Commencement

I just finished my first full day of school and I'm beat. It turns out the tired you feel from standing up all day is totally different from the tired you feel from sitting on your butt in front of a computer for eight hours plus. Who knew.

The first half day was orientation. This included: rules, grading system, expectations, dress code, a tour of the facilities, etc. Then after lunch we put on our gear (sans jackets as they have not arrived yet) and hit the pastry lab. First on the agenda - learning how to properly flour the table, or fleureige. Creating a perfect cloud of flour that gently mists the table directly in front of you is a whole lot tougher that it looks.
After the table was sufficiently covered we rolled out three variations of basic sweet pastry - la pâte sucrée. Three different crusts which we then baked into tarts today. We whipped up an almond creme, sliced some pear and, voila! An almond pear tart prototype.

We also prepared a chocolate mousse which will top the pear tarts tomorrow. Yum. Yum. Yum. Chef Sebastian then showed us how to make use of all the left over almond creme. Why not bake in tiny molds to be used in other desserts, or simply eat it alone, he said. D'accord. Yes, please.

So far so good. I'm especially liking the manual labor. Even the clean up. There's something very gratifying and therapeutic about making something from scratch, creating a huge mess, then cleaning it all up and starting all over again the next day. It's a really nice tired.

But man are my hands dry. You thought I was an OCD handwasher before, now I make OCD look normal. Perhaps I could brand my own line of hand soap and lotion to sell in my future bakery. Hmm... peut-être.