Cakes, Breads and Test Review, Oh My!

The last couple of days have been action-packed.  We finished our cake practical, sat for our written exam and had our first day of breads.

Tuesday was the second (and supposed to be last) day of our cake practical.  As I mentioned before, after pulling slips of paper out of the magical ramekin of doom, I was assigned to make a happy birthday cake for a woman that had a vanilla high-ratio cake base with french buttercream frosting.

Boo french buttercream!!

I think that we should start responding to the mention of french buttercream the same way that we respond to someone saying the name "Haman" during the story of Purim (booing like there's no tomorrow).  Let's test it out, shall we?

French Buttercream...

Boooooo!!!!!!!!

Good, glad we've sorted that out.

So yes, I set about to finish my cake practical, which I dedicated to my friend Becky, when all of the sudden our instructor came in and asked how many of us didn't think that we'd be able to finish by the end of the day.  I was a little surprised, and even more surprised to see that so many of my classmates were raising their hands.  So, Chef Katie changed things up.  She said that if we couldn't finish by end-of-day Tuesday, that we'd have until 10am Wednesday morning to present our cake to her, and that she was going to do away with having us do another piping skills quiz.  Luckily I was still on schedule to finish on Tuesday, even with some minor setbacks (i.e. some of my pieces of fondant dried out too much and broke during assembly).  In the end I'm glad that everyone was given the chance to finish their cakes properly, and luckily for me, I got an extra hour-and-a-half on Wednesday morning to study for our exam while most of the class was finishing their cakes!

Here is a picture of my final cake:

Birthday Mixtape!

Didn't it come out cute?  My instructor love love loved it too, which of course makes me a very happy girl.  She said that she liked my execution, that I think outside of the box and that I worked well with the french buttercream...

Boooooooooooooooo!!!!

Ahem...so yes.  She really liked it and told me that she really wants to place me in an internship at a cake place - hooray!  This is a picture of one of my classmates' cakes that I really liked as well:

Mr. Met!!

Wednesday morning was spent doing last minute studying and getting mocked incessantly for my notecards.  Not the fact that I had them, but because some of them were so hard, no one knew what the answers were.  In my own defense - I'd made notecards from our test review and from any notes that I had, and then I went through the chapters in our book, and if something looked like it might be important - I wrote it down.  I mean who knows!  Chef Katie could've put a question on the test about the flour-batter mixing method, even though we'd never done a recipe that included it....it never hurts to be prepared my friends.  But anyway, yes, there was a lot of joking around and teasing, but I'm glad that I had some people to do a review with - it definitely helped me out.  Amusingly enough - one of my classmates was so frustrated by some of my notecards that she issued a challenge to our teacher - if she could stump her with any of my notecards, we should get extra credit - and she accepted!  We got to ask her 5 questions, and if she couldn't answer any of them, we'd get extra credit on the test and we actually managed to get 3 1/2 extra points out of that - hooray for my ridiculous notecards!!

After the test we went into the breads lecture and then Thursday we had our first day in the kitchen for breads.  Making bread is such a welcome relief after the madness that was cakes.  Chef Katie told us that bread bakers are pretty weird because they (as a professional hazard) wind up spending most of their nights alone kneading and proofing breads.  Still, I think breads are pretty awesome.  We made French baguettes, a couple round loaves of Italian bread and some smaller batards of whole wheat bread.

Me with a French mustache

Silly Brooke, baguettes are for eating - not for mustaches!

Breads = fun!  And we got some of our grades for the cake module already!  Julie and I got a 92.5 on our wedding cake project and I got a 96 on both my cake practical and the cake exam.  So, even though there are a couple of things still to be factored into our final grade for cakes, I probably won't achieve the 97 I'd been shooting for, I'm still pretty happy.  After all, and A is still an A.

Have a great weekend!