"You f***ed your macronage…good hustle though."

Where is my thicker skin?? Four weeks should have done it. Can't you buy those somewhere. I swear to God I saw them at Adrenaline one time. But then Tyson McAdoo made more stuff and they can't the thick skin. I need a lotion or a potion or something that prevents me from standing amidst the chaos, doing breathing exercises on a Friday afternoon.

Oh life in a kitchen. Pastry is calm. I have SEEN it with my own eyes. But days like today….and yesterday…and Wednesday...were not calm. No. I blame it on my inability to work effectively with others. I could probably blame my mom for it in some way. I should go to therapy. But she made me sign something in elementary school promising I wouldn't.

Yesterday, I came home, looked at my cookies. And then I went to Chinatown. There was a feeling of escape in it. I was nearly braindead and thus I just wanted to go somewhere that when I wasn't understood I could blame it on something else. And buying stuff with Hello Kitty or a ceramic owl making the 'peace sign' just makes one feel better.

Yesterday, like I mentioned, was meringues and macarons. You know how i promised that my macarons wouldn't look like the picture.

I didn't lie. 

They don't' look awful. They look kind of odd and cute in their own way.

The almonds weren't ground nearly fine enough so the 'shells' are quite bumpy. There is a narrow rim around the bottom of a macaroon called the 'feet' that is a desirable characteristic. Ours have ok feet. But the bumpy shells are simply so distracting you almost don't notice. The macronage is the stage where you incorporate the ground almond/flour mixture in to the Italian meringue. You need the Italian meringue to be light enough and whipped but you don't want it to be to dry because that means the eggs have been pushed too far and they are very unstable. You'll probably come out with bizarre looking macarons if you pushed them that far. I think the key thing with ours was the ground almonds. They had a nice shell. It was just too bumpy. Hmmmm.
For our vanilla macaroons we had pistachio, chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry Italian buttercream filling. Italian just tastes like butter, with sugar. It's majestic. But just sampling it from the mixing bowl, it feels like you're just eating butter. So weird.

We also made meringues, which always look good and taste awful. To me, they have the texture of packing peanuts. I find, with Classic French meringue, you don't get that spongy, chewy, almost marshmallowy texture. We made a rustic cocoa meringue (that is undocumented because none of them made it home) that were like and so very tasty. It is the brittleness of meringues that I don't like. And whenever I make pavlova or other egg white desserts, I undercook (within the parameters of food safety) as much as I can get away with.

There are macaroons as well, which I think we did in the same class because the names are similar. Other than the name, they are NOTHING alike. Meringues and macarons are 'stress-required' cookies. There are steps. With macarons, there is PLENTY that can go wrong (as illustrated above) that will leave you with less than the product you desired. Coconut macaroons, you dump all the ingredients in a bowl, kind of warm it up a bit to melt the butter, scoop it with an ice cream scoop to make it nice and round and the forget about it. I mean, you bake it, and then you forget about it. So little effort. Even glazing or dipping them is marginal. So they provided a necessary if brief reprieve from the intensity of yesterday.

And then TODAY…..hoo boy. For one, we had a different chef than we've ever worked with before, learning an entirely new concept, a concept with gives many a person pause. Let me preface this by saying that I have NEVER made a pie crust from scratch that was any good. I have made pie crust with my grandmother many times and with my mother-in-law at least once. I dedicate these pies to them. Really, the times that I made with them was one of those instances when you are 'making it together' and they do everything. And then when it comes out of the oven looking majestic, they are gracious enough to let you puff up your chest and tell everyone you made it when you're really going to huddle in bed and feel ashamed that you took credit for someone else's work. Pie crust is one of those things for me.

And then you learn that there are two different kinds of pie dough and that's just for pies. Then you have pate brisee, pate a foncer, pate sucree, and other such French froofy pastry crusts that are used for other things for which pie dough is not appropriate. Oh sweet Lord, I knew it was going to be a day.

Four pies in an eight hour day, chantilly cream, Italian meringue, and so many freakin' ovens on! I texted Moozh and asked him if before he went into class if he would stop by my kitchen and give me a hug. Because I may have needed to cry uncontrollably -I mean, talk out my feelings. Today wasn't really that bad but given my previous major, I can't let the truth get in the way of a good story.

We made two baked pies and two blind-baked pies with cream fillings. First, chocolate cream and lemon meringue were the blind baked. I totally pilfered the gorgeous piping technique from a fellow classmate. I probs would have just done the slather technique and then burn the shit out of it with the blow torch. Thinking back on my grandmother's lemon meringue, it always had the singed meringue on top. Did she have a blow torch. Or did she just use her oven? I'm going to assume she had a blow torch, because that's totally bad ass. And farm wives have a bad-assness that is beyond your expectations. This is flexible family history, my own mythology if you will.

We made a pecan pie, which of course accompanied an argument not only as to the factors that make up a legitimate pecan pie but also as to the proper pronunciation of 'pecan'. Everything from 'puh-cahn' to 'pee-can' to 'pee-cahn' to 'p'cohn'. We have a lot of Southerners in our class with rather inflated and ingrained opinions when it comes to pecan pie. My dad's favourite pie is Chocolate Pecan Pie, which is exponentially better (and with a fuller expectation of calories) than ol' rag'lur pecan pie. The chef we worked with today told us about running the kitchen at one of Vancouver's largest hotels and that every Father's Day, they would produce thousands of pies. Something about pies that dudes just love. Not that any man I've ever met would discriminate against cake or ice cream or chocolate (even though Moozh would go to inordinate lengths for ice cream and ice cream alone), but pie does seem to hold a peculiar and permanent place in their hearts.

You will notice the unsightly 'slosh' mark. That is when I was sloshing and rushing to be a part of the pecan party in one of the ovens. We make a fool of ourselves on the altar of being included don't we? But even despite the slosh mark, there is enough butter and sugar (and protein!) in that pie to make anyone happy. Grab a cup of coffee, grab a couch and chillllllllll out. That's how we do it.

Lastly, which was the pie that came first and was an exercise in crust inflation.

We scored in and it was just never the same after that. Not even coarse sugar and egg wash could fix it. The apple filling was SUPER GOOD. It had enough sugar to provide that dessert sweetness but not to much that it lost the great Granny Smith puckery tartness. Although it did have raisins in it. Raisins? I'm not a connoisseur but I've never had an apple pie with raisins in it. The seam between the lower crust and the top crust was a little shoddy (my bad) and our pie leaked. All in all a bad execution on my part for a fruit pie. So it looks like melted cheese but it tastes great!

And now it is the weekend. Here's aiming for some wine, some sitting, some quality husband time. And very little conversation about food. Monday will come soon enough. Chef Maurizio is back on Monday from his gelato competition. It's back to Top 40 hits with an Italian accent and Lawrence of Arabia tea towel parades.

I need a drink

We were all sayin' it at the end of class today. Today. Was. Stress. Full. Stencil cookies: totally gorgeous, in the end somewhat worth it. HOWEVER, stencil cookies + 12 PEOPLE = chaos. I swore at full volume numerous times. I body checked poor Karin at least once. I kissed my fingertips goodbye early in the day. And then I came home and had a drink. We're cool. (I know it's a coping mechanism okay?!)

For those of you who don't know what stencil cookies are, they fall in the category of "cookies made primarily to be a component of, or garnish for, a plated desserts." Meaning they are a sidekick. They are secondary. Robin to the Batman ice cream. Bullwinkle to the Rocky mousse cake. They are spread free form on a pan and then formed once they come out of the oven. In our theory lesson this morning, my chest was already getting tight. Stressful cookies. Oxymoron. Nope.
Timing is a big component of stencil cookies. As you know, timing = not my gifting. Movie references, butchered accents and even voices = totally my gift. I can make quotes from Aladdin or Princess Bride work for ANYTHING*. Can I remember that I have high fat cookies that are slowly smouldering to their death in the oven? Apparently not.

One helpful development today is that we utilized the three extra conventional ovens in our kitchen today. ("He CAN be taught! *See?)
Of the teams of six, four were designated a conventional oven each and then the remaining two teams were designated one of the two convection ovens each. We were a convection team. This helped me with my oven skills more than you can imagine. Our almond tuile still came out a little…bronzed on the edges. But after that we really stepped up and the rest of our stuff came out with a really beautiful colour. Our cigarettes (cookies, I swear) came out a little under baked but it was a good exercise to determine how cigarette batter was supposed to look, post-bake.

One of the (numerous) aspects of stencil cookies that makes it stressful is the shaping. Stencil cookies are baked flat and then shaped directly after they emerge from the oven. And when I say 'directly' I mean, when they are still hissing. Again, timing. So we set up a little "Shape Station aka Jane Fonda" on a rolling trolley next to our oven with wooden dowels and other shaping devices so that we could do our shaping in a warm environment instead of running our trays from the oven to our chilly work station by the floor to ceiling windows while they whine and become frigid in the travel time. Numerous time I would pull our tuiles from the oven and put them on the trolley only to shriek, "Shit, I forgot my effing offset spatula!" Step one would be to body check someone. Second would be to call my offset spatula, which had done nothing to deserve it other than remain where I put it, a nasty epithet. Step three would be to try and form my cooled tuile into something akin to a cylinder and watch it snap under the pressure. Step four: swear, under my breath this time, stuff some of the cookie carnage into my mouth and portion out a new tray. Yeah, they cool THAT fast. Talk about killing the mood.

Given their high butter content, tuiles bake very fast. About 5-7 minutes, I found for mine. But because of their high fat content, along with the high sugar content, when they emerge from the oven they are very flexible. You can drape them, crush them, fold them, crease them. If you do it in time, there is almost no limit to what you can do to the shape.

The texture, which is a brisk 'snap', and the toasty sugar flavour of the cookie is totally worth the work but only if you want to make quite a few. Tuile keep well when stored in an airtight container. You can bang off a huge amount of the cookies or you can make the dough/batter and keep it in the fridge until you want to make more. These would be great around Christmas and New Years when desserts abound and sometimes you figure you've got a dress on so why doesn't your ice cream. You think that right?

Florentines are a bit different. They are technically a 'biscuit' or a 'cookie' but ours, being a tad under baked, came out more like a caramel square. Which is an awesome mistake to make. Florentines, in their addition to a dessert plate or as a garnish are usually finished with a cream or chocolate on them. They have a really warm nuttiness to them. This recipe had candied orange peel, which normally I would never question but this time it only contributed a bitterness. Weird.

We also made shortbread, which were really good. And a necessary reprieve from the chaos. Although the recipe called for a hard-boiled egg yolk instead of a standard raw egg yolk which was strange. The PM chef said it was 'very southern'. And I trust southerners with anything associated with cornmeal, pickles, sauce and chicken really. To be honest, I don't really question southerners when it comes to food. This is blind trust. But then you add hard boiled egg to cookie dough. And my cookie dough smells like a sulphur leak. But then -BUT THEN -the cookies become the most tender shortbread sammies I've ever had and I revert to my former wisdom. Southerners. God's gift to food. (Hush puppies? Am I right?) During the decoration phase, numerous people made a comment regarding my love of jam. Maybe it's excessive. I definitely love jam more than cookies. Twisted? Probably. But these cookies are a good mediator. Cookies: 1 point.

These are the gingerbread that I promised. The decoration segment of the class time became stranded in an icing session bordering on the grotesque. There was a lot of neon icing going on. A couple decapitated John Does. And a lot of lederhosen going on. I managed to salvage a couple of undressed ones, naked if you will. They look like they're wearing choir robes which is fun. Ginger dames.

Tomorrow we do macarons. Parisian macarons. I know I'm going to be excited because I love macarons. They are elegant. And colourful. And playful. And French. And then I will likely become stressed in class and leave saying gin's not gonna cut it and I'm going to snort coke or something. But right now, macarons are a giddy thing.

Mine will not look like this. But I'm curious to see how they will turn out. I want to make crazy flavoured ones like strawberry and basil or coconut and lime. Lemon and chocolate. Endless possibilities. Tomorrow we also do meringues and macaroons, which are not to be confused with macarons.

Macaroon:

via The Shoebox Kitchen

Macaron:

Via Project Foodie

Meringue:

via A Taste of Koko

So much whipping. Which I am straight up not doing by hand. It's probably possible. My grandmother probably did it for her lemon meringue long before KitchenAid came in pistachio. But I'm Gen Y. And that's why people hate us. I console my laziness by telling myself that no one in the industry would tolerate me if I pranced in saying I wanted to do it the 'old fashioned way'. And post-apocalyptic, I foresee meringue falling to the wayside. That's a luxury you just can't include when you are trying to make a fire like a boy scout.

Pies come on Friday. I will be bringing home at least one FULL SIZE  PIE every day. This is nothing like loaves of bread. This is ferocious.
Anyone want a pie?

Find a cookie you love. Find comfy pajama pants. Eat. Enjoy. Repeat.

A trayful of handicapped gingerbreads

I got my fun day. I kind of feel all sticky though. Today we worked on piped cookies and icebox cookies which meant we christened the piping bags that came in our knife kits. It also meant that I spent the same amount of time trying to dig out the remaining cookie batter from my piping bag and tip to avoid washing it (because that would waste so much time ya know?) as I would have spent washing it out and drying it so that it was so fresh and so clean clean. At the end of the day, I had cookie batter in my armpit. I don't know how it got there but it serves only to indicate that I REALLY got into today.

 First off: madeleines!!!!!
Whenever someone talks about madeleines, they inevitably bring up Marcel Proust. In "In Search of Lost Time", he talks AT LENGTH about the nostalgic quality of madeleines for him. Whenever he eats them, he is taken back to his grandmother's house where he used to eat them dunked in tea. I have never read "In Search of Lost Time". (Has anyone?!)  So I'm not going to talk any more about Proust. I'm certainly not going to dedicate anything about mine to him. I'm more interested in the rumour that the cookies were named after Madeleines Paulmier, who was a servant who had to come up with a dessert when the chef stormed out. She used a recipe she had from her grandmother. Everybody was impressed. The end. The moral of the story is grandmas always come through for you. And have a cute name, I guess, because someone might name a cookie after you.

Madeleines are gorgeous. They come out with these crispy, buttery edges and they are similar to sponge cake in the middle. So very light. I poked around for the best method to pipe the mixture into the tray. (I got called a bake geek for this action -which I let stand uncontested.) Some people chilled their batter (from an hour up to overnight) so that it held together for firmly in the piping bag. Some used it at room temperature. Some didn't even use a piping bag. Judith Choate just spoons hers in with a tablespoon. Some used those clicky ice cream scoops. Either way you work it you want to get the batter fairly level in the shell mould to avoid strange bumps on the back side of the madeleine once it's baked. I ended using a zigzag method to get the batter to lie the flattest. But then I baked them in a convection oven which has an overachieving fan and blew a ridge on to ours anyway. Life is funny.

 The almond spritz have that amazing almond flavor, like amaretto or those almond cookies you get at italian weddings (of which i have been to only one). The cookies start with an almond paste or marzipan base that then gets butter and more sugar added to them. They are then piped in a "shell". The shell was a good exercise because just like the following shortbread, the dough was so stiff that grunting it out of the pastry bag in any semblance of a shape took patience (and the occasional use of expletives).


The piped short bread were most like the shortbread cookies I grew up on. Whipped so they are light and fluffy and literally just fall apart in your mouth they are so soft. It is a texture that is described as "sandy" in our books which  is, in my opinion a rather unfortunate denomination. It makes it sounds gritty but it really is simply meant to indicate that it has a small crumb and delicate texture -Falls apart like a sandcastle in your mouth. Piping it made me feel like Mr. Bean. Every attempt resulted in a similar but different ridiculously shaped result. It was like piping cling wrap. It was sticking to all the wrong stuff!

Lastly we did the checkerboard icebox cookies. I'm glad we did them as part of our program because I likely never would have made them in my own and now that I have made them I desire to never make them ever again. In a way we brought it on ourselves, my partner and I. We made very delicate layers and fine stripes when everyone else made Tonka blocks of shortbread, which meant in short that theirs baked longer and were far sturdier. Ours would be perfect as something small on the side of something like pot au creme or a dessert espresso. The perfect size to eat eleven of them. We let ours sit unattended a little too long before we pulled them from the oven so they approached golden brown and walked right by. They are still tasty but they are more like biscotti now than they are like shortbread, shall we say, 'brittle'. There are FAR easier designs that you can do on the icebox cookies but the checkerboard was more challenging and I am nothing if not a stubborn bitch out to prove something. Again with the expletives.

We also made gingerbread men, and women, and amputees! Not that amputees aren't people but hopefully you get my point. You don't get a trayful of cookie people with goiters, no feet and/or oblong shaped heads every day. A lot of them came out with excessive bell bottoms as well. The very picture of diversity. Pictures will emerge tomorrow because we kept them at school in order to decorate them. We made some royal icing and we are going to practice our piping skills. Mine have been egregiously neglected. But soon I will pipe like a pro, or at the very least someone on the road to pro-dom. 

We start pies on Friday, which means I am going to have to rig up a different system to get my baking home everyday. A cloth bag with a 'closure' that is rather indifferent to the idea of closing up anything -during the rainy season. We'll need to have a talk. 

"Stiff peak is like, 'Aw heeeeeeeeeeey!'"

The tables have turned. Remember the first week when I was having all this fun making breads and Moozh was across the hall in his kitchen tourneeing his billionth carrot and verifying the 4cm by 2mm cut of his julienne? Well this week I have been making things I could make with my eyes closed. Muffins, quick breads, brownies.

Today, this is what Moozh made.

Those, y'all, are frogs legs. Uh yeah. FROGS LEGS! As a vegetarian (or as Moozh calls me, a 'broccoli-head'), there are raw cuts of meat that, I don't know, seem…excessive to me. Like tongue. The whole concept of having to pull the layer of taste buds off the the tongue (the tastebuds apparently feel like sandpaper Moozh tells me) is something that seems to have plunged off the ledge of all good reason. Would Jesus skin a tongue so he could eat it? Moozh and I will differ on this, but I think he would put his hands up and say, "No thanks, I'm good with bread and wine."

But these guys are just so little and cute. With massive hamstrings.

You can tell the guy on the far right was the short friend. I'm just amazed how much meat is on them. It's like when people say they eat squirrel, people who are close to me who I will not name. I just think you would frustrate yourself trying to catch one and then you would skin it only to find that the bulk is pretty much all fur.

Plated it looks very elegant though, no?

Looks less bizarre when it's nestled on wilted greens.

This was my contribution. Date squares and brownies. Boring. But we make madeleines tomorrow and at the end of the week we make Parisian macarons. THAT will be fun.  But I have eaten my fair share of date squares and brownies in my life. Growing up in the Prairies, especially connected with a small farming community, date squares are a mainstay at everything from Christmas to funerals to church functions. Brownies are similar though they have the bad rap of being more like a cookie. People can convince themselves that if they take the date square, it's really like having a granola bar. I think these people are unaware of how much sugar and butter are in date squares. And granola bars to be honest.

The brownies were nice and fudgey. I wish they had more of a dark chocolate bitterness to them. The best brownies I've ever had are the raw brownies at Cafe Bliss in Victoria, BC. It's so much like dark chocolate that you can't help but feel like you're eating a chocolate bar. And with raw hazelnuts and usually some dried cherries or dried cranberries, it's a great mixture of textures, tartness and chocolate.

The date squares could have had the brown sugar taken right out of them. Dates are naturally so sweet anyway and when they're simmered, they break apart and create that great caramel. Again, eating date squares just make me feel like I should be listening to an elderly person talk about their grandchild that's 'just about my age'. Or simply eating to try and regain feeling in my fingers after a long downhill tubing session.

Scroll up. LOOK AT THOSE FROGS LEGS. Comment on the weirdness. Eat something safe and internally discuss how much you wish you were the kind of person that could eat frogs legs. Repeat.

"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.