A French patisserie course: composing a dessert from the pastry, eggs and sauces foundations; classical cakes; tarts; petit fours; set creams and mousses.
Classical French cakes are structured compositions with named forms. Each is a fixed recipe (with regional variants), and each is a worked example of the composition principles: pastry as the structure; cream as the soft middle; sponge as the absorbent layer; glaze as the finish.
A finished French dessert is rarely one thing. It's a small composition of two to five elements: a base (pastry or sponge), a cream (custard, mousse, ganache), a fruit or chocolate accent, sometimes a meringue or a streusel for texture, sometimes a sauce for the plate.
French patisserie is a layered tradition. Each finished dessert is built from a small number of foundational doughs, creams and meringues, combined in different ways. A mille-feuille is puff pastry + creme patissiere + glaze. A tarte au citron is sweet-short pastry + lemon curd. A paris-brest is choux + praline cream. A souffle au chocolat is custard base + meringue. The doughs and creams themselves are covered in their own courses; this course is about composing them.
Petit fours ("little ovens") are the bite-sized patisserie. They're served after the main dessert, with coffee or tea, often as a small plate of 3-5 varieties. The size is the point: each is one or two bites, perfectly executed, dense with flavour.
Set creams and mousses sit at the cream-rich end of patisserie. No pastry, no sponge; just an aerated or set-firm cream as the entire dessert.
Tarts are the most home-cook-friendly patisserie. The structure is fixed: a blind-baked sweet-short pastry shell, plus a filling. The variations come from the filling. Once you can make a clean blind-baked shell (see [sweet short pastry](../pastry/sweet-short.md)), the tart canon opens.