"Something smells like burnt sugar..."

I would describe today as my second class-related meltdown of the year (and the first time that I legitimately burst into tears in the kitchen). We were making crème caramel, which isn't my favourite to begin with (too eggy tasting) and the first thing you have to do is caramelize sugar for the bottom of the dish (which will eventually become the top). We used a mixture of sugar, water, and glucose to do this. First, we had to boil it until it had the caramel colour we wanted, but then we had to cool it in water, bring it back to the heat, and add water and heat it up again until it was at the "hard ball" sugar stage, which means if you drip it into water, you should be able to form a ball with it, without it cracking while you are trying to shape it. I just couldn't seem to get the timing right. I burnt it the first time, which made the entire kitchen smell like burnt sugar. Then, I started again, and was a little stressed because I was already behind. And then I burnt it again. Let's just say it wasn't my day.

Eventually, I got it right-ish, and after the sugar disaster, my day started looking up. Making the custard part of the crème caramel wasn't too unfamiliar because it was relatively similar to crème brûlée, but with whole eggs instead of just the yolks. The rest of the group still hadn't put theirs in the oven yet, so after I finished my custard, I had caught up to everyone else. Once the crème caramel was in the oven, we each made our own batch of decoration syrup, which is used for things like sugar cages and the decorations we did on our desserts yesterday. I wasn't loving all of the sugar work today, so I was kind of looking forward to the day being over at this point. After we'd each finished our decoration syrup (and I hadn't burnt mine!), we took a seemingly earlier than usual break. I spent it getting the burnt sugar out of the million pots that I used earlier. (You essentially have to add water to the pot and bring it to a boil until all of the hardened sugar dissolves back into the water, which sometimes goes really fast, but can take forever. I also had to do this task yesterday for everyone's pots after we had used them for our decoration syrup. Not fun. But easier than trying to scrub hardened caramel out of a pot, at least.)

Once we came back from break, we took our vanilla sponges out of the freezer and got ready to wrap them in white chocolate. Our group had melted a giant bowl of white chocolate earlier, so it would be ready to go. We used a marble slab out of the freezer and spread the white chocolate out onto it, smoothed it out with a pallet knife, cut a wave pattern out of the top and cut straight across on the bottom, then peeled it off of the marble carefully. Then we literally wrapped our cakes in the long sheet of chocolate that we just cut out, pushed the top in a little, and put them in the fridge so that the chocolate could harden a little more. I made my chocolate a little too thick, so it was harder to push in the top part as much, leaving the cake more visible than the one he used as an example. While covering a cake in chocolate has a really cool effect, I'm not sure how you would slice and eat this cake. Once the cakes were in the fridge for a few minutes, we took them out and arranged berries on top, dredged them in icing sugar, and sent them out to the cafeteria. I contemplating buying mine because I think the vanilla sponge with lemon cream, vanilla diplomat cream, and raspberries, wrapped in white chocolate, and then covered in berries would be really delicious. We still have to do the bigger ones next week, so perhaps I will buy mine then.

After we had cleaned all of the white chocolate off of our hands and the table, we were ready for the last task of the day. (It wasn't plating our crème caramels -- this will have to wait til Tuesday, our last day in the restaurant section.) Sugar cages. As much as I was loving all of the sugar work today (read: sarcasm), I wasn't really looking forward to doing more stuff with sugar. BUT, I was actually not half bad at it. Jean-Luc even said my sugar cages looked good! (I think he was mostly glad that I wasn't crying anymore/that I'd found something I was not awful at.) You caramelize the decoration syrup, aiming for a much lighter colour than the one for the crème caramel, because for decoration work, you often reheat the sugar to keep it at the right temperature and it gets a little darker every time you reheat it. After caramelizing and cooling down the sugar a little, you take a spoon and the sugar onto the back of a lightly greased ladle first making lines one way and then the other, creating a sort of checkerboard pattern. Once you've given it a few seconds to cool, you can gently remove the cage from the back of the ladle and set it down. My sugar cages were pretty thin, so they were really fragile and difficult to move. Once the sugar starts to get too cold, it also starts to fall off the ladle before you have finished, which results in a lot of swearing. I couldn't actually make that many because my decoration syrup, after being heated, started to re-crystallize and then just turned into a massive milky looking blob. But the ones I did manage to make looked pretty good, and will only get better with practice. Here's hoping.

Since the restaurant isn't open on Fridays (I think it's only open Tuesday-Thursday), we didn't have to stay as late today as we did on Wednesday and Thursday and we didn't have to plate any desserts, which was a nice break. On Tuesday, we'll finish off the restaurant section by making ice cream and sorbet, which I think will be really exciting! I am a little intimidated by the ice cream maker, but everyone's so far has been really delicious.

I still can't believe the amount of stuff we have learned how to make so far when we've really had less than a month's worth of days in the kitchen. No wonder I get so exhausted by the end of the week...

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Today's Recipes*

Crème Caramel For the custard: 
500 ml milk
4 eggs
100 g sugar
vanilla
For the caramel:
200 g sugar
75 ml water
50 glucose

Decoration Syrup
1.5 kg sugar
750 g water
300 g glucose

Vanilla Sponge Cake 
5 eggs
155 g sugar
pinch of vanilla powder
155 g flour

*To be posted. Soon.