so wednesday night was our first written exam and practical. for anyone not familiar with this particular use of the term 'practical,' it means to define a grueling portion of a chef's exam, in which you perform several tasks while the Chefs rate you on everything from appearance, preparedness, organization, and method, to quality, product, taste and design. it lasts several hours and when all is said and done, you get to present the product to the chef, where she will evaluate its appearance, design, presentation, texture, taste, etc. in other words: not stressful at all.
well i have to say, when i got home, my mood was about as rainy as the weather late last night. granted i'm my own worst critic. if i were a food reviewer who walked into my cake shop, i'd be petrified of me and what i'd scribble down on my pretentious little notepad. it wouldn't be kind. it would be harsh. demanding. critical. almost impossible to please. so i guess it's a good thing i'm not responsible for my grade from last night, because i'd have thrown my cake at me in disgust. but i can be a *bit* of a jerk.
so at the start of the practical, i had already completed my written portion. i was fairly well prepared for the evening, so the written portion really didn't stress me out much at all. all i could think about was my genoise. the evening's practical was centered around the making and baking of a regular genoise cake, the making of a vanilla pate a bombe butter cream, the creation of a rum simple syrup, and the layering, filling, icing and presenting of that entire project to the chefs at the end of the night.
and i didn't waste a minute. i had MEP'd my ingredients and equipment prior to the start of the written so that i could hit the ground running at the start of the practical. *MEP= mise en place* i prepared my water bath and began to warm my egg and sugar mixture, careful to raise its temperature to just 110 degrees F, just beyond body temperature to allow the protein of the egg to become slightly more flexible and allow the expansion of the mixture with air i would whip into it. this is the type of mechanical leavening required to give this particular cake its height. once at temperature, i immediately began to whisk air into the mixture. with my butter gently melting on the bain-marie, my eggs and sugar happily whisking, i began to sift my flour to ensure there were not lumps in the flour and it would be light and fluffy when it was added to the egg/sugar mixture.
once my eggs and sugar had developed a lovely foam, and had tripled in volume, it was time to add the flour, which i did, methodically, neatly and in increments, gently but speedily folding the flour in so as not to over-glutenize the batter (which would make it tough and chewy.) the last stage before completely incorporating the flour, was to sacrifice a small portion of batter into the butter, to allow the butter to take on a closer consistency to the batter it was going to be combined with. by the way, we say 'sacrificed' because in doing this, the batter that is mixed with the butter loses some of its volume. but i completed that step, and folded everything together until it was incorporated and no longer streaky. and then put it immediately into my prepared baking pan and took it promptly to the ovens where it had to go in for approximately 25 minutes. but when i say ovens...perhaps it would be more accurate to say 'ovens of death and chaos' for that, in my opinion, is exactly what they are.
now i NEVER blame a machine. ever! it is almost ALWAYS the fault of the chef, cook, baker, etc. too much liquid, too much fat, too little flour, too much gluten, the temperature was set incorrectly, too much air was whipped into the cake - the list goes on! there's almost always an error in the delicate combination of items on the formula. but this night, i fear, it was the oven that did the damage. (and it's not an excuse, because the chefs did say they suspected oven issues due to the fact that several of our cakes all suffered the same fate last night.) that fate? they fell, caved, deflated...in the most severe way i've ever seen.
the horror! my cake was sunken in the center- like a gaping, frozen mouth. deep enough to resemble a small above-ground pool at the end of winter. you realize that the rain water has finally collected enough to collapsed the pool cover, and all that is left is a sorry, sunken pool, home to rotting leaves, a billion bugs and perhaps a confused duck or soggy tennis ball, floating amidst the cold, murky muck, ...and you are suddenly desperate for spring. well that was me, looking at my sorry cake, sitting upside down on a cooling rack. its little 6" round body heaving under the weight of the stoic, implausible cave-face. the two of us were most unhappy to see each other. like two disappointed souls, sorrily gazing at the other, with no words to describe the obvious. this, my friends, was the first time i've ever experienced such a deflating moment in cake. and i think it was most deflating because it was a practical exam, and i knew that i would have to scramble and re-bake, in order to have a enough cake to even be graded. not fun.
to put things into perspective however, there were 5 other students that this happened to. that means 50% of the class, which is good for someone like me. ONLY because that meant that perhaps it wasn't something I did on my own, but added evidence to the theory that perhaps it WAS the ovens after all. while that sucks, at least it softens the blow to one's ego.
well, slightly anyway. as i said earlier, i'm very intense in the kitchen and do not enjoy scrambling. i like to be prepared and organized and calm. but it's hard to do when you have a deadline racing towards you, a cake to create and a train to catch, to boot.
so back to the beginning i went, MEPing all my ingredients (again), following each step carefully (again), all the while remaining calm in light of this minor cake-tragedy (SO minor) and began (again.)
of course, i was mid-way through my pate a bombe butter cream, so i had to re-configure my production timeline and reorganize myself to time everything so nothing overlapped, but all got done on time. and i was able to do that fairly easily.
by the way, my pate a bombe butter cream was to. die. for. and i enjoy making that, so at least that came out the way it was intended.
the chef told us to bake the second try on a half-sheet pan instead, so that it would bake thinner, quicker and would be easier to cool, given our time constraints. so i did. but i was concerned about the structure of the cake. i wasn't sure that cutting out round layers from a sheet would be as ideal as re-baking in a 6" round, but i just did what was asked and would later deal with the structural integrity of my mismatched, debacle of a cake. i wasn't enthused at all with how my night was going. BUT i didn't let it show. i kept organized, kept clean, kept focused because if nothing else, i wasn't going to lose points by letting my stress show. i wasn't going to be broken by a sunken, 6" genoise cake. mandycakes, that superhero i mentioned earlier?... will not have met her kryptonite tonight. and her kryptonite will CERTAINLY NOT come in the form of a fluffy, tempestuous, high-maintenance cake such as this sorry genoise. oh no!
during our dinner break, we all sat quietly, reflecting on how stressful the night was, all of us thinking about finishing and being DONE with the evening - because a 5-hour long exam and practical...is really quite draining on one's psyche and spirit. after the (much needed!!) break, i returned to the kitchen, prepared to go the distance.
i began to assemble my cake. it was a painstaking process that involved carving out round layers from a less-than impressive sheet-pan genoise which looked a lot like a glorified fluffy tortilla. i mean, disdain...doesn't begin to cover it. i soaked the layers with my rum simple syrup, but wasn't able to soak them too much because they were so delicate and filled it with a raspberry marmalade. i began to crumb coat the cake with my pate a bombe butter cream.
i couldn't crumb coat it fast enough, by the way. it was just horrendous to look at. the sides were uneven, the raspberry marmalade was smeared around the sides where i had to further carve it to maintain the 6" round shape. all in all, i couldn't have iced it fast enough. i could barely look at it. it was, quite simply, the worst cake i have ever made.
of course once it was iced (or should i say slathered, drenched, overcome) with pate a bombe butter cream, i was able to smooth it out, flatten it and begin to decorate it. i lined the bottom with (weary handed...weary souled) butter cream shells, and topped it with butter cream rosettes, and a small center of hazelnut croquant.
i brought it to the chef and the evaluation went ...as good as i could have expected, given the myriad of circumstances i had dealt with. chef Cynthia was lenient...i mean downright merciful. she complimented me on my organization, my calmness, my cleanliness. she complimented me on my smoothness, my overall design, on the fact that you'd never know what tumultuousness lies beneath the pate a bombe butter cream, and even on my rosettes, which she described as 'nicely, near perfectly done.' she complimented me on the texture and taste of my butter cream and added that she would have preferred a little more syrup soaked into the cake, but overall, it was very nice. of course, cutting revealed all the flaws, the uneven layering, the ..gloppy...interior. the strata was all but lost in the murky, bloody carnage of raspberry shmurblahblah (my word) that was the filling, thanks to the unstable structure of the two sheet-pan layers. and she did note that my buttercream was a little too thick in sections, but she understood that it was more to do with the tragic patch job i had to do, and not so much due to lack of skill. she ended it on a high note, complimenting me on a job well done.
well or not, i was glad to be done at all. and i HATED my cake. hated. loathed. despised. and any other over-the-top, inappropriately strong word (for a cake) i can throw at it. just.... UGH!
i came home last night completely deflated...just like my cake. completely aggravated at the circumstances, at the turnout. it's tough to work so hard and not be able to do your best, when your best is all that counts. but my husband reminds me (so does my mom) that i have a lot of positives to focus on. and i know that. and part of me IS proud of the way i handled myself. but what can i say? i'm intense. i'm laser-focused. i'm stone-face, serious. i'm severe. and so it should come as no surprise to you that when my husband woke up this morning, he came into the bedroom before he left for work with a quizzical look on his face.
'umm, mandy? *awkward pause*...your cake was out all night on the table? (but this wasn't the real question) ...umm... why is there a butcher knife sticking straight up out of it?"
but we don't need to ask that, now do we? we know why. and it's why he loves me.
more to come
xo
m
