"Quick! Look like you're having fun."

Oh hello Good Friday. And hello Easter Sunday and Monday. Get the flip off my porch Tuesday.

So fast. It was over so fast. It was Thursday and I was gearing up to sleep in and have my husband all to myself. And then it was Tuesday and I was asking myself what I was doing in my uniform already.

Having four days with my husband where we could sleep in, eat a meal together and have conversations that consisted of more than just one of us rolling over saying, 'Bye Babe' or 'Hi Babe' or "You must be tired" was just long enough for me to get really used to it. Tuesday became extremely offensive to my newly acquired sensibilities quite quickly.

The week following was really fun. I was on dessert service again. After my experimental (and non-lucrative) jaunt with the strawberry soup, I figured I would stick to something really reliable. Lent was also newly over. What do most people give up for lent? Booze and dessert. Let's do it up.

So I made a Red Wine Chocolate Cake with a Blackberry Sherry Ice Cream and a Cassis Sabayon. Yep, there was alcohol in all three parts. With the candied hazelnuts from the dessert before. This should have been a hit out of the park but then like ten people came into the restaurant to eat that day. Girl just can't catch a break.

Then I moved on to Bake Shop aka Pate a Choux-land. My Chef wants us to be super confident when it comes to making pate a choux (which is what eclairs, cream puffs, profiteroles, etc are made of) and thus at any spare opportunity she has us making some. It's likely going to be on our final so it's REALLY good practice. Hordes of eclairs, cream puffs, big and small, St. Honore cake bases.

Friday was my first day in the chocolate room and I spent eight hours trying to temper chocolate. I have never had a hard time tempering chocolate but, for some reason, I chose Friday to use up eight hours.

Saturday. Now Saturday was fun. We got to volunteer, through the school, for an event in the city called "Growing Chefs." GRowing Chefs is an organization in Vancouver that looks to educate school age children about food, agriculture and sustainability. They engage kids in farming and cooking exercises, teaching them where their food comes from and how it gets to them. Very cool. On Saturday, Growing Chefs did a fundraising event called "Guess who's coming to Dinner?" Highly recognized chefs from all over the city volunteered their time to cook for a group of people who bought tickets to a dinner. Matt and I got to assisted one of said chefs in preparing one of the dinners around the city. Our chef, Andrea Carlson, has such an amazing ethic about cooking and she was also one of the founding members of Growing Chefs. She has worked at amazing restaurants in her career. What's even better was our menu for the night. The theme was "Wild Botanicals" which was a purely vegetarian meal using unfamiliar and locally grown produce to create the dinner. Basically, I have never been so full in my life. She made a farro risotto (which I could probably eat for the rest of my life) which burdock root and salsify (do YOU know what that is? I didn't.) There was wild sorrel and miner's lettuce that Andrea foraged herself. Green almonds (look them up!), morel cream sauce, black garlic compote. For dessert she made nougat with toasted walnuts and blue cheese and she served it with a walnut port. She even made, as an amuse bouche, a cherry blossom spritzer made from cherry blossoms she picked from the tree in her yard and cured in salt!?!?! Seriously.
I hope to work with Andrea again. At the end of the night, I basically told her that I was at her feet and her service whenever she needed it. Which made me seem crazed or really keen, one of the two.

Monday, I got tempering under my belt and with the necessary reflection, figured out that I make things too hard for myself. So strange. Instead of getting frustrated I made coconut lime white chocolate truffles and ginger pear milk chocolate truffles.

Today. Banquet plating. On Monday we had a party of fifty come in and today we had a party of twenty-five. The timing of banquets is fascinating to me. It's kind of a 'hurry up and wait' kind of situation. But when you have everything you need and you're all working together. It's really cool to see it all come together at the same time and go out seamlessly.

I can't remember if I mentioned it when I was in basic but this cake is called a "Pasuwa". It's a speciality that the school does. They actually invented it. It is chocolate cake on the bottom, a layer of chocolate mousse, chunks of cheesecake and chocolate chips, another layer of chocolate cake, another layer of chocolate mousse and one more layer of cheesecake to top it off, glazed with a chocolate glaze. It's made in both individual sized dome cakes, like above, or in lager 6" and 8" layer cakes. The banquet party ordered Pasuwa as their dessert so then it was just a matter of figuring out how to make it pretty. I got to be lead hand, and come up with the plating, which was pretty fun. I posted a pic of it on Facebook and a friend of mine who's an architecture student posted that it was 'under strain and thus had to be eaten'. I guess I put too much faith in tempered chocolate to hold cookies up. Fulcrum and all that.

Tomorrow is a new day. We got new candy thermometers today and so I brought my old one home so now I have one here as well. I've got my eye on a sponge toffee recipe. Memories of my dad and I trying to make sponge toffee come to my mind. It was always either too hard, more like snap toffee, or too crumbly. If I can master it, I will consider it a top achievement of my pastry education. And then I can brag.

Make a cake. Your choice. Buy a candy bar. Use it as a 'garnish'. That's what we pastry people do. Eat. Feel spiffy. Repeat..