Today was lesson 5 demo. Nothing really fancy or anything. We were shown:

*croissant dough
*puff pastry dough
*brioche dough
savarin & baba

As usual, we only make the ones with stars beside them in practical. Which isn’t until thursday and friday. This lesson takes up two lessons since the croissant dough and brioche dough have to relax in the fridge and whatnot. Today we had Chef Christian as our demo instructor. He doesn’t normally teach basic, but today he did for whatever reason and I’m happy he did. I don’t normally get starstruck or anything like that (at least not for celebrities), but I remember when I first saw him when I was on my tour, I got all giddy and excited. I have admired him for a long time. In the beginning of class he said something that I really liked. He said:  “Pastry is just for pleasure. No one needs pastry. So if you are going to do it you have to do it right. You will never see a pastry chef in a rush. We take our time to make sure the technique is perfect so that the finished product will always be good”. And I think that’s why I like pastry so much. You don’t have to rush, and as long as you understand what happens and why, you will always end up with a good product.  I like him! I like all the chefs. They are all very nice and good teachers. I am really happy at school.

On another note, tomorrow is the birthday of one of the girls in the house. The ghost! Cause we never see her. So we made her a birthday cake on sunday night. It did not go well. The end product was good, but the way to it was not so good, haha. Originally we were making a cake from a box. That’s right, you read correctly. From a box. A house with 15 culinary students and we were making a box cake. And we were perfectly fine with that. But apparently the food gods were not. We used two mixes and put them together in one big pan, I think it was maybe a 12″ springform pan. Anyways, so it’s in the oven for like, almost 2 hours and it looks perfectly fine so I take it out and test it with a knife. In three separate areas in the middle. They came out clean. So I took the cake out and put it on the counter. Later we discover that the cake was NOT done in the middle. How? I do not know. One of my housemates tried to save it but it did not work and we had to throw it in the garbage…SO SAD! So he saved the day and made a genoise instead. We were up until almost 2am finishing this cake! Then he cut it into 3 layers, soaked it with a framboise syrup, filled it with lemon cream, and frosted it with a whipped white chocolate ganache. Then he wrote her name on top in melted chocolate. Maybe it didn’t look 100% beautiful, but we were all tired and wanted to go to bed, and we were not getting graded on it! Thank god or I would have failed from wrecking the first cake haha. So today we gave it to her, one day early, and it was devoured. It was pretty good! I liked it. I think the failed cake was a sign from the pastry god not to use box mixes. Such a funny night.

One of the downsides of living here in this house: at the end of every day, I feel like I am full of sugar. Even though I am making a conscious effort to eat less every day and eat more fruit and vegetables and things, there really is no way around it when you live in this house. I struggle to decide what to eat for lunch and dinner etc. I get so bored of food so fast! I love breakfast though, I could never get sick of breakfast. It’s just lunch and dinner, and making it healthy that is hard.