Tuesday & Wednesday

The Creme Brulee turned out great and we learned two techniques for making the brulee part of the creme brulee. Other than that we worked on various pie crusts and pie fillings, choc. chip cookies, butter tea cookies, cakes for the advanced baking class and made an attempt at angel food cake. Angel food cake is incredibly picky and is easy to ruin. It turned out that were were a little bit premature on removing them from the oven and they fall apart so we couldn't use them. They were still pretty dang tasty but damaged so they were unable to be used. We also made some orange and apple juice sorbet which was really good and surprisingly easy to make.

Today we made more pies. I made and rolled the pie crusts which is pretty dang time consuming but worth it for awesome crusts. We made apple, strawberry rhubarb, and coconut cream pies. More cakes, cookies, brownies, cupcakes, etc. Its all starting to blur together but I am learning more and more everyday while we make really tasty stuff. I think I have cracked close to 100 eggs over the past 3 days. I am very good at it now. The last time I had to Separate 24 yolks for one recipe and I managed to not break any of the yolks.

As we were making sorbet I learned that It requires a PH balance. Usually done by an acidic main ingredient and balanced with simple sugar. The neat trick for finding the right balance is to take an egg, wash and sanitize the outside then place it in the acidic liquid, add the simple sugar until the egg floats with a portion of the egg (about the size of a quarter) breaking the surface like an iceberg. Thanks to an awesome Culinary grade ice cream machine we had sorbet in a little over 7 minutes which was very nice to have in a very hot and humid kitchen.

After all this I got to thinking about what you could put in a sorbet with it still turning out right. I asked chef Foote if a watermelon, cucumber sorbet is possible. His response? "Lets find out!"

Tomorrow should be interesting.