What You’ve All Been Waiting For…

PASTRY SCHOOL UPDATE!

I know, I know, it’s taken me forever to get back to you all on my fabulous adventures, but I’m BUSY now! YAY! But here’s the low-down on weeks 1 and 2:

Week 1 – Orientation, Sanitation, and the Basics. And we met everyday at 7am which meant I was getting up at 5 so I could catch my train to get into the city. (LOVE riding the train! It’s so fun! I feel like a real city girl, ha ha) Orientation was, I’ll admit, a little daunting. There’s going to be a lot expected of us these next several months! And I’m so excited about our final projects. We’ll work with a partner to design and create and birthday cake, and then each of us individually will design and create a wedding cake, which will then be on display at our graduation events. WHOA. SO COOL. We also had a sanitation class that lasted 2 days and our teacher was a little on the crazy side, but I think we all passed. The rest of the week consisted of lectures on basic ingredients and their roles in pastry, and the elements of design. One of our chef instructors made this show piece just for the design lecture! It is an excellent example of design elements that we were learning about.

 

Week 2 we were in the kitchens! This is the “maiden voyage” of the cake program so all of our equipment and the kitchens are brand spankin’ new!

This is for you mom – our army of KitchenAids ;)

These tables were custom designed by the school for our use

I’ve discovered in the last week that I’m not that great of a photographer, but I did manage this sweet picture of the inside of one of the doors in our table

This whole week was familiarizing ourselves with the kitchens and where everything is and how to get things done. (and we met at our normal time in the afternoon – whew!) We learned how to scale our ingredients (we do everything in grams) and how the day is usually going to go. We also learned our cleaning duties (oh joy!) and some basic skills. We started off the week by learning some simple recipes. We also started modeling, or making figurines and shapes out of fondant, marzipan, and modeling chocolate.

Here is a rose one of our Chef Instructors made. Gorgeous, no?

Meet Chef Scott. He was our main Chef Instructor this week. He will also be with us next week for pastillage and sugar molding.

        

Then we got to try our hands and making roses. I’m quite proud of my first attempt at fondant roses!! :)

Not too shabby, huh?

We also made strawberries :) 
I also participated in a volunteering opportunity! We’re required to volunteer a couple times. The school puts on lots of events so there are plenty of opportunities to volunteer. This last Thursday there was a demonstration by a chef from a company that sponsors the school. Those of us who volunteered helped with the reception, serving cake, bread and cheese, and candies. Afterwards we helped clean up from the event. The cakes we served were SO COOL! I really hope I get to be this good someday:

(The lighting is horrible, sorry!)
I served this one with a partner – it was a Belgian something…those colored sticks on top are CHOCOLATE! It tickled me that they were the Belgian colors…obviously they planned it that way ;)

 
Then other stations served these ones

There were candies and macaroons as well – I thought the set up was so pretty :)
  
The rest of the week was modeling. We learned some simple animal figurines: a dog, a bear, and a monkey
I don’t have pictures of mine. Besides, my monkey was UGLY. I brought home the dog though, so you’ll just have to wait on that one…

Here I am working diligently on another rose:

Eh, you can kind of see my animals in there… ;)

OH! And I can’t believe I almost forgot! We made a FRUITCAKE this week! Yeah, I know. A fruitcake. We learned that fruitcakes are the traditional English cake. It’s a big thing in England. No, really. They have it for holidays, weddings, etc. Every family would have their own fruitcake recipe. It gets a bad rap here in the US, and I must say, I’m not sure if I really want to eat mine. But it was really interesting to learn about it. I mean, back in the old days, they didn’t have refrigeration and this was how they preserved fruits and things like that.

It had a pungent smell while it was baking. And this morning it got coated in brandy to preserve it. You can do that every 2 weeks to keep it moist. Who knows, maybe we’ll get to bring them home at the end of the program (in 3 1/2 months) and it will still be good ;) 

We also have lots of cleaning to do at the end of each day. Each table (partnership) has a job. Ours this week was the floors. But yesterday I got to work our squeegee vacuum thing called the VIPER. It was pretty fun.
 
And that is your update! I’m loving it so far and I’m so excited to keep going and learn everything they throw at me!