Finals!

Finals start tonight with the baking of pâte à choux and mousseline pastry cream...better known as eclairs. It's the group portion of our final and should, fingers crossed, go better than last quarter's group final. As long as we guard our oven (we've taken to taping it shut with masking tape so that idiotic people don't keep opening it thereby lowering the temperature and doing other things that damage our end product) and pay attention to our measurements, we should be aces. Our eclairs always turn out well - I'll have to make sure I pipe them though I think...

Tomorrow night is our final involving knife cuts (the standards, julienne, dice, etc. as well as four tournées which are going to be a pain in the ass) and piping (shell, reverse shell, star, and rosette) - hopefully all will go smoothly. Saturday is deep cleaning and then I'm free for three weeks!

Leek Out!

What I am not burned out on is leeks. I went to the store the other day to get some chives to garnish a potato soup I was going to make and saw some gorgeous leeks that just called my name. I've never really cooked with them before, but love them whenever I have eaten them so I decided to try my hand at potato leek soup. Couldn't be that hard, right? It wasn't and the soup turned out so delicious that I doubt I'll ever make plain potato soup again. Unless, of course, someone dear to me requests it as such, but even then I might orate the niceties that leeks add to the soup.

So now, everywhere I look, there are recipes that include or highlight leeks. Granted, this could be due to them being in season, but seriously, they're everywhere right now. So you'll probably be hearing me wax poetic on the deliciousness of leeks in the coming weeks. I'm already planning on doctoring up a recipe for leek and white bean soup I came across...should morph nicely into a fantastic white chili...

Burned Out On Baking

I never thought I'd say this, but I'm getting pretty bored in Baking/Pastry. It's not Chef F, he's awesome and so smart and funny. I think it's just that because I've been baking for so long, I'm not learning a whole lot of new stuff. Thankfully there are only a few more weeks left to get through, then winter break. I think also that I'm burned out on having class Thurs-Sat nights. Hopefully next quarter with classes Mon-Wed I'll be able to focus on working more and being a bit more social...

While I Love Being Correct..

...I would rather be sleeping considering I'm now working 6am-5pm Thurs and Fri before class. Although being awake right now works out well since it's the time I need to leave tomorrow and Friday...moving on to update. This is going to be long and gloss over a bunch of stuff, which is really unfortunate. I don't like not documenting things, you know, since I'm getting all old and stuff and the memory fades.

I was about to start listing out all the stuff we've done over the past 9 weeks and then realized I just don't have the motivation to live it all again, plus I'm really not that exciting. Honest. So I'm just going to post some pics that I've taken over the last two months and that will be the catch up. And I promise to try to get better. History proves that I usually don't blog when I'm not at my happiest and since recent changes have made me realize I haven't been happy, posting should be on the uptick. Okay, here we go!

Class started with biscuits and muffins and then we moved on to breads. To the left are baguettes, sourdough (yum!), and challah (which we maturely kept pronouncing HOLLA!). They all turned out delicious, even if the challah looks a bit dark. Chef F loves the darker color on the crusts as we've found out.

This is my first attempt at a danish. For some perspective, it was about a foot long, chocolate filled with an apricot glaze and fondant icing...never let it be said I do things half-assed. The danish dough is amazingly easy to work with once you learn how to get the hundreds of layers of dough and butter to work. We also made croissants that week and I'll tell you this, if I had disposable income, I would purchase this just because it's so much fun to use. Quickly, danish and croissant dough are very similar in that you start with a dough rolled out to a certain size, roll out butter to about 1/3 of that size, put it on the dough, fold it, roll it out to the original dough size, fold, and repeat that about four times, refrigerating in between each "turn" - all in all, takes about 4 hours to complete. Lots of steps, but they get easier as you go, which generally is the case.

Around that time, we also worked on custards and cremes (eclairs, creme brulee, flan) and pies. All the pies we made turned out especially delicious. It was around this time my teammates decided that there is nothing I don't do well. While I would have loved to have kept them in the dark, that belief is far from the truth as any of you who have met me know all too well. I just, wisely I feel, choose to do those things I do well and not do those I do not do well. I'm also incredibly lucky in that I can watch or read about how to do something and recreate it (at least in the kitchen) with little difficulty. Enough about how great I am, it's getting boring. On to the bad.

I ended up missing about 5 classes due to being incredibly sick. I'm on the mend, at about 95% now, but it's been a pretty long, difficult road and has impacted my grade negatively, unfortunately. Thankfully, the classes I missed covered things like lemon curd and cookies - things I've made successfully in the past. More pictures!

Here are our perfect eclairs, per Chef F. So nice to hear since the first attempt, weeks ago with my first team, did not have such a lovely ending. We filled them with a vanilla pastry creme and then dipped them in a glaze made of equal parts chocolate and butter. What's that? Okay, I can wait while you recover from your heart attack. Let me say again, I am the only one in baking/pastry who has lost weight. Thankfully I don't like super rich foods.

Here is the last picture I have from my adventures in baking and pastry thus far. As you've most likely surmised dear, intelligent reader, it is a carrot cake. Mary came over while we were icing it and joked about how we'd better make it pretty since she was going to steal it and take it home for her birthday cake. Since none of us like carrot cake, we decided to gift it to her and did, indeed, make it pretty. I was put in charge of finishing it up, so Tyler chopped and roasted some walnuts while I colored some of the cream cheese frosting orange and green. I easily pressed the walnuts to the side of the cake (GREAT way to hide any flaws btw) and then went to work piping on the carrots and leaves. Yes. I piped those. I know it seems like an easy thing, and ultimately it was, but it's really the first piping I've done other than words, so let me be excited please. I piped carrots! Okay, I'm done.

Somewhere in there, my mom came to class with me and basically did all my work since I was infected with what they think was ecoli (so gross and unenjoyable - I shall leave it at that). She had a great attitude and seemed to really enjoy herself. I'm just bummed I wasn't feeling up to class all three nights, nor healthy enough for her to see me in action. Her happiness and pride in me doing this has been a great source of inspiration and support when I get run down or question what the hell I'm doing not making as much money as I used to. I've started really wrestling with feeling guilty and selfish for doing this and she's really come through on keeping me on track and supporting me pursuing my passion. I'm a lucky woman to have such an amazing woman as my mother. Enough sap!

This week we'll be baking up a Black Forest Cake, souffles (I predict there will be lots of taping ovens shut - I'll explain later), ice creams, sorbets, and truffles.

I hope the three of you who actually read this have enjoyed the update and are inspired to create something in your own ovens. I'm off to clean out my pantry since this awakeness seems to have no end in sight.

Hey Everybody! Remember Me?

Since I slept this afternoon, I have no doubt I will be awake until an ungodly hour, which will leave me with time to update this for the last quarter. Baking and Pastry has been full of ups (turns out I'm a good baker) and downs (illness and difficult team member) but overall has been an amazingly great class in which I've learned a tremendous amount. It has made me regret not taking chemistry for the first time ever.