Week 10 & 11 (Intermediate Patisserie)

(Week 10 exam week) Last week was exam week and the following week we had the last lessons of Intermediate term and results! Exam week started on Monday with the practical exam. The weekend before, I'd spent practicing all three dishes to make sure I was ready, unfortunately I'd picked up a cold and was praying it'd be gone by Monday. It wasn't! Our exam was at 3pm and I'd spent the day with the cold getting progressively worse, my head was very stuffy and when we went to stand outside the kitchen ready for the exam I was about ready to collapse into bed! The chef came out and announced we'd be making the Alhambra cake, which I was happy with. I like doing the marzipan roses and tempering chocolate and this was the only dish with both! We got into the kitchen and did the Bon d'economat first. I've been revising the recipes hard so managed to fill in most of the blanks in the recipe and method. These were then collected up by the chef and we got our equipment unpacked, I was trying to stifle a coughing fit and not sniff a lot, didn't want to disturb the others too much. We got started, however I made a mistake very quickly. There are two amounts of sugar in the recipe, one to be creamed with the butter and the second to be beaten with egg white to make a French meringue (which gives the cake it's rise). I'd put the French meringue amount in with the butter, luckily I'd realised before creaming it together, checked the weight and added more sugar to it. This threw me a bit though, it's been drummed into us that we can't remake stuff in the exam if we make a mistake, whether that extends to double checking the weight of something I don't know, but the seed had already been planted and I couldn't shake the worry that I might have failed because of a stupid mistake. That was the only noteworthy cockup though! Everything else went reasonably smoothly, the ganache and the glacage (glaze) came together well. The marzipan rose was a tad small but I'd got it nice and fine and was happy with the result, the chocolate tempered well and quickly too, which meant I could pipe some nice fine decorations. I could have been a bit neater on cutting the sponge in two and applying the ganache on the outside, I should have let the chocolate cool a little before piping "Alhambra" on the top too, but I finished in time and it looked like it was supposed to, so I was happy...mostly, the sugar weighing incident left me in fear of an instant fail all week. I was glad to get home and get straight to bed after the exam! 

Tuesday we didn't have any classes but I was helping with an evening class again. This was the second lesson of the four and it was a pear and almond cream tart, using a sweet pastry for the shell. They all came out looking nice.

Wednesday we had our last demo, it was the cake decorating one, showing us how to marzipan and fondant ice a cake. It was then decorated with royal icing and adorned with the sugar paste flowers the chef made in an earlier lecture. The finished cakes looked nice, something to aspire too! And techniques I'll definitely be practicing. I stayed in London Wednesday night, the cold still hadn't relented and I didn't fancy an early start for the 11:30am theory exam the next day! 

Thursday was the written exam, it was in a different format to the Basic exam. We had some multiple choice answers, some true or false answers and then some written answers too. The multiple choice and true or false questions I was mostly ok with. It all unravelled at the written answers though! We'd been given a study list, which I'd been revising hard from. However, at the bottom of the page it says that we should also know things from all classes over both terms, in a nutshell that's over 40 recipes with varying quantities of ingredients! An impossible task! Unfortunately a few of questions came up that I hadn't revised for - the chocolate fondant recipe, we'd done it in a practical so I could take a stab in the dark, but failed miserably at the quantities of ingredients. We also had questions on the paper that we'd never been given the answer to, either verbally or in any documentation - which French town did the Dacquoise originate from? Much like algebra in the real world - when are we ever going to need to know that!? Ridiculous! I did what most reasonably sound thinking English person would do and answered Paris. The Parisians are big headed enough to try and stake a claim to most things like that, so it seemed a safe bet! A quick Google and hunt around the internet after the exam seemed to indicate it was actually Dax (who's ever heard of the place!?), but nothing concrete could confirm that, so I only have Wikipedia's word for it! Needless to say, I felt horribly unprepared for the exam after the event, despite reminding myself a good 40% of the paper was the multiple choice and true or false questions, 60% of the paper may have gone disastrously wrong! I have to be completely honest, I ended this week feeling quite dejected and worried about the potentially impending doom. The prospect of failing the term felt quite real, which wasn't a good feeling after I felt quite ready for the exams at the beginning of the week. 

(week 11 results week) Results week finally arrived. Monday morning we had our first cake decorating class. I made quite a few sugar paste roses to go on my cake. The theme for which was an English rose garden! The paste was really hard to work with, so it took a while, but I was reasonably happy with the result given it was my first time working with the stuff! It was a nice distraction because it was then time for the practical debrief. I was very nervous climbing the stairs to get to the room, I evidently needn't have been though! After sitting down in front of the chef and a pause while he looked up my results (which felt like an eternity!), he smiled and proclaimed I'd passed! I was completely elated! I did quite well as well, I'd achieved 70.55%, not on a par with last term but I was (and still am!) extremely happy and relieved to have passed! He then went through what was wrong and good with the dish, which was all useful feedback.

Tuesday was an early start, two lessons back to back to decorate the cakes. I managed to get it marzipaned and iced quickly, painting the roses took time and rolling out tiny little peddles for the garden path did too. I ran out of time to finish it properly and made the roses too big, but I was quite happy with the first proper attempt at using wired flowers! There were some amazing cakes in the class, so a really nice lesson to finish the term on. I stuck around at school to help with another evening class, this was the third of four, in this one they made choux buns and also made/rolled puff pastry ready for the next lesson. It was quite a busy lesson, with lots to do, but it went well and there were some nice choux buns made. I got home at midnight, and after a 4am start I was knackered! 

The finished cake, I was quite happy with it, but equally could have happily spent double the time getting it exactly how I imagined it. It's a very tasty fruit cake inside too!

Most of Group B and our finished cakes! There were some really nice cakes produced. Group B has been a really nice group to work in, there are some great people in there that I really I hope I get to stay with next term. 

Thursday was the graduation day, we didn't have many people from the class turn up, which is understandable as some use the break between terms to travel home etc. We had to painstakingly sit through the same time filling speech as last time and then the main event finally arrived - the certificate presenting! Our group was one of the last to pick up the certificates, however I opened the envelope as soon as I got back to my seat and found that I'd passed the whole term with a score of 75.2%! Miraculously I did well in the written test, with a good pass mark of 79%, so that helped pull the overall marks up a bit! The next day, 18th September 2015 (friday), it's exactly a year to the date that I first went to visit the school and have a look around. The first time I walked around the building I fell in love and knew I really wanted to study there. A year later and I've completed two terms of the Patisserie Diploma and the love for the school has grown into so much more than I could ever have imagined! 

The certificate! Successfully navigated my way through Intermediate Patisserie. Extremely happy and proud of what I've achieved this term. 

A few of us with some of the chefs at the graduation ceremony. I really wish I could spend more time with these chefs, there is so much experience and knowledge they all have and I could learn an enormous amount from them!

And there ends Intermediate term! It's been hard, but once I hit my stride I got into the swing of it. The realisation is starting to hit that in only a couple of weeks Superior term will start, we'll be in our final term, the main event, the big kids in the school! It's gone ridiculously fast, and if I'm honest I don't really feel ready, I'm only just used to being an intermediate student!! But the next term will bring some very exciting challenges and opportunities to learn some amazing skills, so, as before, BRING IT ON!