Back to my roots.

Hello. Just checking in from Denmark. We found out late notice that we were having a mid term break. I couldn't bear the thought of staying in Yssingeaux for an extended break. Weekends are long enough. So I scoured the net for possibilities. As luck would have it, I found a reasonable ticket to Denmark so I could visit family.

Jens Peter and Jette have been spoiling me with a wonderful relaxing holiday. I have to say, it's nice to take a break from France. Even though I can't really call myself a Dane, Denmark really does feel like home. And hanging out with a retired couple makes for a an extra mellow break. Very nice.

I'll be here for another couple days and I'll post pictures as soon as I can. I've taken more than a few. I've been laughed at for photographing my food and going into Danish bakeries and photographing those treats too. What!? It's my job now!

I think Jette might be able to help me learn how to make Kransekage. This is a traditional Danish wedding cake. Also used for any big celebration. Christmas, New Years, birthdays, etc. I have to do a presentation next month for school where I teach people a dessert of my family heritage. This is what I'd like to do.


Only problem is, I've never made it before. But how hard could it be after what I've been through? Last week I stabilized dark chocolate, sans thermometer. Kransekage seems like a piece of cake (pun intended). I think the dough is simple enough. It's mainly just getting the size of the rings consistent so you can build it properly. My mother has been kind enough to find me the special pans you need to make the perfect rings (thanks mom!). Anyway. I'll give it a go. I've always seen it decorated with Danish flags. However, as you can see in the photo, this one has Norwegian flags also. I think all of Scandinavia would like to claim this cake. I've always been told it's Danish, but I think my family is a little bias. Anyway, I think I'll do the flags in marzipan. Throw in a little confectionery. Why not? But I think I'll make Danish flags as well as American. That makes sense. Oh here's a random fact. Denmark has the oldest state flag still in use. Don't believe me?

Anyway I'm looking forward to getting whatever advice I can gather while here in Denmark. Then I'll get the recipe down and move on to the hard part: giving a cooking demonstration to an auditorium full of people while being videotaped. Oh yeah, in French! Really it's just the French part that makes me nervous. I can get through any presentation if I know what I'm talking about. But in this presentation, I may not know what I'm saying. That's the part that makes me a little uneasy. But I'll get through it. I think I'll try to distract them with some well designed leave behinds. Nate has been very kind and has volunteered his skills.

Okay. Gotta run. Mikkel and I are off to Arden now. More later....

Aéroport

According to the Rosetta Stone pronunciation lesson, I don't pronounce aéroport right. I can't argue with this. It's true. It's a very difficult word to say in french. The vowels are all over the place. My tongue gets itself all worked up and confused.

The other night I was doing a lesson in the living room. I was repeating what I was told to repeat, or reading what I needed to read. And doing just great, I might add, until the word aéroport. Rosetta Stone doesn't let you proceed until you get things right, so I was repeating aéroport over and over. Increasing my volume and irritation level with every try. Each time, a patronizing "errrp" sound buzzed. After about the 20th repeat, Jacqueline, my Swiss roommate who grew up speaking french, was suddenly in the room laughing at me.

"What's going on?" She asked. I asked her how to say aéroport. She said it and I swear, "that's what I said!" I tried a few more times while she was explaining to me how I wasn't doing it right. Finally exasperated, I asked her to say it to Rosetta Stone for me. Which she did and it immediately accepted.

I cheated. Cheated just like those people who have breathalyzers hooked up to their cars and have someone else blow into them so they can continue on driving.

Whatever. I'll take the train.

Mom and Dad come to France.

So Jeani and Mike came to visit and we had a great time. They were on the move non-stop. It was really nice to have them around and go off and see other parts of France together. I think they enjoyed themselves, too. Here's a Cliff Notes version of the trip.

First stop. Le Puy.

In the cathedral touching the fever stone. They were hoping it would help with jet lag and general aches and pains.


After my practical exam, we drove down to Provence. I had booked a hotel online for our first night in Saignon. It was a tiny village but the area looked pretty and the hotel cute. We ended up in a little apartment, and it was absolutely beautiful. The staff was extremely friendly and helpful and I'd stay there again and recommend it to anyone. Here's their website. And here's the view from our balcony. This is the same area and view that inspired many paintings of VanGogh.

It overlooked this cute courtyard.

The restaurant around the corner.


Some local construction.


Village hopping.


This photo sums up their visit pretty well. Dad is up front waiting patiently for mom to catch up. She's busy taking full advantage of her macro lens in the background.



Space invaders visit small towns too.


And we even managed to find some wineries.


The inside of an abby.

Here's the outside.
And another little village. They are seriously all this cute.


Our hotel the second night was recommended by the first. This was a completely different style. It was WAY out of town and kind of lodge like. Set in a valley under a massive rock cliff. Just beautiful. Everyone takes their dinner and breakfast together. It was really peaceful and relaxing. A perfect place to go if you're into hiking and nature.


Florida plates. As my dad quickly pointed out, "that's a hell of a drive."

We got back from Provence and parted ways. Monday morning I went to school and they continued north up to Strasbourg to check out where I'll be living next.


They returned at the end of the week and we picnicked in between class behind the chateau.


And I had one afternoon off so we went out to a near by lake and had a picnic there too. I had a wonderful snooze in the sun.

The entire visit with mom and dad was filled with food. They were on vacation, so all rules were off. I went along with the crowd. And now I think I'm going to need the rest of my time here to get off all the extra pounds I put on from their visit.

Here's my first escargo. I wasn't sure where this fit into my diet. It isn't meat, but it's not exactly fish. But I deemed it acceptable for my pescatarian lifestyle. And I'm glad I did, because they're yummy.



Then off to Lyon at the end of the week. We had dinner with dad Friday night and then dropped him at the airport Saturday morning. He had to get back to work. Mom stayed on for a girls weekend in Lyon and one more day in exciting Yssingeaux. But it was a gorgeous weekend for sightseeing.

The cathedral on the hill, designed by the same architect that did Sacre Coeur in Paris.

A trompe l'oeil. A completely flat building painted with the images of famous/influential former residents of Lyon.


Mom's disgusting (although she said it was really good) lyonaise meat loaf. So. Gross.



No girl's weekend is complete without a trip to the salon for a haircut and manicure.


An afternoon ice cream stop. Mom's documentation of my ice cream documentation.

The beautiful botanical gardens in the north of the city.



Mom walked me to school, and the picture taking continued.

Then she joined the class for the afternoon. Chef said she was a good worker and helped out a lot. But she got in trouble when it came to clean up time. No standing around allowed. But she's on vacation, we cut her a break.

Phew. That's it. And that's the short version. We did so much and I feel so lucky to have had two fun visitors. Now it's back to work and back to my normal diet of healthy eating (while snacking on pastries all day).

Talk soon...

It was like I was competing in a Food Network challenge.

That's exactly how it felt. Well, exactly how I imagine it would feel.

We had our first practical exam a couple weeks ago. A shortened version of our final practical exam we'll have in September. It was a timed, 8 hour test. At 8:15 we were all given the same assignment.

1 Fôret Noir (Black Forest cake -see previous post)
1 Paris Breast
9 croissants
9 pain au chocolates
1 marzipan flower
2 marzipan leaves
1 marzipan plaque with "Honoreus Saint Valentin" written in chocolate.
And an assortment tempered chocolate covered ganache bonbons (The ganache was already made, but we needed to temper the dark chocolate.)

The first half hour was dedicated to planning. We were given a blank spreadsheet to fill in with our schedule for the day. It's our organization method. What are we going to do when. When one thing is in the oven, what will we be working on. The schedule is great for us so we can map out the day and make use of every minute. And it's great for the judges so they know that we know what we're doing and not just winging it. At the end of the first thirty minutes we had to turn in our plans which were then then photocopied and handed back. The judges follow along throughout the day and if we detour off our map, we lose points.

I filled out my schedule with modest confidence. I felt good about the Foret Noir and Paris Breast. However the croissants and pain au chocolate, not so much. All the timings for the fridge and proofing were still a little hazy in my head. But I filled in my schedule and handed it in just in time.

At 8:45 the cooking began.

I started with my pâte à choux for my Paris Breast. Everyone in class had secretly agreed before hand that if there was pâte à choux on the test, we'd all do it first. This is because when you cook a pâte à choux you can't open the oven during cooking. And it takes about 42 minutes to bake. We only had one oven between us, so we had to coordinate.

The pâte à choux came together just fine and I dressed it and put it in the oven with the others, no problem. I swiftly moved on to the croissants and pain au chocolat. Now these are essentially the same thing. A painn au chocolate is a croissant, only it starts as a rectangle, not a triangle, and you put chocolate inside. Personally, I don't know why you'd ever eat a croissant if a pain au chocolate was near by. But that's just me.

So I mixed up the dough and wrapped it up in plastic to let it rest beside me while I continued to work on my other assignments. Next up, the chocolate genoise. This is cake that is the base for the fôret noir. It is a very simple cake to make. In fact, I was telling my mother the night before, oh yeah, my parents were in town and mom wanted so much to help me study for my exam. One of the best ways to learn is to teach, so I went though all my recipes and explained the process to my mother. When I got to the genoise, I told her this is so simple it's almost impossible to mess up. You just have to remember to sift in the flower and coco powder. While that is true, it's also true that you gently fold in that sifted flower by hand, NOT the mixer. Then bake. So when I got to my chocolate genoise in class, I didn't hesitate at all. "This cake is so easy, it's impossible to mess up," I thought.

Once again, I am reminded, nothing is impossible. I pulled my genoise out of the oven and it was much shorter than normal. I cut it into three layers and it was more dense than normal. This normally light and fluffy cake was a dense hard brick. And I couldn't figure out why. I set it aside and moved on to other tasks. I'd come back to that later.

I gave my croissant dough a tour, put it in the fridge. I whipped up my praine moussiline for the Paris Breast and put it in the fridge to cool. I rolled out my marzipan plaque and torched it to give it some character. I sculpted a pink flower and a couple of green leaves. Gave my croissants a few more tours and chills. I was on a roll and ahead of schedule. Before I knew it, it was just about time for our 30 minute break. I quickly cut and formed my croissants and pain au chocolates, gave them an egg wash and threw them in the proof box.

At break I was feeling good. I was ahead of my schedule, so I decided to redo my genoise just after the break. So that's what I did. I asked chef if this was allowed. He gave me one of his classic answers that isn't an answer at all. "Do you think you need to redo it?" He has a way of turning very simple questions into twisted mind games. I still wasn't sure if this was allowed, but I did it anyway. I had the time, I may as well. So I did it again.

I believe it was Einstein who said, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." Well, I think the excitement of a timed exam was altering my logic, and I made my genoise exactly as I did before. My result? The exact same hard dense brick. Duh.

But by this time, I was out of time. I had to move on to my chocolate and put all the pieces together to present my buffet. I moved fast and tempered my chocolate, assembled my Paris Breast, baked my croissants, inscribed my marzipan plaque and finally assembled my Foret Noir.

Everything was good except for the Foret Noir. The genoise killed it. And my chocolate shavings were not as pretty as the first time. So that didn't help either. I was hoping it could at least look good on the outside. At least make a first impression, you know? But it wasn't great. No way around it.

But I finished. All in all I was happy. My croissants were the best I'd ever made (still MUCH room for improvement), my chocolate writing was better than before, my Paris Breast looked good, and my work station was all cleaned up. I did my best. That's all I could ask.


Unfortunately I didn't get any pictures before the judges cut into things and moved it all around. But here are the remains. And here is the terrible Fôret Noir.


Not so bad flower.

And the delicious Paris Breast.

All in all, this exercise confirmed that I love to bake. I think I thrive with a little competition and pressure. It makes it more fun. And I loved doing everything on my own. This was the first time that we were able to make things from start to finish on our own and all at once. For me, this made it much easier to spot areas where I need to improve. But overall I loved it. So much fun.

At the end, we were interviewed about the day. Chef asked me how I thought I did. I told him what I told you and explained the trouble with my genoise. He said I was brave to take the time to do it over, but that I did it over wrong. He said you NEVER put the flower in the mixer. But he was confident that I'd never make that mistake again. Me too. So my marks were low in organization. (I'm pretty sure I could keep a neater work station.) But despite my genoise, my taste marks were high. Not bad for the first round.

Our final exam is 15 hours long over two days, and will include ice cream. Yikes. I really need to organize my notes.

My parents came by to pick me up when we were done. We boxed up my exam and hit the road for Provence. Vacation pictures to come....