le cordon bleu - day 25, 26 & 27

What a relief that the theory and practical assessments are over! It's been a week of early mornings, strange happenings and some near misses. And well, I passed! Not sure exactly how I did and what mark I got but I gave it my best shot. I made mistakes but at the end of the day, I'm human and the teacher's are human too :P Thank god for that! But I got to say though, the beady eye of the assessor today made my stomach flip and half the time, made me think I was doing something wrong when what I was doing was perfectly fine. Funny enough, she seemed a lot nicer when I got my personal feedback at the end (maybe it was just me during the exam thinking she hated me and was going to fail me). Well, I'm glad it's all over; exams make me nervous :P

Anyway, I was speaking of strange happenings. I'm not sure what happened but on Monday after class, there was a note left on my car windscreen which said 'All entrants to Ryde college must pay parking fee' which was addressed to me from security. Well I always pay my parking fee but that morning when I drove to the college, I swear there was no one sitting in the toll booth, the gates were open; any sensible person would just drive through right? And really, if the booth was unmanned at the time, surely they couldn't chase me up for the $2 parking fee? So that got me thinking, was I so asleep that I drove through the booth with the security guard watching me? Well my classmates seemed to think so and I'm starting to think I did too :( *quite embarrassing actually* Anyhow, I didn't get chased for the $2 when I drove out. *strange enough though*.

Near misses: Argh...I absolutely hate fondant! And I officially hate eclairs! Not only did I slice my finger once again cutting open an eclair, I was nearly going to have to do a resit of the exam because my fondant wasn't shiny and hence made my product not as presentable. Seriously, my history with fondant does not look good and I doubt it will improve. I don't even understand how someone designed this product let alone eat it! Fortunately, the rest of my product was perfectly fine and I finished on time. It was actually quite a hectic day making the eclairs; about half a dozen people managed to cut themselves to varying degrees and this was made worse with a good half of the class not being able to finish on time. So a near miss yesterday and near miss today. One of my classmates blind baked my tart before it had rested properly and it just shrunk like mad. The good thing was that I still had some short pastry to do it again and can you believe it, it still shrunk despite resting it for a good 20 minutes. When I spoke to the chef, she says I've already lost marks for it which is fair enough. But hey, I still managed to get away with it at the end when I garnished my tart, you could hardly tell that it had shrunk and my tart was one of the tarts that the chef pointed out as one that someone would purchase in a store. yay! But it was definitely a close one.

And off the topic of class, I still have to thank everyone that came to my graduation, sent their well wishes or came to dinner afterwards last Friday. I'll put grad photos up on facebook soon. Simply said, Thank You!