Hello Momma!

While I am starting to get used to city life I do still get home sick a lot too, although I do try to go home when I can it's hard with my hectic schedule between studying for class and interning. So I was overjoyed when My mother and Grandmother decided to come see me for a weekend to help pass the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Their visit came with perfect timing. They got to come and dine at our afternoon of desserts at school. As a class we had prepared for this day all week Mise en Place-ing our desserts and then when the orders came in from our families we fired them and sent them out. I even got to be in charge of calling out orders and making sure that they got to the table timely, ( they should have known better than to give me permission to yell!)

After a quick tour of school we settled into our hotel room. The next day we went exploring some and went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I all ready can't wait to go back again. Everything was just simply beautiful and completely inspiring.

Before they left on Sunday we went to L'Ecole for brunch. It was good I got Steak tartar with a raw quail egg. I think better than eating it was watching the look on my mom and grandma's faces when I spilled the egg on to the raw meat and dug in!

My Favorite Toy

Settling into our new spacious kitchen was very nice. But the fact that we were now to work on more chocolate worried some. I have to admit even I was a little worried, I still hadn't quite mastered this tempering thing just yet. Although thanks to my manager at Jacques Torres who insisted that I try tempering chocolate with out a thermometer. You want me to do what!? The thought of not using a thermometer made no sense to me in my head I knew that there were very specific numbers that we had to hit as we heated and cooled the chocolate how could I possibly do that with no thermometer? But as Melissa explained that it was all about learning

the look and feel of chocolate when its tempered I thought OK, maybe I can do this. So when Chef Jurgen said that we were to be doing out final Chocolate showpiece the next day I decided to put my thermometer back in my tool kit and see if I could do this relying only on my senses. And to my excitement batch after batch came out perfectly tempered with no sign of a thermometer in sight. And by class end I was very happy with my Chocolate show piece.

I was nervous yet excited to bring my chocolate showpiece into Jacques Torres chocolate to show everyone, yet their opinion and knowledge of chocolate was greatly respected. Melissa was overjoyed that I didn't use a thermometer like she suggested. I think she was even more amused by how excited I was about it. An then there was Chef Torres himself. Part of me didn't want to show him the showpiece, after all he is the master. Chef was very impressed and said it was beautiful and he couldn't do better. He even asked me how I made some elements of it! Hearing that from him meant so much to me, truly a proud moment.

sugar one

After all that plating I was definitely excited to get back into some show piece work. Our First level of sugar was one I had been pretty excited for. First we got to work with marzipan and we made several different fruits and vegetables along with a nougatine basket. I've always enjoyed sculpting so this was a lot of fun, plus I got to use an airbrush again which I am all ready pretty confident with.

Next we moved on to working with pastillage, a stiff sugar dough that drys like porcelain and is very fragile. This medium proved to be frustrating for all of us. The goal was to make a 12in tall cake stand that could support a 6 inch round cake with both design and air flow. I chose to do a Japanese dressing screen type design. And after much frustration of pieces breaking and not adhering as planned I finally got it together and it held the weight!

Now it was time for what I had been most excited to learn, sugar paste flowers with Ron Ben Israel!!! At home I can often be found at the table all night working on sugar paste flowers so it was no surprise that I would be excited for this lesson. We watched videos and eagerly asked all the questions we could think of in our short time with Ron Ben and in the end we came out with some very beautiful flowers. Even on the plane ride home for Thanksgiving had them sitting on my lap and the man sitting next to me asked to take a picture of them. I couldn't help but laugh.

At the end of our last day of sugar one Chef Jurgen came into our class room and gave us his "tomorrow you will be mine!" speech. And with that we were all reminded that this was our last day of level 2 and that tomorrow we would be in level 3, our last level before graduation.