I Scream, You Scream

We all scream for ice cream!!! Yeah, can I just tell you? I totally love going to pastry school. Some of the stuff we did this week, I totally had a moment and thought “wow, I seriously love this.” Yeah. It was that good.

Now, to be honest, when Chef Della told us last week that we’d be bringing home 4 ice cream cakes this week, the image that came to mind was something like this:
Don’t get me wrong! I KNEW that ours were going to be pretty! (At least, prettier than the one above…) But man, I was not expecting the amazing deliciousness that we were about to experience. (though, I must confess…give me a block of pralines and cream ice cream from Baskin Robbins…and it’d be a pretty stiff competition for my attention…)

Anyway, the first cake: Pineapple Surprise
We started off with sorbets, which, by the way, are fat free ;) Just thought I’d share that with you because alllll the ice creams were made with whole milk. YEAH BABY! We started off by learning how to make a sorbet base, which would then be put into the ice cream machine and spun to give it it’s light fluffy texture that you know of ice cream and sorbet. We made pineapple sorbet for the pineapple surprise, as well as another flavor for a different cake. Chef Della was AWESOME and offered to take a picture of me getting my pineapple sorbet out of the “hopper”

To make the pineapple surprise, we made it in a half of a pineapple! It had candied pineapple and raspberry coulis in it. YUM. I’ve also discovered new worlds of piping. You can pipe sorbet! (well, i mean, of course you can, it just never occurred to me to do so…) So then we piped the pineapple sorbet on top to look all pretty and gave it a little garnish:
 Try to control your drooling. You’re getting your keyboard wet ;)

Cake#2 The Vacherin (vah-sher-AHN) 
The inside of this cake had two flavors of sorbet in it. Each table (there are 9) made a different flavor. Our table had to make cherry. Half of the amount went into our cakes, and then we traded the other half with another table for the second flavor. I think we got the short end of the stick with the flavors…no one wanted cherry!! Not when there are other flavors like mango, exotic, and raspberry! We did manage to trade with the apricot table and the combo wasn’t too bad ;) We sandwiched the sorbets between French meringue discs and covered it in whipped cream and meringue fingers. I know. Watch the drooling ;)

Cake 3 – The Ice Cream Bombe
I think this one looked really cool. It was dome shaped (hence the Bombe title) and was raspberry coulis and vanilla parfait covered in chocolate ice cream on top of a sablé cookie. Hey, you might want to get a towel…that’s kind of a lot of drooling.
In goes the raspberry coulis Next the vanilla parfait 
Here’s our chocolate ice cream base already to go into the ice cream machine, which is totally amazing, by the way…it spins these batches in like 5 minutes!!!
  Oh yeah. We also got to spray it with chocolate. It gives the cake a really nice velvety look. And yeah, I know, I’m not the most attractive in my uniform. I’m over it ;)      And then to finish it off, we decorated it and made it pretty! 
Gorgeous, isn’t it? ;)

And lastly, cake number 4: the Chocolate Caramel Wood Grain cake. Oh my goodness. The caramel ice cream was amazing. But I’ll get to that in a minute. This cake was chocolate ice cream with caramelized hazelnuts sandwiched between two hazelnut daquoises (dah-KWAHZ-ez) covered in caramel ice cream. Um. You might want to get another towel. No worries, I’ll be here when you get back…

You’ve got a new dry towel? okay, good, moving on…

I actually didn’t get a whole lot of pictures of this cake’s making, mostly because this was the last one and by the end of the week, things were getting pretty insane and I just didn’t have time to pull out the camera and get some good pictures. But here’s one of the cake, once it’s covered in caramel ice cream and ready to go back into the freezer:My table got the short end of the stick again with flavors when we made ice cream. The ice cream our table made had to cover this cake. My table made Earl Grey Tea flavored ice cream. Now, being LDS, the whole tea flavored thing wasn’t going to work for me. I explained to Chef Della that I didn’t eat tea products and couldn’t use our flavor on my cake. She was super nice about it and let me have her leftover caramel ice cream to use. And ohmygosh it was amazing. AND I managed to trade my leftover earl grey ice cream for some peanut butter ice cream and ohmygosh it was AMAZING. To decorate this cake, we did this pretty nifty trick with chocolate to make a wood grain design to go around it. Then we spayed it with chocolate spray, piped meringue on there and garnished it. And would you believe it? That’s not all we did!! We also learned to do spun sugar nests. You can make them and stick ice creams, sorbets or mousses in them to give it a nice finish. It was really fun. We colored ours pink it I think it looked like clown wig hair ;)
Some more awesome action shots ;)
Doesn’t look a little like fake hair? ;)
We also made domes by pouring the sugar over the dome mold
It kind of looks like a princess crown on a fancy pillow, doesn’t it?? 

*Ding!*
Liiiiiiightbullllb!)

And we finally made it to the end of the week. It was crazy getting those cakes home. The trick was a cake carrier and an ice pack. The school has an awesome blast freezer that freezes those cakes hard as a rock so they would stay cold as long as possible while we transported them home. Craziness.

And of course, we needed help eating the yumminess, so we had a little ice cream cake/hot chocolate party :) I found these way yummy ideas for hot chocolate at this blog called Our Best Bites (seriously, check it out, it’s amazing!! I’ve planned like 2 weeks worth of dinner using that blog!!!) And so we had friends over and ate yummy ice cream cakes and it was good fun :)

and of course, I can’t help myself, I had to decorate all cute for it:

  
And that was ice cream week!! that was a long one, wasn’t it? whew! You might want to get those towels to the laundry now…

;)

Snow Days and Blue Man Group!!!

Don’t worry my friends, ice cream and sorbet week will be coming up next. Unfortunately, I can’t package those and give them away. Sorry. ;)

But first, our fun weekend!! For Christmas, we were given tickets to see Blue Man Group by the very generous gentleman that ALSO gave us tickets to see Wicked and so we headed to the city for another adventure together!

Before the show, we learned that there was something called Snow Days going on at Navy Pier and we wanted to check it out. So we made a day of it and headed downtown after lunch to spend the afternoon in the city. IT WAS SO COOL! There were snow sculptures!! They were amazing! I can’t even imagine how these sculptors could figure out how to do what they did…

There were high school teams:It’s Belle!!
I LOVED this penguin one!!! 
And there were professional teams:
This one was called Shark Feast (that’s a surfer at the top there…)  Firebird
Himeji Castle (of Japan) This was one of our favorites
Indian Chieftan
Davy Jones Locker
Arctic Alarm (this was definitely one of my favorites – it reminds me of a book I read as a kid called Tacky the Penguin – if you can’t tell, there is a penguin on top ready to beat a drum, and the penguins at the bottom are ready to throw snowballs…that’s a polar bear there in the middle!! hee hee) And sorry my eyes are squinty…i was looking right into the sun!
Bernini’s Elephant
See no evil, Hear no evil, Speak no evil
Gretta Gargoyle
And there was lots more, there was a really freaky one of Medusa!! But wow, what a cool talent!! It was really fun to go see them. There were also some dog sled demonstrations that was a little bit of, and that was really cool.

Lots of fun!

But on to the best part: BLUE MAN GROUP!
SO FUN! It was hilarious!! We had a really good time. Of course, I couldn’t take any pictures of the show, otherwise I TOTALLY would have. And we were in the second row! (in the poncho section!!! In case materials from the show shot out in to the audience, we got plastic ponchos to wear) So we had a really good view of their awesome facial expressions. There was paint and marshmallows and fire extinguishers and captain crunch cereal and super cool effects and twinkies and rock music on PVC pipes and lots and LOTS of toilet paper. ;) We loved it!!

And we got a picture with one of them on the way out!!!
Of course John had to do the face ;) I’m not gonna lie, the whole stare-at-you-not-blinking thing freaks me out a little…

We had a blast! We found a Five Guys for dinner (YUM!) and made our way home through the crazy downtown traffic. What a fun day!!!