Tuesday, April 20th

Well, Friends, this is my last week of classes. I'm a mix of totally stoked to start my three week internship slash completely nervous!

Last Friday, we completed our sugar sculptures... Here is mine:




We had to have a few different components: pulled sugar, straw sugar, a sugar base, net or bubble sugar, at least one rose and one exotic flower with three leaves.

Here is a close up of my exotic flowers. Oh la la.





And my rose:




Here is JM's:

And our official show-off, Henry:

Kim's:

Phar-Bears:

Monica's:

And last but not least, we counted that between the four of us, we went through 40+ latex gloves (which must always be worn when working with sugar), in one day.

Yesterday we started working on our final project (tear), gingerbread houses. It is the very last thing that the students in my program do. We are given a "scene" and must work in teams of two... For example, one team is doing a grave yard, one a train station, etc. and they all have certain criteria like the graveyard must have headstones, a few ghosts, a mausoleum. Me and Vicki? Well, Ill give you one guess as to what scene we got...

Ill give you a hit... You can typically find me here at the end of a long day or on the weekends with a very cold martini in my hand...

That's right. A bar.

So as you can imagine, not only am I stoked, but its totally my element.

We have until Thursday to finish but I thought that I would document a little bit of our work each day.

Yesterday we baked off the gingerbread (which took a while after we figured out the measurements of everything), and today we actually began construction. Here is a picture of Vicki working with modeling chocolate to create our bar stools:

Below is a picture of one of the outside sides of our bar (named Ohbergs (Oh + Silverberg = Ohberg's)... I piped the bricks with colored royal icing and started putting the roof (Bakel's chocolate chips) on. The windows are filled with sugar so that when we put the bar together, it will actually have windows on it!

Most of us spent the day a tad frustrated as gingerbread has the tendency to be fickle and break so Chef lent us some comic relief: