Group 2: Viennoiserie?

We found out our groups today. I sort of felt like I was in elementary school again. Will my group like me? Will we get along? Will one person have to do all the work? But then I remembered that I'm in baking school and no matter what, IT IS SO MUCH BETTER THAN ANYTHING ELSE.

The five rotations are:

Bread
Viennoiserie
Pastry
Restaurant
Decor

So, of course I am in the one that I can't pronounce. (Viennoiserie.) Jean-Luc explained that viennoiserie [still unsure of how to pronounce it] are small pastries named as such for their popularity in Vienna. Even after the day was over, I didn't really understand. But now that I've looked it up on the Internet, it's starting to make a little more sense. This category seems to include things like puff pastry, croissants, pain au chocolate, &c. Also known as things that are delicious. Also known as things that have a lot of butter folded into them.

The pastry lab was crazy today because every group was making something totally different and you kept wanting to look at what other people were doing. But there wasn't much time because we made so many things today. Actually, that's a bit of an exaggeration. We, like many of the other groups, prepared a lot of things today, but didn't actually complete many of them.

Today, everyone in our group each prepared (to be completed tomorrow):

partially rolled out puff pastry dough 
chocolate chip cookies on baking racks, ready for the oven 
dough for pur beurre (i.e. classic french shortbread / "pure butter") 
dough for oatmeal cakes 

And, to round out the day, we made a collective batch of delicious-looking tea biscuits.

I think it's going to be a bit of a struggle to keep up with the rest of the class, because I seem to do things a little bit slower, but not necessarily more meticulously than everyone else. The thing about baking for leisure (vs. the people in the program who have worked in bakeries and at cafes) is that I can afford to be slow when I have five hours to complete one thing, rather than one hour to start five. Luckily, the atmosphere is a friendly one and if you're super behind, someone might clean your workstation for you while you are frantically washing the dishes you used for the previous item. And Jean-Luc goes around telling jokes and acting silly, which helps keep things light and fluffy, like the tea biscuits.*

*I didn't actually try any because the other people in my group took them to the cafeteria before I'd gotten a chance to take one. Jerks.** 

**Not really. 

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Today's Recipes

Tea Biscuits
500 g pastry flour 
1500 g all-purpose flour 
200 g sugar 
28 g salt 
800 g butter 
80 g baking powder 
4 eggs 
1 litre milk