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The small village of Echiré has a famous dairy, “where the royal house of England buys its butter”, reportedly. Echiré butter is also served at the French president's palace in Paris. My client group was visiting the Echiré, and I had arranged a baking class for us in the new teaching facilities of the dairy.
The room glowed with steel as a cheery, self-conscious chef introduced the newly built cooking class areas. Our teacher had served on large ocean liners as a pastry chef. I think there was an effective command as the norm, because we too were kept in order, albeit flavored with humor.
Our task was to make strawberry cakes - each his own cake! We made the dough, mixed the sauce patissière (delicious custard), and then cut the strawberries and made our own creations. The chef served us a drink from time to time.
The cakes were really delicious, but what on earth would we do with seven of them? Well, we gave one to our taxi driver, another to my daughter who lives in Echiré, 2 cakes to the host of our hotel (who did not realize that we had made them ourselves and consequently wondered why we brought him cakes, but accepted them politely anyway. He must have thought that these foreigners were a bit strange). We ate 3 cakes ourselves and oh how delicious they were!
In the future, I think I will suggest Mr. Chef that we all make our own croissants or pain aux raisins (i.e raisin bread), which is my favourite. No problem to have seven of them!
We were given aprons and other items from the dairy shop in the back room of the dairy. We also got the recipes, and I tried making a similar cake at home. It was very successful, but I had to wait for strawberry time in Finland, because so many strawberries go into the French version that expensive foreign ones would ruin me. Besides, Finland has the best strawberries in the world. They ripen 24 hours/day because of the white summer nights.
