The Pastry Adventure BEGINS!

Woo hoo!!! We’re BACK! Sorry it’s been so long my friends, we’re getting back into the swing of things with school and work and going crazy and stuff. you know, the usual ;)

So, now on to the sweet stuff (pun totally intended). First I have to tell you about orientation week. Just a little though. That was last week. I only had to go to Monday, Thursday and Friday, which was a really good thing, because I could barely handle those three days getting up at 5 in the morning! (i know you’re all thinking to yourselves “Ashley, you’re going to be a Chef…isn’t that already in the job description to get no sleep? - We’re not going to talk about it) ANYWAYS, we had intros and basic lectures on the properties of milk, eggs, butter and flour. Might sound kind of strange, but these four ingredients make up about 80% of most pastry recipes! It’s all what you do with them! It’s pretty amazing, I must say. So that first week was a lot of sitting and trying not to fall asleep note taking and such.

Week 2, this week, was back to the kitchens! And basic skills :)
Welcome to Kitchen 1 (K1)!!

Pretty sweet kitchen, no? This was the one I toured when I came to visit the school waaaaay back when we were just married and had moved to San Diego. LOVE IT. We started off the week getting a feel for where everything was and basic kitchen procedures. (a lot of it I already knew, having been through the cake program already, but it was good to get refreshed)

We also went over knife skills. But before I go there, a word about our tool kits. They came in SPIFFY new bags!! We are the first ones to get this new bag and it’s pretty awesome. Let me tell you why (click on the pictures if you want them bigger…i figure you’re not all THAT interested in the tool bag…):
It has straps to wear it as a backpack!!!!!!!!!!!
   
There’s a pocket for the rolling pin!!! No pins clattering to the floor!! We can also fit our monster-sized books in this pocket!! 

And it’s all so organized for the lovely tools!!
Okay, enough about the bag ;) This week we had Chef Della (click on her name to see her bio) who is SUPER nice!! I really like her a lot. It’s kind of fun to have a female chef instructor :) Like I said, we started off with knife skills. We cut apples for practice. Here are my lovely cuts :)  Ta da!! That knife is awesome by the way. Sooooo sharp :) We made a lot more things during this week than we did in the cake program. We made sweet dough cookies:
That’s big pieces of sugar. Not salt. Just FYI. We made meringue delight (it’s baked French meringue)
I wasn’t sure if I’d like these, but they were pretty good!! But let me tell you…they weren’t as good when I felt dry. Like, with dry skin. And it is DRY out here! But when I hadn’t put lotion on in a while and I had one of these at home, it was like eating chalk. Sweet chalk, but still…chalk ;)

We also learned a little bit about piping in pastry, which is a little different from cake decoration, I’ve noticed – like how you hold the bag, but I didn’t have much of a problem with it.
My silpat of random piping ;)

THEN we made cream puffs!! Soooo yummy! We made something called pate a choux (PAT a shoo) for the dough and filled it with pastry cream. OH yum!
 We had to bake the pate a choux and cool it before we could fill them with creamy goodness. But oh, they were worth the wait.
I had like 6 before I even left the kitchen. nom nom nom…

And that’s the first week folks!! It’s been pretty good so far!! I think John’s liking this program a lot better…I’ve brought home three treats so far!! ;) Next week is sugar candies which is going to be AWESOME!!!!!