The night before the final, I couldn’t sleep. I felt like a bride on her wedding night, except I don’t think it was excitement that was keeping me awake. No, I think there was a knot of stress in my stomach that wouldn’t let me close my eyes until the wee hours of the morning.

I was nervous about one of the recipes. For the Doucer Chocolat (Heavenly Chocolate), there were two parts that I was a little unsure about. Doucer is a hazelnut cake topped with a praline filling, a chocolate mousse and then two thin disks of tempered chocolate. For the mousse, first you make a ganache (melting chocolate by pouring hot cream over the top) and let it sit. Once it’s cool, you whip it like there’s no tomorrow. But this is the challenging part. It must be at just the right temperature in order to set. I remember in practical, this took a very long time and with such tight time limits, I was concerned.

The second aspect that made my stomach churn was tempering the chocolate. I’ve done it three times in class, but the extensive process of heating, cooling and then reheating can be tricky. Once tempered, the chocolate is poured out onto a piece of plastic and spread very thin. Two round disks are cut into the chocolate once set. But if the chocolate isn’t tempered correctly, the end result will significantly impact my grade.

As I was standing outside the classroom waiting for the chef, I was practicing lots of deep breathing. Finally Chef Danniel showed his face and with a smile, let us draw recipes. I was the first to pick and when I pulled out a yellow chip, I broke into a huge smile. I had the passion fruit raspberry tart – the easiest of the three recipes. The stress I’d been keeping inside immediately left my body as I walked into the room and set up my station.

The hardest part about the tart is the crust. Because it contains so much butter, the dough is extremely soft and almost impossible to work with. I mixed all the ingredients together, flattened the dough into a round and put it in the refrigerator. I then started on the raspberry coulis that lines the bottom of the tart and the passion fruit cream that goes on top. Once I was ready to roll out the dough, it was a bit of a nightmare, but I managed to get it into the pastry ring in one piece. I probably rolled it out too thin, but I didn’t want to risk starting over.

Since Dominique and I were working next to each other and had the same recipe, we put our tart shells on baking sheets and blind baked them for 35 minutes. (Side note: blind baking is the process of putting pie weights (beans, pennies, etc) into the crust and baking. Once the crust becomes crispy, the pie weights are removed and the crust finishes cooking.) At this point, I had a bit of down time, so I completed the technical portion of the exam – writing Opera in chocolate.

I had been practicing this every day for almost two weeks. With a deep breath, I began my piping and finished in about two minutes. The Opera was perfect, but I managed to make a few tiny mistakes in my border. It wasn’t perfect, but I was happy with my work.

Once the tart shell was cool, I spooned in the raspberry coulis and let it set in the freezer. Then came the passion fruit cream carefully spread to the edges to make a smooth top. The tart is topped with a neutral jelly glaze mixed with passion fruit seeds. Et voila! I was done.

At 11:00 AM, I walked out of the building with everyone in Group A, and we headed immediately for the corner café. We celebrated with some glasses of wine and lots of noisy talk about the final. We were happy to be done, and we toasted to the fact that we’re now in the superior level.

Thanks to everyone who was keeping me in their thoughts. I think all that positive reinforcement was a tremendous help! And now I have a blissful two weeks off. Monday I get on a plane bound for home for some much needed rest.

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