First 2 weeks in FPS!

Everyone agrees that time flies when one is busy or happy, or both. That pretty much sums up how I feel about the first 2 weeks in class.

First week, we went through the orientation, Servesafe classes, test and theory on baking. I enjoyed myself listening and learning from chefs about eggs, cream, butter among other things. Not so much about the servesafe classes, which talks about foodborne illness, bacteria, allergy etc. I am not saying sanity in kitchen is not important though....

Second week is when all the kitchen works begin!We started with knife skills and practice with piping. Here's a picture of my 2 apples, peeled,cored, and cut into different dimensions.

Piping is never my forte. It's sad that the Wilton courses I attended didn't make me any better. My friend Heather on the other hand,is insanely good at that.

Apparently, she could decorate more than 60 cakes in a day when she was the cake decorator in Sam's club. I think her next challenge would be to do piping with both eyes closed. Or could she do that already? Hmm....I need to ask her about that.

The first edible product I brought home was these cookies made of sweet tart dough. Unlike the soft and chewy cookies that many are accustomed to, these cookies are baked until really golden brown and crunchy. The dough was rolled and cut with cookie cutter, and after the second rolling and cutting, the dough was discarded. Being the frugal girl that I am, I couldn't stop thinking about the wasted dough in the bin. It could turn into some great fruit tarts, together with the pastry cream we made and brought home the same day. And speaking of the tub of pastry cream, I was too worried about what to do with it, since it had a short shelf life; I gave it to my classmate before tasting any myself. Silly me! The torturing thought of fruit tart with the wasted dough and pastry cream accompanied me into dream land that night.

The second edible product I brought home today- Piped french meringues. The picture above was when they were still raw.

We have Chefs Sebastien Cannone and Dimitri Fayard for cake class today. The chefs shared about the thinking process of building a cake. The various elements that are in play and a demo on whipping cream to make butter! When OCT asked me how chef did it, I told him it's like centrifuguring the cream (centrifuge is a high spinning machine in the lab) to separate water from the fat, and bringing all the small fat molecules into one big glob. It feels like a chemistry experiment, except it's something that I can relate too.

Speaking of chemistry experiment, it brings a smile to my face everytime we do scaling for recipes. It was exactly what i did when I was trained to be a chemist many years ago. And when Chef Laura showed us how to scrape everything off the bowl, I remembered Dr Wang, my ex supervisor in the pharmaceutical plant. We scraped off everything from the instruments we were using, because every drop of drug active ingredient mixture translated into a few bucks. I think chemists can be very good bakers! ;)