolate, and we finish the course with a day making petits gateaux.

Although I was excited about spending five days in the kitchen and expanding my repertoire, I was also a little overwhelmed.

I have next to no experience of commercial kitchens and traditional cakes, slices and puddings are my usual baking fare.

But even after just a few days in the kitchen, all of us were improving. The skills we learnt making entremets we relied on again for petits gateaux, and we continued to do a bit of chocolate work for garnishes as the course continued.

I’d go to bed at night and think about all the new skills and tricks of the trade I’d learnt that day.

I’ve always admired petits gateaux and it was such a treat to learn to make them myself. They are not as hard to make as they look, but it is important to have the right moulds, be very precise and neat, and have an eye for detail.

My first baking project since returning from the course was a sponge cake with passionfruit icing that I took to a barbecue at a friend’s house, but I hope to have another crack at some petits gateaux sometime soon.

If you see me spreading a protective layer over my kitchen bench, don’t worry, I’m just getting ready to decorate.