Sorry for the delay. I was busy attending the International Culinary Center Career fair where I met some fabulous potential career/internship options. Half the time I was pretending to know about the company and think I pulled it off because I passed out a ton of resumes and got those business cards… say what!? I did turn beat red when I told one company I lived right by them when I didn’t and confused them with their top competitor- oops guess I won’t be getting a email from their HR.
I’m keeping today’s chronicle short, but oh so sweet because I also have things to do and people to see tonight (I know bummer, sowwy). We are still doing our pastry segment of the course and today we made puff pastry, ladyfingers, whole egg foam cake, and buttercream frosting. The puff pastry dough takes a while to make because you have to have a layer of the dough then you need to smush it with a brick of butter and roll it all together. Also, you have to roll it out a total of 6 times and after rolling it twice you need to let the gluten sit and refrigerate it for a little. So, we worked on the dough throughout the day.
We made ladyfingers, which we doused in powdered sugar. I felt like I was Tony Montana in Scarface making it “snow” on those L.Fingers (Stephen that reference is for you) except I did not make mountains on our desk out of the white powder. Once those went into the oven to bake, we took out our dough and rolled it for the who knows how many time. Pandora (my partner) put our rolling pins on a rack over our heads. I don’t know where her common sense was because all of a sudden both of the rolling pins come rolling and crashing down onto our station with a huge BANG!! Missing our heads by an inch. Luckily we were blessed with a kitchen miracle because we almost both got concussions. We then made our “sponge cakes” where we covered them in our homemade buttercream! I added cocoa powder to my buttercream (chef let us choose what flavor cream we wanted… some people even chose coffee flavoring or kept it original). We were able to decorate our cakes however we wished with decorations! It was a blast pretending to play dress up as a pastry chef in a bakery. I went a little overboard and added a bunch of little semi-flower shaped frosting balls on top of my cake! There’s no such thing as overboard in my dictionary though! Duh!
More pastries tomorrow- woohoo! Love you all.
Sweet Kisses,
Eli