TGIF

I can't believe how totally exhausted I am. Thank goodness it's Friday because I'm honestly not sure if I'd be able to get up before sunrise again for class tomorrow if it weren't. My heels are in excruciating pain from standing all day... I'm going to have to invest in some squishy insoles. But, all complaints aside, I am loving all of it so far. It's definitely more high-stress than I'd like, but that's just to get us used to what we might experience if we were to pursue this as a career. I would prefer to do everything at about half the speed we do it now and make one thing at a time rather than multitask. [I don't think that's a viable option.] The other groups (e.g. pastry, restaurant) seem to have a lot more components to what they make, so they have to move even faster than we do. The restaurant group made 60 sugar cages and the pastry group made a bunch of chocolate flowers -- and both of these things, though time-consuming, were simply a decoration for some super complex dessert that they ALSO had to make. So, something to look forward to. I'm glad I started with vienoisserie, because it seems to have eased us into the environment, rather than plunging in right away.

During today's demonstration, Jean-Luc taught us how to make chocolate decorations, which was really cool. The scary part was when he said that in December we are going to be tested on our chocolate piping skills; there will be 10 designs that we have to do in a row on a piece of parchment paper, using a cornet. So, that's terrifying. I can't believe my homework is actually piping chocolate patterns. [I also have to study for a test on bread and yeast and do some hazardous materials/occupational health and safety exams. Fun times.]

Our first task for the day was putting our prepped apple tarts into the oven. Yum. The apple tarts were essentially puff pastry, a sort of almond cream filling, and green apples.

Ready for the oven.

Finished product.

Inside view.

While those were baking, we made our "Plain Muffin". I now understand why the recipe is just for plain muffins; Jean-Luc asked us if we wanted to add chocolate chips or blueberries and we opted for blueberries (we've worked with a LOT of chocolate over the last few days). The muffins were easy enough to make, using the methods for creaming, heating up egg to room temperature, sifting, etc., we've done so far. Then we scooped the batter into our silicone muffin pans and put them in the oven.

I need to get slightly better at using the ice cream scoop to put the batter into the muffin pans (even though it seems a little foolproof), because a lot of my muffins were a little bit lopsided. The blueberry distribution was not quite even either because I was worried about breaking the frozen blueberries while mixing them into the batter and making the dough turn purple. It did anyway. But they still tasted good! Fluffy and delicious.

Once our apple tarts were cooling and our muffins were in the oven, we took out our other piece of puff pastry to prep. The ingredients were pretty much the same as the earlier dessert, but the arrangement was slightly different. We scored our dough and put it in the oven for a few minutes so it got a little browned. Then we got to trim our dough into a perfect square. That's when we got to try it and it was SO DELICIOUS. Buttery and flaky and ohmygosh I couldn't believe I made it. Then we added the almond cream in a thin layer and arranged apple slices in a seemingly simple but inexplicably complicated pattern on top of the cream. We dredged them with icing sugar and then put them in the oven. I didn't love the look of these ones as much when they were done, but that's because I don't love cooked fruit that isn't in something like a pie. Jean-Luc said that this way of doing it was a traditional Parisian tart.

Today seemed relatively laid back because the only new thing we did today was baking the muffins. Otherwise, everything else was wrapping up loose ends from the rest of the week. Then we spent the rest of the time cleaning. By "laid back" I mean I didn't feel like collapsing into an ice water bath as much as usual at break time. But I was still drenched in sweat. The other reason I'm glad it's Friday is that I get a chance to wash my uniforms this weekend. I'm pretty sure I'm going to go through an apron a day for the rest of the year.

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Today's Recipes

Puff Pastry
450 g pastry flour
100 g flour
10 g salt
500 g butter
125 ml water (ice cold)

Almond Paste
[We used two different ones, I think. One we'll learn in the restaurant section and one in the pastry section.]

Blueberry Muffins
100 g butter
100 g shortening
300 g sugar
15 ml vanilla extract
2 g salt
1 egg yolk
4 eggs
250 ml milk
600 g flour
24 g baking powder
250 g blueberries