Baking Midterm

Made this Julianna cake for the midterm. The sides are really crap but I like the way the top turned out. :) I tried to do a pattern for the sides but I guess the 2nd color wasn't dark enough to make a real difference at all, so it all looks the same. I got 89/100 which is okay with me cause I know I could have done better if I weren't terrible at cutting layers and if I were a bit more awake. The layers weren't even sizes and after I soaked the first layer in coffee syrup, I completely forgot to soak the other two layers, and I had already covered them in hazelnut and vanilla cream before I realized. o_o So, overall today went well, but it was very exhausting of course.

Russian Cakey

Those aren't my arms, btw. xP
That is just a russian cake, nothing too difficult. That little thing has 3 cake layers and 3 frosting layers, then an apricot glaze. o_o After we were done with those, we made our genoise for practical finals, so we'd have less to do on the actual day next week... I suck at cutting cake layers. *sigh* They are pretty uneven... I might work on them next week, I dunno. >.<

Ratatouille

It always feels nice to have your food be used as the "good" example. :) Especially since last week in baking our frosting was the "bad" example. xD The sugar was kinda messed up so the frosting was grainy. Oh, well.

Anyway, I was proud of my Ratatouille because I did everything for it besides cooking the onions and tomatoes. So I got the right consistency for the peppers, zucchini, and eggplant just by sight which is good. Chef brought it over to another table at one point to show what the ratatouille should look like and I'm just like "yes!" lol And he kept coming back over to eat it, too. xD

Okay, okay, that's enough of that. Made me happy, is all. :P

Mediterranean

<-- Prawns!
















Today I discovered that salt cod tastes awful, and chickpea flour is made from garbanzo beans. :D
I think today we were in Provence, Italy. I almost forgot because the last half of lecture was all about cheese. *snore*
So, anyway, we made Garlic Aioli, Socca (thin like a crepe, made with chickpea flour), Tapenade(mushed up olives and things, with a bit of anchovy, good on the socca. xD),and that an awful salt cod thing. The prawns were just sort of thrown in at the end. But it was the prettiest. :)

Mediterranean

I suck at taking pictures today. : /
That was a polenta I made... Today was basically "stir til you drop" day, because we made this, which needed a good half hour of attention and stirring, then we followed it with risotto... another half hour... stir, stir, stir... We also made Gnocchi, but gnocchi is pretty easy. >.O Wish I had taken a better picture! I need more pics of actual hot food... I've gotten way too much baking pics in comparison.
Meh.

There was no Dining Room Service last week, and there's none tomorrow either, so I have no idea if we are doing anything useful tomorrow... it honestly felt like a waste of time last week because we mostly stood around and talked. -_-
Bleh, I'd rather have a day off!!! Although, I shouldn't complain. I'm really afraid of when service starts again because my shoulder has been screwing with me ever since the last time I had to lift one of those heavy-as-hell trays, and I just aggravated it last tuesday while bussing dishes, so... lifting almost any weight with my left arm hurts, and certain positions hurt, too. *shrug* I want my left arm to be useful again. ;-;

I've had my homework done for Friday's Food Service Management class done since the weekend, so I'm very glad that I don't have any last minute work whatsoever. ^-^
Yep, that's it for this week. I don't think I have any readers anymore. o_o

Baking a Cake

Even though everyone was nervous for today, since the people who took the class last term were freaking out over the difficulty, it turned out pretty fun in the end. I know this is really only the first week of doing things, and it'll get harder, but I still think it'll be a lot better than what we seem to think. xD Dan ended up being a good partner, even though he is always complaining about baking. I guess I sort of took the lead, at least moreso than I usually do, so that is very good. Usually I'm the one asking "Oh, so we did this... what now?" and I think I was answering that type of question this time instead. xD I was the one with the neatly printed out recipes so it leaned a little bit in my favor!

Anyway, this is only my second time really piping decorations, so I ended up really happy with it. I'm getting much better at thickness consistency throughout the lines. :) And of course I got to draw a bunny which makes anyone feel better about their day, right? :D The reason why the flowers look so funny is because the blue coloring kinda sloshed out, and then we still needed to add red to get it to be purple, so... I was expecting it to be the same consistency of the green, and it ended up being a lot thinner. xD It's okay, though, they look sort of cute anyhow.

So, here it is! Our brown sugar spice cake!

Baking II

So... we're making this brown sugar spice cake on Tuesday, along with Royal icing decoration, Chiboust and Buttercream frostings...
I practiced it today and it must've taken at least 3-4 hours, not counting the time I had to wait for the thing to cool before I could frost it.
My cake was pretty good at crumbling apart all over the place. xD

Here are some pics I took that make it look almost decent though. All about the angles. ;)