Well, another Saturday has come and gone, and with it about 50 billion calories of delicious baked goods. I wish I could say that Day 5 went off without a single problem. Sadly, that wasn’t the case.
It all started so well. We had a quiz, very easy. We learned about shaping danishes and croissants. Then it was time to get to work. We started by making a Danish dough. I followed the recipe exactly, and got the dough looking like the recipe said. The recipe didn’t say that the dough was going to stick to absolutely everything in the kitchen. It neglected to mention that we were supposed to add flour until the dough came together and was less sticky. Yep, would have been very nice to know that before putting my hands in it and trying to shape it into a flat disc. Oh well, that was the least of my problems. Our croissant dough that we made last week needed 4 more turns. Each turn needed a half hour rest in the fridge. So that was going to take a long time to finish.
We also made sticky buns. Now, I hate to say this, I really do. Sometimes my lab partner annoys me. It happens very infrequently, but it seems that she cares much more about combining strange flavors and making fillings than she does about the dough. So while I am trying to do turns on both the danish dough and the croissant dough, she’s making half a dozen fillings, and occasionally making me watch them, which leads to problems. For example, We were using the same cherries and creme de cassis that we used last week for our danishes. Yes, the cherries were delicious. She suggested we make a glaze, so we took the soaking liquid and added some brown sugar and set it on the stove to reduce. Well, I was working on the dough, and the glaze started to smoke. Nobody had a clue where the vent fans were, but we quickly found out. Now since I was closer, I’m the one who looked like an idiot for not watching the glaze. If instead of making the cream cheese filling, she would have either rolled the dough or watched the glaze, there would have been no problem. But I guess it was at least partly my fault as well.
The fruits of our labor were a tray of maple and bacon sticky buns, a tray of cinnamon rolls with cream cheese icing, a tray of danishes (mostly vol au vents, with a few pinwheels) in raspberry cheese and cherry cheese, and 4 types of croissants, plain, chocolate, chocolate with raspberry, and chocolate with orange. We drizzled some chocolate sauce on the chocolate raspberry and chocolate orange croissants, but I felt the drizzle had a bit too much of an alcohol taste from the Grand Marnier, which did not have a chance to burn off without the chocolate scorching. Everything looked beautiful, and for the most part tasted excellent, but I was having a bad morning and was in a bad mood. Nothing was going well.
I took pictures and will add them to the post as soon as I get a chance.
Next week, Cookies, I think. The schedule is all screwed up, so I have no idea what we are actually going to do from week to week. Stupid snow.
