Exam week #2

Exam weeks generally make me angry. I know that I'm not going to be learning anything, so it's a waste of time and money to begin with. On top of that, if I'm confident I can make all the products perfectly, the only way I could feel is disappointed if they don't come out perfectly.

Usually we have two practice days before the three exam days. But this time, on monday we were forced to watch a 6 hour gum paste flower demo. It was every bit as boring as I thought it would be. It might have been better if we were actually making the flowers and practicing the techniques. But no, we just sat there in hard plastic chairs and watched chef Lodge make little flowers all day. I actually fell asleep for about 10 seconds, and then sprang up when I almost fell over onto the lap of the dude sitting next to me. Wedding cakes are not my thing. To add insult to injury, chef Lodge used the demo as a way to repeatedly make an aggressive sales pitch for his line of instructional DVDs, tools, and equipment for making wedding cake decorations. He was like an older, gay British version of Ron Popeil.

Tuesday was practice day for exams. I spent the entire day making chocolate candy shells. The techniques chef Sebastian taught us during chocolate candy class don't work very well. I followed his instructions exactly three times during chocolate candy class and the shells would never be good enough to sell in a chocolate shop. So I bought Peter Greweling's book and followed his directions for making shells.

There were three things Greweling says you must do, which chef Sebastian said didn't matter or didn't say anything about:

1) You should flip the mold over and keep it elevated after pouring out the chocolate. If you don't, the chocolate will collect at the bottom of the mold (the top of the shells) causing the tops of the shells to be too thick, and the sides too thin.

2) Warm the mold to 25-30*C before pouring chocolate into it. If the mold is significantly colder than the chocolate, the chocolate won't set evenly.

On tuesday, I made 4 molds full of shells, tempering my own chocolate each time, and they all came out perfect. I didn't fill the shells with anything and make actual candies, I just unmolded them after they set.

On thursday during the exam, I forgot about the third thing Greweling says, which is to warm up and soften the filled shells with a hair dryer or heat gun before capping them. This helps the newly poured layer adhere to the sides of shells. Since I didn't do that, some of my shells cracked and separated on the seam between the bottom and sides.

I also think I poured out the chocolate too early when making the shells. The tops were a little too thin. They cracked or shattered in a few places, and some of them were impossible to unmold. I might still get a decent grade on them though, because the chefs here seem to have rather low standads for chocolate shells.

The other products for this exam were a lemon curd tart with sweet dough crust, and simplified versions of the sugar and chocolate showpieces we made in each showpiece class.

The lemon curd tasted like ass, I have no idea why. The showpieces I don't really care about, I just did them as fast as possible.

The next two weeks are cakes with chef Dimitri. There's 6 cake recipes in the textbook. I'm allergic to 4 of them.