Millions of Tasty Treats and Experiences

     So our first and second week in the kitchen have just ended and it was great to get to learning the real stuff.  This program is going to go by so quickly considering we are already 18.75% of the way done.  We did some modeling with modeling chocolate, fondant, and marzipan (almond paste and sugar).  We made little monkeys, polar bears, dogs, roses, etc.  It was really awesome.  We got started on a few basic recipes making an English fruitcake to start.  As I told you last post, the program is highly personal and this fruitcake recipe actually is one of our English chef's family's recipe that has been around for ages.  I must say, I am not particularly excited about this fruit cake as it is super dense, almost all fruit, and must be aged for around 3-4 months.  A fruit cake should age no less than 2 months and often no more than 2 years.  It is saturated in brandy and sugar which preserves the cake for practically forever.  We also made a sweet dough that I brought home and made into a kiwi and raspberry tart.

     The second week was all about tasting and building a cake based on flavor and texture.  We made tons of cake that we ended up building into a cake that had these layers (picture directly to the left).  The bottom layer was a hazelnut biscuit (biscuit is not a biscuit as we think of and actually is not even pronounced like that but like the french way) but is basically a pretty dense but moist cake, then a layer of from-scratch orange marmalade, and then another layer of the hazelnut biscuit, then a layer of coffee pastry cream with streusel chunks in it and then a layer of an orange hazelnut japonais which is almost like a macaroon but way more cake like.  Basically they teach us that a cake is not just two textures and two flavors but should be a cornucopia of flavors and textures leaving a unique cake that cannot be replicated easily.  We had so much extra cake so I took a bunch of it home and made a vanilla genoise (a denser vanilla cake) with homemade whipped cream and strawberries and a chocolate genoise with a peanut butter mousse.  I took all these baked goods and about 6 small loaves of bread to Jared's and I think they are starting to warm to the idea that I'll be at their apartment every weekend. 

     Again I am highly impressed by my chefs.  The first and second week we had an awesome chef who is freaking hilarious and ridiculous but soooo knowledgeable.  We will have him again for sugar work which is what I am most excited about because I have been dreaming of making sugar work and blown sugar for quite some time now.  This past week and next week we have another chef who is also pretty funny and again so helpful.  I wanted a peanut butter mousse for the chocolate genoise and he gave me his own recipe and stayed after class to tell me what to do.  The chefs are all about sharing their recipes and such and even say a recipe itself really isn't all that helpful unless you know how to do it.  After making the mousse, I learned how true it was.  During class the chefs do a demonstration of all the recipes we will be making which takes about half of the class time and then we go and make the same recipes.  Even then I have a million questions.  For the peanut butter mousse, I just had to guess on what to do and I know I messed up quite a bit but it still tasted like peanut butter mousse so I was okay with it.  It's just so wonderful that they care about their students and care not only about what they are baking in class but also helping them out elsewhere.
     Also something that the French Pastry School really encourages the students to do is stage (not pronounced like stage but like stasjh- terrible attempt at spelling by sound but basically the french way again).  They say that this is one of the easiest ways to figure out what kind of work we want to do afterwords whether it be in a bakery, a restaurant, a hotel, etc.  It is also a way to get letters of recommendation and stuff on the resume.  The French Pastry School says that there is a huge correlation between number of stages done during the year and number of job offers at the end of the year.  I'm going to make these I priority and try to do as many as I can.   I have gone to the same one twice now and it was actually paid.  Normally it isn't paid but this one was because they are a huge, rich club that can afford it and had so many events that they really needed help.  It is really cool because you get to do a bunch of random tasks.  Last Saturday I made 300 apple turnovers, and yesterday I got to plate a wedding cake, try about a 1000 tasty treats and learned really creative new ideas for how to present cakes, and made bread pudding.  I've never done any of those things AND you get to work around great pastry chefs.  Yesterday the pastry chef decorated a four tiered wedding cake in less than 30 minutes.  How is that possible?  Goodness.   I've got a few more stages lined up which means I'll literally be working from 6-12:30 everyday during the week and then going to school everyday from 1-7:15.  And I will most likely be working on Saturdays too like I did the last two weeks (from 10-5).  I always said I wanted to live in the city and have a faced paced life and so I guess I got my dream.  And the cool thing is that I really do love it.  I love my work and I loooovvveeee my school.  What more could I ask for?