Today, I am a pastry student

Posted on | November 30, 2009

On the weekends, the school runs classes for consumers. And She Chef, who was my kitchen chef for my second term, allows me to take the classes she teaches.

Of course, as a good guest, I bring a thank you gift (the biggest can of Red Bull I can find – she is addicted to the stuff) and I stay after class and help clean up.

In return, I get to learn how to bake. Today, I got to learn to bake cookies, brownies, and cupcakes.

And, hey, today I discovered a hidden talent.

Honey is the only food that does not spoil
The thing about being in a consumer class is, well, the consumers. See, after months of indoctrination into The Way of The Chef, I have picked up certain habits. I hold my knife properly. I work (or try to work) efficiently. And, most importantly, I work cleanly.

Cleanly, I tell you.

So we get put into groups of two and I discover my teammate is not a culinary school student.

Lemme tell you about her.

A Sagittarius, she likes long walks on the beach and … erm … no. All I know about her is she hates to touch food (?!) and likes to be messy. As in, in the first five minutes of working with her I was dusted from the chest down with cocoa powder.

Both shoes were sticky with the stuff. My just-out-of-the-laundry jeans were speckled brown. And my apron, oh, my poor white apron looked like I had been waltzing with a fat man holding an armload of cocoa dusted truffles on a hot, hot summer day.

Now, mind you, I had not touched any cocoa powder. This was solely her cocoa powder.

Okay. Nothing that won’t come out in the wash, right?

But you should have seen our workstation.

As if the cocoa butter were not bad enough, everything, but everything, was coated in butter. KitchenAid, spatulas, spoons. Bowls, cutting board, knife. Heck, even the prep table was smeared with the stuff. A greasy, nasty mess that not only made it really awkward to hang on to anything, but a sticky, gooey mess that possessively clung to every grain of cocoa dust, every speck of salt, every dusting of baking powder she brought to the workstation.

In five minutes flat, it was filthy.

When she left early, which, mercifully, she did, I immediately stopped all baking and scoured my prep area and every bowl, knife, utensil, etc. on it. Including the KitchenAid which I cleaned from top to bottom and back again (and how she managed to get cocoa powder under the KitchenAid is beyond me; but she did, she did).

I can see why she would not want to touch food. If everything in my kitchen was covered in butter and cocoa, I would not want to touch it either.

Peanuts are an ingredient in dynamite
So once she was gone, I was able to really get down to some baking. So let me tell you what I made.

First (and best) I made cupcakes. They were chocolate and gorgeous. And the recipe made three dozen, so boy were there a lot of ‘em.

Second, I made peanut butter chocolate chip cookies. Here’s a great tip for you. If you are going to smush the tops of your cookies with a fork, dip the fork in sugar before smushing. I got this tip, alas, after I had already smushed about a million cookies, struggling to withdraw my fork from the quicksand that is cookie dough. But, along came the sugar, and so easy!

There was a problem with the oven (the temperature was set too high) so the cookies came out a bit crisper than I like (I like ‘em a bit soft in the center), but they weren’t bad.

Third, I made brownies. Chocolate brownies, of course!

Now, the recipe called for walnuts. And walnuts are good in brownies. But I wanted macadamia nuts, so I got some of those and toasted them and rough chopped them and added them to my batter. Nom nom! Oh, and that’s a good tip to have: Toasting. I learned that at school. It makes the nuts more aromatic and yummy. And it is so easy. Just pour the nuts on one layer on a cookie sheet and pop them in the oven to toast. Keep an eye on them, they love to burn. When they are done (it only take a few minutes) pull them out. How can you tell when they are done? They easiest way is to trust your nose – pull them out when they smell great.

Coca-Cola was originally green
Now, I wasn’t that interested in the butttercream frosting, so didn’t bother, but some of the other students hadn’t got around to making it so She Chef, kind soul that she is, made some for all of us.

I hadn’t planned to frost my cupcakes, but, hey, there was a big bowl of buttercream frosting in front of me (and, let me tell you, if you knew how much butter went into that you would just pass out) so, what the heck, I grabbed a star-shaped tip, plopped it into a pipping bag, and filled it up with frosting.

And I discovered something.

I LOVE frosting. No, not the eating part (it was just too rich for me). What I loved was the frosting part.

I loved decorating those cupcakes. And I loved trying new designs with the frosting.

I did the usual round swirl, where you go round and round, making a nice mound that rises in the center.

I did a series of stars, sometimes in a circular pattern, sometimes in stripes. Heck, I even played with stripes!

And I played with the size of the stars. For example, one cupcake had a big star in the center and two little stars on either side.

I played with height. In one cupcake, for example, I had a large star with a medium size star on top of it and a tiny star on top of that.

I played with shapes. For example, I got the Chef to show me how to do the classic shell shape and tried all sorts of variations.

Remember, I had 36 cupcakes and no partner to share them with, so I turned into a mad scientist with a piping bag . . . Mwhahahahaha!

When I had my fill of frosting, I offered my half empty piping bag and leftover cupcakes to the team next to me. They had dumped so much raspberry puree into their butter cream that they turned it Pepto Bismal pink. I thought they might like to try using both my white and their pink frostings together on some of the cupcakes. They went to town. Only their goal was to use every last drop of butter cream. And they did. So much so, in fact, that they had some cupcakes that were more frosting than cupcake!

Pearls melt in vinegar
When class was over, I packed one cookie, one piece of brownie, and a few cupcakes (including one that was filled with butter cream – surprise inside!) for the husband. Me? I had overdosed on sugar and butter and really just wanted a nice broccoli.

So I gave the rest of my cupcakes to anyone who wanted them.

Let em tell you, some of those people left with dozens of cupcakes, between the ones they made and the ones I made and gave away. There were pounds of butter just walking out the door.

My station was clean (once I cleaned up from me early-departing, and insanely messy teammate, I kept my station clean), so there was nothing to do there. So I helped clean up the other workstations, gossipying with the Chef and her two pastry student helpers.

When I got home my husband ate the cookie, the brownie, and two of the cupcakes. Then he said, “Honey, I can’t eat any more. Should I freeze the rest of the cupcakes?”

“No, baby, please just throw them in the garbage.”

“You sure?”

“You have no idea.”

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