Wednesday, April 21st

Gingerbread House update!

So here is a picture with one of the three sides attached before we stood it up...



Here it standing up! This is a view of the front - windows on the right, door way on the left... We split the ceiling so it would look like you are looking in on the scene...



Here is a view of the back part of our roof! Pain. Staking.

None of us think that we are going to finish because we only have four hours tomorrow to work on everything that goes IN the house before it is due tomorrow at 4. Sigh.

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:

Tuesday, April 13th

Hi! Remember me? The pastry student that used to be so diligent about updating her blog?!

Well I'm back! And I have a lot to update you on, so grab a cup 'o Joe and take a quick potty break!!!

Here we go!

So where we left off, I was still in plated desserts. Our team of four was instructed to use all the main components of a plated dessert and center them around pineapple and, wait for it, marshmallow... So we sauteed the pineapple in brown sugar and butter, topped it with some delicious pound cake, a coconut covered marshmallow with a coconut tuile cookie and served it with a passion fruit sauce and a chocolate sauce. Tres successful...



That was our last day of class work and then we were given three rather stressful days to complete our final where we were asked to create three plated desserts and construct them start to finish. Everything had to be homemade from crackers to marshmallows...

My first dish was toasted lemon pound cake with a lemon rum sorbet, a honey tuile cookie, raspberry coulis and a honey sauce.




This was the least well received dish of all three of the ones I presented although my lemon rum sorbet was a huge hit.

Next I did a chocolate-chocolate chip cookie with peanut butter mousse, salted candied peanuts, a creme anglaise and chocolate sauce.




The mousse was outstanding (and everyone in my class wanted a cookie) but Chef said that because the dish is so rich, the portion should be smaller.

I told her we don't do "smaller" in the mid-west.


My final dish was a trio of brownies (from left: a coconut and pecan deep chocolate brownie, a white and semi-sweet chocolate chip blondie and a peanut butter marshmallow (everyone's favorite) brownie (thank you, Gail Kichler, creator and author of TEMPTATIONS, TEMPTATIONS, TEMPTATIONS) with vanilla bean ice cream (and a sugar garnish) with a rum caramel sauce and a chocolate sauce.



This was the most time consuming dish because I had to make three different batches of brownies and work on making good curly-q for my sugar decoration.

After that class, we took a week off for spring break.

We are now in our candy module which also happens to be our last class (sad face).

We have Chef Folck who I have wanted to teach one of our classes since the third week of school.

Last week we worked solely on tempering chocolate (not as easy as one would think), and made port truffles, coffee truffles, Grand Marnier truffles and passion fruit truffles.

Below, Kim demonstrates that if you leave your spatula and ladle in a bowl of chocolate that overtime begins to harden, you will not be getting your tools back anytime soon... Notice how she isn't holding the chocolate up by the bowl...




After we learned how to make our truffles, we worked on creating a chocolate box (insert obvious joke here), which we would be tested on making Monday. Below you can also see the truffles I made.

Here is a close up of the lid because I was pretty proud of it.

Here is what I made on Monday... This time, I only used three sides to make the box because four was just way too much for my shaky hands and impatient attitude to handle. We had to make two types of truffles, one dipped and one shaped so I made the coffee truffles (dipped) and the passion fruit truffles (dipped).

So today we started on what we will be focusing on for the rest of the week: sugar work.

Here is what Chef made in demo today, and what we will be recreating over the rest of the week. We must make a log (made from pulled sugar), two flowers (one a rose and one of an "exotic nature" with three leaves made from poured sugar and other decoration made from bubble sugar:

Ill keep you updated on that one....

For the rest of class, Chef agreed to made us other things from sugar that we would not have the opportunity to make, like blow sugar. Below is him making a fish...

Readers, Darrell Folck.

Chef, the 4 readers of Maryn's Been Baking.

You will notice that half way through the demo, the fish changes color because the red one broke...

So here, Chef is pumping air into the sugar:

Then he manually blows air through the tube to inflate he sugar while shaping it with his other hand.

He holds it in front of this machine which cools the sugar into its shape.

More shaping, but you can really see it coming together:

We will use super hot lights to keep our sugar pliable while we are using it.

As Chef begins to assemble the rest of the fish, Vicki shows us what "gills" are.

They may be "gills" to you, Vicki. But to me, they are "boob wings."

And here is her Fish Face!

And here is the new fish being shaped.

Chef them affixes the tail of the fish.

Here, with the help of Henry, Chef adds eyes,

... and a mouth,

And places it on a stand that has also been made from sugar:

And here is Chef Folck in all his paparazzi glory as everyone in the class wanted to take a picture of him with the final product.

Here is a little bow he showed us how to make:

Phew! So there you go! You are now all caught up!!!

P.S. The number of times to date I have been asked, while in uniform, if I am a doctor: 3.