One last day of baking

 Our last day at Le Gargantua arrived too soon but don’t worry too much because we still had Fraiseiers and a whole lot of choux to look forward to. 

Unlike the previous days at Le Gargantua, there was to be no morning excursion. Instead we spent the whole day in the kitchen cooking up a storm, indeed between the Choux de Pistache: choux pastry shells with a cracklalan top filled with pistachio cream, Fraisiers,; biscuit jaconde (which is actually a sponge cake) creme patissiere and lots and lots of strawberries (remember those from the other day, I told you that they would be making a reappearance)  and finally Coffee Religeuse, as seen on GBBO, this includes more choux pastry, creme pat and coffee flavoured royal icing. Oh and we baked the baguettes as well.

With temperatures outside nearing 35°c and the ovens and stoves at full blast, you can imagine that it was rather hot in the kitchen and I spent a good part of the day helping myself to ice cold beverages from the drinks fridge. 

Our day was divided into two separate parts; in the morning we baked and prepared all of the components needed; including making the highly anticipated creme pat, whilst the afternoon was set aside for construction and assembling the troops…I mean choux nuns.

By the latter stages, the temperature in the kitchen was getting really quite intense and no sooner had we piped one bit of cream than it had to go back into the fridge again.

There is a lot of pressure is patisserie that everything needs to look beautiful which for me is not something I’m exactly very good at. This inevitably led to pistachio creme patisserie spilling out from the crevices of the choux bun and rather wonky looking nuns in the religeuse.

The Fraiseiers was surprisingly quite alright, it even made it to the picture table and you can see my  take on the Le Gargantua’s Facebook page (as well as my Tarte Tatin and chicken too) Looks don’t matter too much though, it's all about the taste and I can assure you that they were all delicious. 

Tomorrow, after breakfast, we will bid a fond farewell to our lovely hosts Marlene and Tom and thank them for a stunning week of food, glorious, food and to think I didn’t have to do any washing up, not once! #winning 

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