Tarts, cheese sticks, and first Mont Blanc attempt

It's been a rather long time...looking back, my last post was posted in 1st December 2013...guess the sluggish side of me won, but hopefully I will be able to pick it up again and bake and post more? Tehe.

Tarts

I initially wanted to do a dark vs light tarts kind of like the idea of one pitch black and one bleaching white kind of tarts, however they somehow spiraled into something that turned out just pretty average looking, not as special as I anticipated. Which was due to my laziness in drawing up designs, improvising 90% of the time whilst baking. Am thinking of making the tarts again, this time I would add edible carbon powder to blacken the pastry, along with cocoa to darken it further. As for the 'white' tart, normal pastry will have to do. 

First time I made Cheese sticks- Oh the way I actually bothered to egg wash, then twist and turn them. Baked them again for Christmas, and another time for one of my brother's birthday that just passed, seriously, he wanted cheese sticks instead of a cake. I recall retreating to bed at precisely 9am that morning I baked these, ah...no words. 

Mont Blanc

Evidently, these were a first attempt, I didn't follow a recipe for the supposedly chestnut cream. In fact its barely cream but more chestnut puree, it hardened very quickly after a while and I had a hard time piping it out neatly (back ones and ones in the far right. Although, I probably didn't have to point it out, you all have eyes). Most of the chestnut cream all had rather large quantities of butter or whipped cream, which I thought would diminish the flavour of the chestnut.   

The Mont Blancs with the cake bases were considerably easier to eat, the ones with the rounded bottoms were sable breton, obviously much too thick to be eaten in a delicate manner. The taste overall was decent enough, had the texture of the 'cream' had not hardened slightly in the fridge, it would have been better. My sister actually preferred the slightly uncooked sable breton, but meh, that's my sister. She likes dense textures. 

Brioches 

They look so ugly, weren't bad tasting. Could only thank Richard Bertinet for providing the recipe I guess. The tops of the Matcha swirl buns completely failed the spiral pattern, must make again. 

Despite the rather sad looking tops, I rather like the pattern that formed in the insides of the buns, stretched branching patterns if you will? 

The flavour- was very good. I never was a huge fan of matcha, not as much as I am a coffee nor chocolate fan, but matcha is still up there, just trailing behind strawberry and passion fruit. The intensity of the matcha really did go well with the brioche. the unflavoured brioche by itself I found that after a few days; dry and hard to eat, but with the matcha the texture didn't bother me much, even though it was my sister and mum who chomped most of it down. 

A Smiley Kunamon biscuit to end this post. The oval red object are red eggs- traditional Chinese birthday treats back in the day. Very old fashioned in fact, my friend didn't even know what they were aha. 

Post more later. Eat a lot of cakes, and be happy.