split pea soup

. . .

It is done. I graduated from baking school – with honours. I didn’t even fall off the stage. And for the first time in months, I’ve got time to do stuff. It has been an adjustment; I mostly sit around and make lists of stuff I should do, and then wander aimlessly doing other stuff. On the plus side, I’ve had a lot more time to enjoy all that is 2.0. The other night, for example, he came home from work and cheerfully exclaimed, “there’s a two ton hairball at work! They’re cutting it apart with chainsaws because it’s too heavy to lift!”

(This is why I’ll never be a famous food blogger. You’re not supposed to write about hairballs.)

coffee cake muffins

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Remember what it was like when you had time to sit down with a cup of tea? To sit down at all? Lately, those days seem few and far between. I’ve started my work term at a bakery about 45 minutes outside of the city, and my Real Job duties hit a feverish pitch at this time of year. There are lists everywhere. Dance costumes litter the second floor of our house. Chores have been left undone. Things – all sorts of things – are piled everywhere. I did, however, manage to sort through my kit from baking school, and I thought you might enjoy seeing what I had to lug around on my back all year. Et voilà:

baking school instagrammed

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Last Friday, we shut down the kitchen at baking school, and I cleaned out my locker. On Monday, we wrote our final exam. This is how my iPhone recorded the year:

Remember September? When we all thought baking school was going to kill me? Remember those ridiculous lockers? We battled with them all year. It took a few weeks to master taking a run at ’em to get our gear wedged in. (Forget about getting it back out.) There were uniforms, kits and textbooks, wine tours and our first loaves of bread. At the end of the month I gave myself a 10% chance of graduating.

snowball cookies

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How’s about a little baking school update? I’m on a new team – there are four of us. We’re basically the Spice Girls. There have been some oven mitt hive-fives and baking success all round. In the past three weeks we’ve learned to make: pain au levain, pain rustique, pain pugliese, ciabatta, gluten-free baguettes and flatbread, gluten-free muffins and cakes, sweet dough, bagels, pretzels, english muffins and pizza dough. It has been epic fun. Next week, we hit the Station of Dread. I don’t know what happens over there but there have been tears and a LOT of cursing. Yikes.

honey gingerbread

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I survived the cake station. You were probably wondering – perhaps even fretting – so I thought I should tell you that yes, I survived the final station of my first baking school rotation. I was uber prepped. I didn’t sleep all week. My jelly roll got rolled, my black forest cake got tricked out, and my angel food cake was a delight. I mise en placed the crap outta that station. I took organization to the next level. When one of my teammates was struggling with his products, my chef instructor jabbed his finger toward me and yelled, “DON’T YOU HELP HIM!” I was elated. I mean, I felt bad for my teammate, but the mere suggestion that I have a working knowledge of anything at school – which could, in turn, be useful to someone else – made me wanna bring in ‘da noise and possibly ‘da funk.