Just another day at the spa.

It has been a few days straight out of Cake Boss or Ace of Cakes. If you have ever seen those shows, you will have absolutely NO idea what my day was like. There was likely less frustration, more precision, and actual cake underneath all the fondant. Yesterday and today we worked through cake decorating. Earlier in our cake lessons, we learned how to split, fill and mask a cake. We learned how to cover a cake with buttercream and make piped decorations. This was really an extension of that day. Last Friday, we made our own rolled fondant and then yesterday, we added any necessary colouring and covered our tiers with it. Today was then, prepping all of our decorations and finishing our cake. In retrospect, I saved myself a significant amount of breathing exercises by opting out of the flower brigade. Others in my class made beautiful flowers, SERIOUSLY. But I know that my flower afternoon would have been made up of muttering under my breath, throwing hunks of fondant across the room and then inevitably changing my flowers to balls of fondant, with or without a seam showing. The colour may not even match.

So I did some research, which was primarily comprised of me sitting on weddinggawker for hours at a time and looking at what people more detail oriented and coordinated than I am did with their opportunity to decorate a special occasion cake. I was really drawn towards simplicity, and by that I mean of course, less work. I wanted something to do with preferably cut outs, aka cookie cutters. I didn't know what colours I wanted either. Chef made it clear that we were making a wedding cake, that this wasn't just an opportunity to decorate a crazy cake. That meant soft colours. I started thinking of the kinds of cakes that I'm drawn to. Not a lot of flowers. Not a lot of scrollwork, if any. A lot of dots. Circles. Lines. I added these things up in my head and came up with K'nex. But I also came up with Art Deco! Art Deco is very clean, linear. It uses the repetition of shapes to create depth and height. It was the 30's, I couldn't resist. Colors are where I can't chill out. Even when I was in fashion studies, I was the one doing a lavender high-waist dress with a champagne bodice when everyone else was doing black and white. So here as well I couldn't just do turquoise and chocolate brown like everyone else. (*It's funny because no one in the class actually used that colour combination. I'm such a whiner.)

I started off with colour blocking my tiers a little bit. This involved WAY overworking my fondant and so it got a little crackly. But across the internet, you can't tell! The bottom at this stage made me think of Nibbler from Futurama immediately followed by breasts. And then maybe a penguin. Originally I wanted kind of an antique peach colour with a cool slate grey against the white fondant. But instead I achieved a pale pink  and a dark purple. The colours were still fine, just not as they were initially intended.

On the second tier, I really like the addition of taller columns, continuing on with the layer and the colour scheme. No one would actually want to eat my cake, because it has SO MUCH fondant on it. But working with the repetition of colours and shapes, it kind of became classy. We had to have a topper. I didn't know what to do for a topper with the style of my cake. I still like it better without the topper but I think the topper gives the cake a strong retro feeling. Kind of like a lounge singer. In a good or bad way, not sure.

This is the close up, and my favourite angle of the cake. Just two tiers. A monochromatic grey on grey would be classy. Or even a pale grey and a white. For someone to get married on New Years Eve. You could of course do green and black, if you wanted to be really Art Deco.

After I started working on the second tier and then on the finishing aspects, I found that I actually really liked it! A project that I was loathe to get involved in, I actually came away from it proud of my design. Not everyone liked it but like I said, I DON'T DO FLOWERS. We all have our strengths. The PM teacher came in and took a picture of mine because she said it was a good example of a cake that is 'easy to achieve but still beautiful'. I'm good with that.

On MOnday, we also finished our petit fours. We glazed them with pastry fondant (different than the fondant regarded above) and piped designs on top. They taste kind of like a donut, if a donut had a bajillion layers. One girl said it looked like the buildings from Inception when you lined them up in rows. This of course inspired a lot of kicking over the 'towers' with one's fingers and then stomping around the kitchen like a T-Rex. We all did it, I swear. I think it would have been fun to ice them all like dominos but it was good to practice our piping. I thought the domino theme would be cool for a New Years party too. I'm seeing a theme. Maybe I'm just wishing for a New Years.

Tomorrow we do fruitcake….yahoo. And then we start prepping for our Midterm! I do not remember bread. I do not remember anything earlier than last week. Who am I kidding -the weekend. I remember THE WEEKEND. We're gonna be practicing bread, pate a choux, tart shells and chocolate truffle. And then our skills are inflicted on the general public when we bake for the restaurant. In two weeks, I will be looking back on all of this, and it will feel like kindergarten, when you wish that you could still play at the water table and colour with HUGE felt markers when you're now forced to do big kid stuff like practice your cursive writing and remember your times tables up to 5. Except now we're plating desserts and trying not to give paying customers Staphylococcus. Easy shit.

Find a donut. Kick it over like a boss (with your fingers of course). Chow down. Repeat.

"How do strippers do it? They really must have so much cardio."

Oh chocolate. You've gotta be more like cilantro. Or Dub Step. A love or hate kind of thing. Because this ambiguous middle ground that I am feelin' for you right now is very confusing.
Chocolate demo: kind of frustrating. Not that inspiring.
Chocolate day: Kind of frustrating. Not as gratifying as I was expecting. Wanted to throw my chocolate writing AT somebody.
My chocolate-related imagination: Totally Wicked.

Chef put some bugs in my brain by the mere mention that things could be done with chocolate beyond what I've seen at Purdy's (which I would venture to say is one of the least imaginative chocolate shops ever. Which is not to say that it's not good.). Like instead of a ganache with cream and dark chocolate, you do it with passionfruit puree and milk chocolate?! Amazeballs. No kidding. Even tempering, which I was beyond unexcited for, was really pretty relaxing. And almost instantaneous. If you ever decide to try tempering at home (which I would probably just tell you to buy tempered chocolate), it will likely not take you long -unless your house is like Dante's Inferno. I dumped my chocolate on the marble, fooled around with my offset spatulas for like two minutes and the chocolate was already hardening. Back in the bowl and onto the ganache.

But flavours! Boundless. Which I knew but at the same time, there is so much I haven't even considered. Adding flavouring to a ganache is typically alcohol even though you could use nut pastes, and syrups if you so desired. The alcohol we used was pretty much cleaning solution. You took the lid off and instantly the kitchen smelled like a casino: just alcohol and sweat. But think about using a spiced rum, or a bourbon. Chef told me you could get tobacco truffles. Which I WANT. As in, not optional. You could do an Irish Car Bomb truffle. You WOULD fall down but man would that be tasty. And worth it. The things I love about what foodie culture has contributed to the culinary world is a creativity and a playfulness to flavour and texture combinations. Not that that aspect wasn't present before but now you have this demographic desperately seeking it out.

Like rosemary chocolate truffles. Or lemon rind cacao nib chocolates. Why am I dreaming about this? I pretty much everything about chocolate including it's mother on Thursday. Whatever.

My dark chocolate truffles and Lex's white chocolate truffles. Chef complimented our properly tempered coating but my ganache had a chunk of solid chocolate at the base from when my ganache set unevenly on the marble. That's what is known in the culinary world as 'not paying attention'.

Today we made Dobos Strips, prepped petit fours and made rolled fondant for our cake decorating days next week. I know that I will feel as if I have been transported back to elementary school when I was trying desperately to do one of those stupid grid pictures. Art + Math = no thanks. People will walk past my station, squint, clear their throats and then ask, "What is that?" at which point I will probably growl, insult them in my internal monologue and reply, "I'm not done yet." But of course we all know, I will never be done. Because it was supposed to be a  teapot, why does it look like a cactus?! That's it! I'm being a librarian!

…

I'm really aiming for something realistically achievable next week. Employing a lot of cut outs. Stencils. Bands of fondant. Like scrapbooking but with cakes. And not like Michael's scrapbooking where you pay $3 for a sheet of patterned paper. But like, Drunken Craft night scrapbooking where you cut out your friend's face and put a Powerpuff Girl sticker on them. That kind. Just trying to keep it interesting.

This is my Dobos Strip, which is a kind of petit four. My friend Danielle accurately described it as my cake having 'toast on the top'. Which I think is mortifyingly accurate and totally hilarious. This is what a Dobos is supposed to look like (once again put to shame by Smitten Kitchen. This woman has a two year old!)

And then we hand made rolled fondant. Or I made three batches of fondant. We had a couple people absent and so Chef asked me to make a second batch after I finished my first one. "Yours is good", he said to which I wanted to reply, "Totes a fluke Chef". But I don't think 'totes' is in Chef's vocabulary. So I did a second. And then he was going to do a double batch in the Hobart. So I did that one too. Hopefully, in my future I will look back on this day and I will say, "I am glad I got so much practice on fondant because otherwise I would be in a real pickle right now." Because in my future, I will STILL be lending from profanity and so I will STILL be talking like a Precious Moments doll and my life will be hard.

I also made caramel sauce last night that is so bitter that I need to throw it out but I want to save it so it's in my fridge. I talked to Chef about it and he's going to demo caramel sauce three different ways for me on Monday! I will be a caramel genius and Moozh will love me for it! And then I may just inch above Indian Food for first place rank in Moozh's heart. It'll be temporary but it will be a success!

Guess who's hilarious? Daily Grace! I want to be her. Especially in the kitchen.

Find some fries. Melt chocolate over them. Eat it standing in the kitchen, preferably in the dark. Exclaim over the redemption. Repeat.

"Why can't you wear black shoes like the other mothers?"

I was completely blown away by how NOT into chocolate I was today. Our entire day today was a demo day where Chef demo'd how to properly temper chocolate using two different methods. We had what in my opinion (being presently jaded -just for a day) was an excessively long lecture about the origin of chocolate, the fermentation process, drying and processing. We tried different kinds of chocolate, which varying degrees of cocoa butter, cocoa solids, sugar, from different companies, origins. It really just left me confused. Then the tempering came and I am going to be SOAKED in chocolate tomorrow. I got my jacket dirty today and I didn't even DO  anything. I am going to wear the dirty one tomorrow because then I still have something to wear on Friday.

And today was Ash Wednesday so my typical catharsis method of swearing my face off is officially out the window.

I'll just do my best to channel Vianne tomorrow. Chocolat is one of my favourite movies, there is something intoxicating about it. Vianne is so whimsical. Perhaps it is chocolate's role in her life, maybe not. Maybe it's the red shoes. I wonder if Chef would let me wear red heels tomorrow. That would really help my frame of mind. But my Chef pants are pegged and everyone knows you don't wear heels with pegged pants. Unless you want to look like an extra from Dynasty.

There's a quote in the movie, "Don't worry so much about supposed to." That is going to be my mantra tomorrow. I get too caught up in frustration when I make mistakes, I miss the opportunity to learn. And we will be making a passionfruit ganache for our truffles tomorrow. Anything with passionfruit is a win.

Here are the cakes we finished yesterday!

We did a sachertorte, which actually comes with quite the history. The Viennesse do not joke about their pastry. There was a lawsuit fought for years over who could claim the 'Original Sacher Torte". Doesn't matter to me because it tastes good. It's a dense chocolate sponge cake, almost like a brownie texture. It's split and filled with traditionally apricot preserves (duh-lish) but we used raspberry jam and then glazed with a chocolate ganache. As you can see, I was SHAKY when it came to writing on the surface. That is a skill that will come with time.

We also did a lemon blackberry mousse cake, similar to the raspberry one we did  a couple of days ago but using lemon curd, one of my top seven favourite things. We had to use the walk in freezer for our two mousse cakes and both of mine came out looking a little worse for wear. The glaze didn't set evenly and the outer edge got a little mangled but this cake is seriously SO GOOD. I find the assembly of modern cakes (mousse, ganache, etc) very meditative. You've got to have everything together but once you do you can knock off so many. Bodes well.

We did last a Bavarian Charlotte which is a vanilla cream filled cake with lady fingers around the outer edge. It made it out of the freezer a little more mangled but it still tasted good and when you pile some fresh fruit on top, it never looks all that bad.

The cross section shows the inserts. A lemon cremeux and a blackberry fruit gelee.

We glazed the top with the same glaze as the mousse cake, which is not traditional, to cover up some of the tears. The cremeux layer is WAY too thick even for a lemon lover like me. The gelee is bent but overall the layering is not too bad for a first time attempt hey?

Today Moozh made rabbit confit, which is rabbit cooked in it's own fat! Whose idea was that because I think they need a prize.

Yesterday, Moozh made a chicken roulade (which means a rolled thing) which a prawn filling.

Less than three weeks until our midterm. Then it's advanced. Then it's real. No red shoes in advanced.

Find some red shoes. Wear them in bed while you eat some chocolate. Consider yourself a rebel. Repeat.

Don't listen to anything I say. Basically.

Heyo! So we're doing our best to get back on the once a day track for posting. Otherwise, there are simply too many pictures. And pushing 'email photo' on my iPhone more than three times in a row is just exhausting.

Today was a hard Monday. I'm not gonna lie. All day I was just wishing for a stat holiday, or even (in my silent, inside voice) for something contagious. I was somewhat consoled by the fact that I wasn't the only one that stared at myself in the mirror this morning and contemplated calling in a sick day.  But eight hours a day, five days a week is pretty good training for real life. Except real life won't be like an Italian spa.

Today had a good clip though. There wasn't a ton of 'viamo guys!' going on. As long as you nestled your head firmly in the group and put one foot ahead of the other, you looked pretty ridiculous but two o'clock arrived with everything done. Tomorrow is our last day of cakes which will involve another mousse cake (yay) and infinite glazing, which is not so much 'yeah' and more so 'nononononono not like that'. All good.

The cake we glazed today is a cake custom to the school called a 'Pasuwa'. It consists of a chocolate sponge base, chocolate mousse, chocolate chips, cheesecake chunks, another sponge layer, more chocolate mousse and cheesecake chunks and then chocolate ganache, aka Boom. I brought it home, had a little chat with my digestive system and then went and made friends with my neighbours. The conversation that begins with 'Do you guys want some cake?" really only ever goes one way.

But Moozh had a good day today. Let me preface this by explaining that my husband has what could be described as a charismatic experience every time he eats Indian food. Something about the flavours, the textures, being able to eat it with your hands…something. It just speaks to him. So when he texted me this with the caption, "Indian Buffet", I knew he was going to be a very happy man when he got home, which a little bit of a kick in his step.

I feel personally blessed that Moozh has learned to make Indian. Especially such a spread. I am going to request an instant replay of this meal complete with everything you see represented here and I will dangle WHATEVER CARROT I HAVE TO in order to get. You have no idea how seriously a white kid can take Indian food.

Moozh also made quite the spread last night for our small group. Nothing is better than having people you love to pieces over for delicious food and wine. Nothing.

Rack of lamb, cumin rice pilaf, garam masala bean medley, roasted asparagus, and roasted veggie tower with a raspberry vinaigrette-pearl onion compote.

Not bad right?! My life, I tell ya. The man does me right.

"And naturally you belong to me, wouldn't you agree?"

Cake-land is a comfortable place to be. And land where time is spent luxuriating through parks of mousse cake and up staircases of layered opera cakes
I have noticed a discernible propensity in me towards minimalist decoration.
Namely, Opera cake.
Chef

Me.

The cross section is pretty though.

And in my defence, it is not truly my 'decorating style' and maybe more informed by there being supplies AND TIME available. Cake is a new world, I kid you not. I posted Chef's sponge layer cake the other day. Methinks, I let my personal opinion inform my decorating style. And my artistic ability but that's a conversation for another time.

I also made the prettiest cake I EVER have as well. And it was absolutely the easier of the three.
Voila!

The cake wall at the bottom, could be in any colour you wanted. We prepped them last Tuesday and I decided that purple would be pretty. But then Chef did his pink in stripes like a candy cane or a retro beach towel. When he pulled his mousse cake out of the fridge after it had set, I was 1) completely overcome by jealousy over the beauty of his cake and 2) had this overwhelming to be five years old wearing a crinoline with THAT CAKE as my birthday cake. It was a very complex emotional state. But mousse cakes are fantastic. And due to my general dislike of icing (especially icing with massive amounts of butter in it), I think mousse cakes are my favourite. So light, creamy, fruity. Not that there is anything wrong with excessive amounts of chocolate, butter and/or sugar.

We also made cupcakes. That had a very different texture than what I expected. Someone in my class suggested cornbread. I would probably say poundcake, simply because generally metaphors are supposed to HELP you understand. We made a French Buttercream, which is richer than the Italian buttercream we made the other day.

Don't you look so prettay! My best friend picked me up from school and we went for lunch. We had a very enthusiastic waitress who wanted to see all of my spoils from the day. She oohed and aahed very supportively over everything but the cupcakes got the most fanfare. And they are very pretty. Cupcakes are THE THING right now, aren't they? And I do understand why. They are infinitely customizable, transportable and very cute. This is the recipe for success in business and I believe the secret behind the success of purse dogs, mini tacos and bejewelled iPhones. All of this things are very popular in the city in which I live.

T-minus two days until we start learning chocolate which means truffles! Which also means my circle of friends is about to get a lot bigger. And then -AND THEN!! -two weeks from now, I write my midterm, do my midterm practical, and MOVE TO ADVANCED. I am very intimidated by this. I know I will do fine. But I am intensely fixated over the moment by moment, pre-play I am concocting in my imagination. (This is when being an imaginative person is a detraction from general quality of life. As I imagine, is bungee jumping.) The Advanced students are the BIG KIDS. I have been transported back to elementary school, sans the bicycle shorts this time (thank God).You don't talk to sixth graders when you are in third grade! (Why not?) YOU WILL DIE!
I need to talk to a professional.

Find a cupcake. Go talk to the big kids. The ones you're intimidated by. Maybe bring a cupcake for them. Bond. Repeat.

P.S -The title of this post is straight from Cee Lo GReen. I got my introduction to The Voice as an experience this past week. Cee Loo, while verging on the creepy, is so infinitely quotable.

"Guys, when it go wrong. Do not desperate."

So Chef prefaced this week as being "a very challenge" if we were to miss even one day. I was all prepped to study study study.
And then I got the most amazing surprise. My Best Friend, author of the Love Tour and Reflect What You Believe and my long-distance partner in crime, surprised me as a belated birthday present. She has been here with me everyday this week! And I have still managed to learn something! Everyday when I would normally be stoked to stand around in class after I am supposed to be home and in my loungewear, I am itching to GET OUT OF THERE. It has been so wonderful to have selfish time with someone you usually have to share every time Moozh and I head home to Cowtown. We've been able to hang out and talk and drink tea and make crafts with pop rocks. (It involved rimming a glass. Booyah.)


Here's a rundown on what Moozh and I have been up to since I was here last.

Moozh made cream puffs and lamb stew one night.

He also made breakfast for dinner which consisted of mascarpone stuffed French Toast.

We made soufflés on Monday. Cheese (Gruyere), Vanilla Cream and Chocolate.

The chocolate was the only I managed to snap before it began to collapse. The cheese was great -if you like stinky cheese. (Be advised, you go to culinary school and stinky cheese is in everything. No cheddar up in here.) The Vanilla Cream tasted vaguely like vanilla scrambled eggs which was…weird. The chocolate was awesome, though. Very light and airy. Not eggy. Win. We also made a chilled lemon soufflé that I think was my favourite out of them all. And the advanced pastry chef liked them enough that he featured the ones we made in the restaurant as a dessert feature. Woot!

What has followed in the days since, when I have company of course, has mostly been prep. We made a lemon pound cake yesterday that was very much like pound cake. I didn't know this but the name 'pound cake' derives from the original recipe in England that called for one pound of flour, one pound of butter, one pound of sugar and one pound eggs. It's also known as The Four Quarters cake. One POUND of butter.

Today was fun because we began to learn the assembly of cakes, which is just as important as the proper baking.
We learned how to properly crumb-coat or 'mask' which is simply a thin layer of buttercream on the outside of the cake to keep any crumbs from getting onto the outside of the cake.

Then we learned how to fully ice and decorate the cake. Throughout the entire process -cutting, filling, masking and icing- I have never felt so uncoordinated. Everything else we have learned thus far I have felt like a beginner but today I just felt ridiculous, waving around offset spatulas and serrated knives. "Chef! What am I…What am I doing!?"
I went for a more monochromatic look, simply, minimalist. What I forgot about minimalism is that it shows ALL YOUR MISTAKES.

For a first try, I am happy with it. I realized that my general aversion to excessive icing kept me from playing around and really decorating up my cake. I am the person at the party that scrapes all the icing off the top of the cake and then dissects each layers so as to simply get just cake. Others did really impressive rosette work and piping.
Chef did some major piping.

 Tomorrow we ice our cupcakes, we finish off our opera cake, we make two mousse cakes, 

Opera Cake from Hardian Nazief

Also on the weekend I made cream puffs for some friends we were having over. I definitely feel more confident that I know what I'm doing.
Before the bake:

After the bake:

Filled with pastry cream!

I have been very blessed this week with simply quality time. The cakes continue next week and then we move on to chocolate!

Find a friend. Find some pop rocks. Brainstorm. Repeat.

Moozh doesn't get a lot of air time here. He's the talker in the relationship. I'm the typer.

I ate (and/or gave away -I swear) all of my creme brûlée and thus have no documentation. We made a million and the ramekins we needed for our creme caramel. So we shared them with the rest of the school for the staff meal. I had to run to advanced pastry to grab something and on my way back I heard one of the advanced pastry kids bitching, "Just throw them out. They're not even done properly." So. Maybe not as successful an outing as I convinced myself it was.

 We made chocolate pots du creme which is akin to a custardy hot chocolate. Aka holy delicious.

We finished with creme caramel. My most dominant memory of this dessert is how hard it was to clean the caramel that didn't form a sauce from the bottom of the ramekin.

There was a rather rapid 'turning out' of the creme caramel. They were set and cooled but creme caramel (an really anything baked in a ramekin) is not really transportation friendly. We had to scoop them out into a container to take home. So it looks like salad dressing. Custardy, vanilla salad dressing.

But Moozh has done fun stuff! He did butchery all last week and then aced his butchery exam this week. Mucho proud wifey.

Moozh beat me to both creme caramel AND soufflé. I thought that pastry would have the market on that but turns out I have competition from someone who can hack through a pig carcass and balance our check book all in one day. I need more skills. We do soufflé on Monday, I remind myself.

Moozh told me an interesting story about sablefish (below). Turns out that the sablefish you are dying to try on the menu is the same Black Cod that you could have taken or left. It's a beautiful example of the role marketing plays in food culture. When the fish was under the name Black Cod, it couldn't compete with Atlantic Cod, Halibut and a lot of the other more familiar fish that are used for Fish and Chips, seafood chowders and other classic fish dishes. So someone decided to instead call them 'sablefish'. This bumped them up to an entirely different category because we all know that sable is so much better than black. More exotic. And quality obviously.

Yesterday they made scallops. My favourite part of getting pictures from Moozh is the plating. Plating is one thing that pastry only learns late in the program. You have to know it before you get into Advanced but it simply does not factor into any of your learning for the first month and a half.
Look at those scallops!

And notice the tourneed vegetables. Even though I bet learning that was really frustrating, it's good to know because after the first week, it's in EVERYTHING.

Each day, the foundation culinary students make a three piece meal for themselves.
An appetizer:

And entree:

Flank steak and grilled zucchini.
And a dessert:

I don't know what this is. I should because it's a dessert. But it does not look like anything I have seen before. I will reread this passage with egg all over my face one day when I say "Oh THAT'S what that was. Ooooh……."
Moozh has come home with an angry stomach everyday this week. It's a wonder French people are so chill and skinny. Because their contribution to the culinary world has been bereft of anything easy to digest.

So tomorrow is Savoury Day for us Pastry folk. We're making spanikopita (or Spank-i-topia, as Lex calls it), tortiere, which is a ground beef pie with chunks of potatoes and yummy spices. There's sausage rolls, empanadas, samosas, an onion tart, and a tomato-ricotta tart. We  also get out knife skills tomorrow. *Saying it like that makes it sound like they come in a box or something.* No, we have our knife skills class tomorrow. The first day of the pastry class having to use their knives, two of us cut our fingers in a major way (I wasn't one of them -go figure!). So some of us got indignant (that may or may not have been me) and demanded that our ineptitude be rectified by a knife skills class. So one of the VERY FRENCH teachers is coming in tomorrow to help us work out way around the sharpest knives I have ever been around. On the day where we will be slicing more onions than most of us have probably ever seen. (C'mon, it's Greek food. Super smelly but smelly in the best way.)I feel like I have a leg up because Moozh sat me down and showed me all of the slicing methods he was learning the first week. I sliced an onion in class today and I didn't even cry. These are the big things of life, let's be honest.

Next week we start cakes, which basically means we enter one of the seven circles of hell. Chef has straight up told us that if we were deluding ourselves that anything up to this point was hard, we may as well just sign our careers away because cakes take it all (just about said, 'takes the cake' but I restrained myself…kind of). But of course, Chef says that about everything. That is the Italian Pep Talk.

Find some veggies. Slice 'em fancy. (Strips are fancy) Put some parsley on top. Top it with a steak. Feel like a genius. Repeat.

"This is easy shit."

Croissants take three!

Much better hey? Mine always turn out a little clubfooted but otherwise, I think they turned out pretty nice. The advanced pastry chef even came in and told our class that he was very please. Good sign. I got the opportunity to troubleshoot with this batch a little too. If you begin the lamination process with croissants (which is the process of layering and rolling out the butter and dough combination) when the butter is too cold, the butter will seize and break up into chunks which is not what you want. You want a cohesive layer of butter that you can roll out to create increasingly thinner and thinner layers that will separate and become flaky during baking. Despite my knowledge of this, and probably due to my eagerness to get started, this is exactly what happened to me. My butter seized and instantly I was faced with an incorporated butter block that had broken into a million pieces. My croissant dough looked like a cobblestone street. Too bad. But totally fixable and that's the good part. I may have sworn. And I may have sworn at the inanimate object before me. School has caused me to create rather a habit out of this. But with Chef's patience (and flamboyant) guidance, I was able to save them.

This is the cheesecake, as promised. And as Chef promised to us, it was the smoothest, creamiest cheesecake I have ever had. Considerable will power was required today anywhere within three feet of that cheesecake. I'm an inspiration.

Our overflow project for today was creme brûlée. They baked at the end of the day, they will chill overnight and we will torch them tomorrow. And they are in ramekins, which can't leave school property. The only foreseeable solution I see to this is to eat them all tomorrow. Twist my arm. I am nothing if not sacrificial. The torching of the sugar crust will be interesting. I hold the blow torch the same way I hold babies: away from my body at full arms length with one eye closed.

We also made Linzer Torte today which was far cooler than I expected. Linzer Torte is one of the oldest recipes in pastry. The oldest printed recipe dates back to the 1650's. It's an Austrian pastry, named after the town of Linz in Austria. The Austrians have been an excellent contributor in the world of pastry. Would definitely give them hype on reddit.

The crust is a crumbly pastry made up of ground hazelnuts and flour with sugar. It is then piped in to the pan and filled with traditionally a red- or blackcurrant preserve which North America reliably replaces with raspberry jam.

It's really a pretty dessert. If you use jam in the middle, it is super sweet. I think it would be so good with either fresh berries in the middle or a compote or preserve with very little sugar and a little tang to balance out the sweetness of the pastry.

Chef bumped crepes today so that we could do croissants. Tomorrow is also creme caramel and pots du creme. After that we do savouries: spanikopita, onion tart, sausage rolls and samosas. Yum.

Go find a recipe that you've known for a while. Eat it because you are honouring the time honoured tradition. Thank me. Repeat.