"I wasn't so keen on my scones. They tasted animal cracker-y."

Test #1 down. And not once did I have that "Oh…no. OhmygodOhmygodOhmygodOhmygodOhmygod" so I think it went okay. When I could have been doing a final review last night, after I had stared at my textbook for an hour and realized my brain was at critical mass, instead I played with my makeup and had a bath with my mom's handmade bath salts. It was a good night. Talking to some of the girls in the advanced class (the class that just came out of training kitchen into advanced), they said that pretty much everyone overstudies for the first test. Because you have no idea what kind of stuff is going to be tested, what the questions are like and you have so much fermenting in your head all at once, you stress yourself out when you don't have to. I was sure that 'ohmygod' moment was going to come because it usually does when I am too cavalier. But I trusted myself this morning. I guess we'll see. We don't get our marks back until Chef Maurizio gets back which isn't until next weekend.

Today we started cookies! It's amazing having made cookies all my life, how stressful it was and how much I overanalyzed every step when I did them today. When you're making them for your family, or even to take over to a friends house, you're not so obsessive about how they look. In school though, after you learn about the science behind the ingredients in a cookie dough and how the properties in them contribute to an 'optimal' cookie, you study every step in the process.

Left to right is, classic chocolate chip, oatmeal raisin, and chocolate indulgence. We were supposed to do peanut butter cookies but a classmate has nut allergies. She couldn't eat the oatmeal either because they had pecans in them but peanuts were the big concern and we wanted to avoid anaphylaxis as much as possible. The chocolate indulgence are beautiful cookies. They are labor intensive much it is worth it. They are similar a recipe I got from my mom. Melted semi-sweet chocolate with some butter which is then incorporated with very little flour and then chilled so that the dough can be shaped. This recipe required the eggs to be whipped with the sugar and some vanilla. I had to scrap the first batch of egg mixture because after a significant amount of whisking the mix had turned grey, smelled slightly metallic and hadn't proceeded to the 'ribbon' stage, which is before 'soft peak' when you are whisking eggs. I tried again and got similar result minus the metallic taste. Still no ribbons. So I mixed the chocolate in anyway and formed the cookies. I realized when the cookies were already in the oven that my math had been wrong when I scaled the recipe. But they still turned out beautiful and so airy. Not as chewy as my other recipe and not as sweet either. These had a really nice dark chocolate taste. My other recipe is almost crunchy with sugar.

We had our 'cause and effect' debriefing at the end of the class, where we correlate ingredients, mixing methods, bake time, temperature, etc with the finished product and analyze what could have been done better, etc. I made a little pie chart, or cookie graph, of our escapades today.

The Cookie Trinity

And then! REmember the carrot cake I was talking about. That had a rather embarrassing fall from grace at the end of class yesterday. The proceeding cooling process provided enough heat to help the evaporation continue and by the time we got in this morning they were no longer doughy in the middle. They were pleasantly moist while definitely being cookies. But again with the leavening. When you scale a recipe by four, you lose a lot of precision. My scale can't manage fractions of a gram and so I do my best to kind of guess. But look how squatty it is.

You can see that is packed with stuff. It has grated carrot, crushed pineapple, grated coconut and chopped pecans. It should have been taller than that but probably not by much. It was interesting to pull it out and to see how much it can change even by just cooling completely. And how recipes can be a bit of a bummer.

Monday is a bit of a flex day. Chef allowed us a day where we could have some time to work on a recipe or concept that we've already tackled. For me that meant croissants, which will be a nice exercise. My croissants turned out well but I want more practice so that it's not just fluke. Others are calling on a mulligan on the pastry cream they made that coagulated into scrambled eggs (with vanilla bean in it -ew). Others are practicing scoring bread, or redoing scones because they tasted like animal crackers. We also start brownies and lemon squares and prep our batter for madeleines! Oh madeleines straight out of the oven are like nothing else. If you ever have the chance, don't even wait for them to cool. Grab them from the hot pan and pull the crispy fluted crust apart. It's like a spongecake a little bit but better with crispy butter edges.

Pull cookies fresh from the oven. Break it open and inhale deeply. Assert your belief in everything good and pure in this world. Repeat.

P.S ~ Look at my cupboard. That's just from this week. And that minus danishes and carrot cake that refuse to be stacked.