le cordon bleu - day 10

The week of bread truly ended with mum tossing out a number of mouldy beings from our bread container this morning. I'm calling out for food recipients for the upcoming weeks. It seems that despite the assistance I have of 2 aunties, an uncle and their families, I'm still not clearing out the food I bake from class each week and really, it upsets me (all the good food going to waste!) So for those interested, give me a buzz and I can let you know what's on the agenda in the upcoming weeks. I assure you that no one will be turned down :P


So after a week of bread, it's a week of chocolate! I don't even want to remember how many chocolates I ate in the space of class today and how many dribbles of chocolate I plopped into my mouth because at the time, it seemed like the best place to put it. If you see my uniform, there's every evidence of our chocolate lesson (as I would've expected) and fortunately, I didn't leave the class today being the grubbiest of them all. Well, I did cheat a little by wearing an apron but that was after I remembered I had one in my bag. Stupid me! In a nutshell, the whole lesson was spent tempering chocolate via the addition method and the tabling method. One of the other methods which the handbook speaks of is the Microwave method. Obviously, we weren't going to be spending our lesson doing that. And well, after doing the tabling method once, I resorted to tempering the rest of my chocolate via the Addition method because it's so much easier and you lose less chocolate (basically you melt half your chocolate and add the other half chopped into it). With the tabling method, you're spreading the chocolate out on a marble slab to cool it down. Far out, that piece of marble is so heavy I don't understand why you would want to use it!

In addition to tempering chocolate, we made our ganache fillings for tomorrow but really, it was a short lesson. I've got to say that I'm still a big chocolate fanatic and I haven't been put off by a day's worth of chocolate making. Although making chocolate isn't exactly the most exciting patisserie lesson; maybe it'll be better tomorrow when we make filled chocolates. Looking around the class, you could really see some people getting quite bored. For me, I was happily chocolate-ing away and the double goodness was that all my trays of chocolate came up with a nice shine. Hmm....I can't exactly say that about everyone in the class. I think a lot of people were rushing their chocolate and not doing it properly. I suppose the annoying thing for me is that I have warm hands so every time I was picking up my chocolates, I needed to soak my hands for a little while in cold water. Oh...and my moulded chocolate chef, it's head kept coming off. Quite disturbing!

A good day but quite sleepy now. To everyone who celebrates Chinese New Year, Happy Chinese New Year to you all! I hope we all got a lot of red pockets :D