Tuesday 6 February 2007

le cordon bleu - day 5


Nearly slept in this morning which probably wasn't such a good start to the day as I then hurriedly swallowed my breakfast, packed lunch and dashed out of the house to get to class. I keep reminding myself not to stay up so late but old habits seem to die hard; hopefully I'll remember for tomorrow and the following weeks to come. I continue to be amazed by many of my classmates who are making the trip from the city, from the junction, from woop-woop just to get to class. Another girl even has the energy and time to go the gym in the morning before she starts class. Where do people get their energy from?!

We made a Light Fruit Cake and a Marble Cake today. My marble cake turned out fine but a few boo-boos with the fruit cake. I used grease-proof paper rather than silicone paper so I had a little trouble moving my cake off the paper onto the cake board. The other thing was that my butter was too hard when I initially creamed it with the sugar; Chef Geraldine fixed that up for me by warming my mixing bowl slightly over the stove so that the lumps of butter melted. phew! In between all that, I probably mixed up my steps when making the cakes but generally I managed to mix all the fats and the wet ingredients together before I added flour and other dry ingredients. I think after a couple of weeks, I'm really going to start forgetting which step and method goes with what; Chef Geraldine is probably right about taking notes during her demo's.


And well, my uniform is looking atrocious after today's lesson. When chocolate's involved, I always seem to get it everywhere, on me, in the bowl, outside of the bowl, and generally where you least suspect there to be chocolate. For some strange reason, I've also got these yellow stains on my shirt; I suspect they're from the lemons as I was zesting them. Argh! So not good! Although on a positive note, I can actually tie that neck scarf thing...haha...well sort of.


Before the lesson ended, we got to try the chef's fruit cake as well as a chocolate fruit cake which the baker in our class experimented with. Both were extremely yummy! Speaking of which, I tried the two tarts from yesterday last night and the apple tart is seriously awesome. Bit of a shame with the fruit tart because the fruit is already starting to ripen (next time I probably wouldn't use kiwi fruit because they seem to ripen at an exponential rate and subsequently give off a funny taste). I still have a blob of dough leftover from the lesson so hopefully this week will find some time for some miniature tarts which I can share with more people. I haven't forgotten to all those I've promised :P

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