Hello Stranger.

Hi, my name's Bri. Maybe you've heard of me. I bump around here sometimes. I make promises of dedication that I don't follow through on. Join me on my culinary journey. You will question my sanity and my photography style on a daily basis. That would be if I posted on a daily basis.

I've missed you. But I haven't been able to talk about school. Because it makes me tired. And as the photos that I will share with you today will attest, it has not all been experiences of grandeur.

I like his face. And his BEARD!

I wanted first and foremost to share what the Moozh has been up to. His first fun week was amuse bouche. The amuse bouche is the course before the appetizer. Not all restaurants do it but what it is meant to do is to stimulate your palate and prepare you for the meal to come; 'amuse the mouth', as it were.

Duck Carpaccio (or green pepper) with Cassis pearls

Salt-crust toasted beets and pickled walnuts on Belgian endive with lemongrass creme fraiche
caramelized orange rind and edible flowers. 

Shave smoked scallop and pear, with pomegranate and black garlic on goat's cheese crostini

For his fourth amuse, he did a dashi broth duck breast but he didn't get a picture of that one. Sometimes things just get too crazy and something's got to give. Moozh has such a creative mind though, especially when it comes the pairing of flavours and the melding of textures. I am so blown away. His technical proficiency has totally exploded since he got into advanced. It was good in basic but really being able to apply it in advanced and incorporate it into presentation, he has gotten so much better. And with the duck carpaccio as an example, he is extremely mindful to vegetarians, always having an option available. I am his blessing and his curse.

This week he's on appetizers.

Rainbow Salad

Beef Tartar

Tonight he's doing Pork Belly and I can't wait to see what it looks like. Moozh LOVES pork belly. Like it probably goes, "Jesus, Me, Pork Belly." Sugar puts up some seriously fight for a top spot in the trinity but pork belly does have a lot of uniqueness going for it.

Moozh and I are currently working through the Intermediate WSET Wine course at school. This past weekend, Moozh cooked for the courses on Saturday and he made the most amazing Thai Noodle salad. The salad itself was simple but then the dressing was so amazingly complex. He sweat lemongrass in sesame oil. He added red chiles turmeric, galangal, ginger, garlic. There was mirin, and rice wine vinegar. I said numerous times during the night that I wanted him to make me that salad for the remainder of our marriage. Numerous times.

Our wine class is fantastically fun. The sommelier at the school is such a wealth of knowledge in wine but also extremely accessible in the tasting of wine and the development of palate when it comes to wine. The above picture was from our red flight, including Pinot Noirs, Grenache, Merlot, Cab Sauv, and Shiraz. We also get to taste from the taller wine glasses that you can see behind, which are 'varietal specific' glasses. Each glass, designed by Riedel, presents the wine in the best way on the nose and on the palate. I know it sounds like bullshit, but it works. Works for $45 a stem? If you have the money yes. But you can enjoy wine just as well out of your run-of-the-mill, Ikea stems.

And now for my turn. I really have run the gamut these past weeks. I'm nothing if not versatile.

My first successful macaron, pistachio creme.

This was my dessert today. Lavender Lemon Posset, Chamomile madeleine, and a cherry mint galette.

Posset is the most amazing thing. I answered the question, "What's a posset?" probably a dozen times today and I didn't even have to deal with customers. Posset has only three ingredients. Lemon juice and sugar, which are combined and brought to a boil, and heavy cream, which is also brought to a boil but separately. The liquids are then combined, portioned into their serving containers and chilled. The lemon juice and cream react and 'set' the posset into almost a curd or pudding-like consistency. It is ethereal. Like a lemon curd but oh so creamy. If you are ever short on a dessert and you don't know what to do, make posset. It has to set for a minimum of two hours but it can set overnight for a really creamy texture that is more stable.  It is so simple and fresh and EEEEEASY. But we know how I feel about lemon.

I saved these pictures for last because this day will live in my memory for a long time.

Bad cupcake day.

Now I attend a culinary school that trains in the French style. Let's just say, we don't really 'DO' cupcakes. We make numerous varieties of 'gateaus' which is a layered cake. We make pate a choux (cream puffs, eclairs, etc). We do butter sauces and plate using classic French decor involved lattice work and filigree. Fancy muffins aren't really in the French repertoire.

But cupcakes. Are. Easy. You find a cake batter of which you are fond. You scoop it into muffin tins. You slater it in buttercream. You box it up. It sells. Always. Without fail. Even in Vancouver where cupcake shops are the new Starbucks. They are friggin' everywhere.

So when we got a special order for forty cupcakes, twenty chocolate, twenty vanilla, we were not concerned. I was not concerned. That was my station and I was responsible for making sure that most of it was prepped and ready to go. The request on the order was for 'garden cupcakes' so we were going to decorate them with coloured buttercream in a variety of different flowers. We have girls in our class who have taken cake decorating courses before and some even work at a grocery store in the cake decorating department. They had the decorating part down pat. Now I had to hold up my end. Simple.

Didn't end up being so simple.

Y'all I don't even know how it happened. Danielle in my class, (SHOUT OUT) said they were 'apocalypse cupcakes' and honestly that is the only description that feels appropriate. It looks like mummification. And it was a CIA recipe!! The CIA (Culinary Institute of America) publishes all of their textbooks and recipes. They are extensively tested. They are to be trusted. SUPPOSEDLY. It was a cake recipe and I am racking my brain trying to come up with a solution for why they did what they did. I followed the recipe. I did it twice! The pan turned out like this TWICE.

They souffléd (meaning they puffed up in the oven). They also souffléd ALL OVER everything. But just as a soufflé, when we opened the door to check if they were done, they collapsed….into that. And I ended up with the worst burn of the program that is easily two and a half inches long on my forearm. I'm not bent out of shape about the burn but my conscience as a writer knows that it needs to be included to somehow communicate how bullshit the day was. So bullshit, that's how.

After the second batch, I was NOT doing the recipe again. Not even my respect for and belief in the CIA's recipe practices could make me do it a third time. DEvil's food it was. And they turned pretty good.

You see those leaves? Those were my doing. And the chocolate icing underneath the flowers. But the roses, gardenias, plumeria and daisies had nary a whiff of me near them. How beautiful are those?! The girls did a mega job on them. And we boxed those babies up and sent them away. I don't even care if they lady liked them.

And the moral of this story is not to avoid CIA recipes. Just when you are making their High Ratio Chocolate Cake, have your whits about you.

There is a Food and Wine Writer's conference in the Okanagan in the middle of June that I want to go to so bad. But it ends the same day as my written final. School is a buzz kill once again. But there's also an event at the UBC farm called "The Joy of Eating" or something like that going on pretty soon that I am GOING TO BE AT.  So help me God.
(Please help me.)

Find a recipe you like. Make it. Feel like a boss. Cover it in cream cheese icing but it makes everything better. Repeat.

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.

"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.