Chocolate Week

And it was one hot, sticky, chocolaty mess. I learned several things this week:

1. I miss my friend the molten-hot-lava sugar!
2. I need more patience
3. Chocolate is NOT my thing
4. Chocolate melts. REALLY fast.
5. After smelling chocolate for 6 hours each day, I come home craving something savory. Like steak. :)
6. I have a VERY patient tablemate :)
7. Dark chocolate seems a lot messier than white chocolate because it’s, well, darker. Easier to see, you know?
8. Novices at chocolate are often seen with the chocolate “belt”. You can bet I had it allllll week.

Our kitchens have a chocolate tempering machine, but lets face it, chances are we aren’t going to have access to one right out of school, so we learned to temper chocolate the ol’ schoo’ way ;)

Here’s Chef Scott (well, part of him):

Once the chocolate is tempered, you have to scrape it off the table back into your bowl. With skills, it doesn’t drip too much over the side, but there will still be some drippys. This is how you get the chocolate belt. You lean up against the table and AWWW MAN! chocolate all across your apron. I will be spending the weekend getting chocolate stains out of my uniforms. Oh yeah.

Anyway, we made some cool stuff for our test on Friday. Like spheres. And curls. And piped leaves.
Here is my station, all ready to get to work:

And here are some action pictures of me tempering my chocolate :)

We painted the molds with colored cocoa butter. Cool huh? These are in white chocolate.
I don’t think I have pictures of the leaves. Oh well. You’ll see them on the finished product.

We learned to make flowers, which were going to be the death of me these week. First my spheres that were to be the bases didn’t come out, so I had to wait until the next day to have time to get those done. Then my petals were NOT WORKING. at ALL. very frustrating. I tried making them three times. Not working. at all. And I got chocolate everywhere. No really. I’m also still on floor duty and cleaning up hardened chocolate off the floor from the projects of 18 people is no cake walk. Oh yeah, and I was trying to work on my flat pieces (S-shape thingys…), which also didn’t work and then accidentally broke half of my tablemate’s pieces!!! Ohhh my goodness I felt so bad. Luckily the pieces that broke were easy to replace and my partner wasn’t mad at me…but I still felt SOOO bad. So basically what I’m trying to say is that this was a challenging week for me. Which is probably good, because not everything is going to turn out awesome in school and this is where we CAN make mistakes…but it’s not like i WANT to! But anyways, I survived, and that’s what matters. But my flowers still look weird. I’m just sayin’. 

Okay, enough negativity, but it really was a very challenging week. My cake turned out okay though. I liked it more after it was done ;) This is what Chef Scott’s cake looked like:

Pretty cool huh? Of course, none of ours looked this cool because he used luster dust.  The stuff that made all his spheres look shiny. We were all very envious of the luster dust. However, we were forbidden from using it ;) We were all very sad. There was a running joke about it all week. One student even brought her own in but I don’t think she ended up using it. It was pretty funny though. All week we tried to make Chef Scott feel bad for not letting us use it and trying to give reasons as to why we should. It didn’t work. But Chef was nice enough to give us each a sphere with luster dust on it to use for our cakes on test day.

Oh, random. Here are some AWESOME chocolate pieces made by some of the chefs at school.
This one is for you mom. That’s a KitchenAid bowl. Made of chocolate. With luster dust. ;)

So anyway, here is my cake building…
The cakes are covered in modeling chocolate. So even the ‘FROSTING’ is chocolate!!!!! Pretty sweet huh? ;) John was pretty excited about me bringing this one home. ha ha

Here are flowers, curls and leaves with my awesome white chocolate sphere
  And here’s the finished product!!
It almost survived the trip home until someone on the train accidentally knocked off a few petals of that bottom flower there, but I didn’t really care. After dinner, John and I started EATING it!! All the brown chocolate is very dark chocolate, so I claimed my large sphere for eating. Thankfully, John likes dark chocolate.
want some chocolate?? Oh my goodness I look so frizzy by the time I get home from school. Oh well. Next week is learning how to actually make cake! YUM!

Thanks for keeping up with my adventures!!!!!!!!!