Last day before Christmas break!

Merry Christmas folks!

 Its almost that time. It's amazing how quickly it creeps up on me every year.

 Now that I am on Christmas vacation I have some time to write about my last day. We were going to be finishing up some baking we started. We had our chocolate piping test and we had to do a deep clean of the pastry lab.

 We finished our creme brûlée on a daquoise base. So damn good. I could of eaten my weight in those little things. Chef showed us how to "hot knife" a creme brûlée to get the crust on top. I loooooved doing this. Mostly because it involved fire and sugar. We put some palate knifes in the fire of the gas stove and let them get super duper hot, we sprinkled brown sugar on the tops of the CB and we slide the screaming hot knife over the sugar. Smoke and burnt sugar smell everywhere - but really fun to do. I prefer this way to using my blow torch.
 Some of them turned out, some didn't and the torch had to come out to touch up the spots that didn't caramelize. If you did it to slowly you could burn the sugar or it would get so hot the sugar would just stick to the knife and you pulled it all off. If you did it to quickly the sugar didn't caramelize.
 I needed to try it. It was sooooo good! Tasted like ice cream. mmmm

We also finished our chocolate and vanilla pate in chocolate cups. Those were also good. Sort of like a mousse thing. I wasn't a fan of the white chocolate, but the dark chocolate was amazing. White chocolate is touch and go with me.

 We also baked off the rest of the apple strudel. I would change the recipe if I was making this for me. I hate raisins. So i didn't eat any of this.

Next came the piping test. EEEK!
 The hardest part of this test was rolling the damn conays! Rolling parchment paper cones are a huge pain in the bum. My hands were shaking lol. A few unrolled on me. After a deep breath I finally got them all done and could start my piping. We had 1 hour to do 10 different designs. I know that sounds like a lot of time - I thought it was too, but it went by so quickly!  We could re do them as many times as we wanted, but we had to have 10 done at the end of the hour. So my plan was to just do one of each so they were done, then go back and look them over and re-do which ever ones I thought weren't going to be good enough. He is looking for even spacing, fluid clean lines and probably lots of other things.  I surprised myself! I had a pretty steady hand and pretty well kept all my originals. Practicing them on paper was super helpful. I tried to correct a few little mistakes but my second round looked much worse than my first, so I just threw those out. I really want to know what my mark was!

 So, thats the end of the first semester. Crazy!! It's been such a blast. I'm a little scared for second semester because I know Chefs expectations of us are going to be very high. Challenge accepted! Time to whip out the talent and stop second guessing myself. I got this.

 I'm excited to do some christmas baking at home. I have shortbread dough in the fridge. I'm going to make cookies tomorrow with Davin. Nothing more fun on a snow storm than decorating cookies and decorating the tree.

 I'll try to update this during my break with what's going on and what I've been practicing in my kitchen. I'm going to be going back in to the school next week to work on some stuff for the skills competition. Exciting!

Merry Christmas!