6.24.2010

rich doughs and a plan

wow what an overwhelming brain day!  i started the morning by watching the end of the isner-mahut match at wimbledon, which was exceptionally exciting.  i'm glad that it didn't last as long as yesterday though or i would have been extremely under-productive again today.  

after the tennis excitement subsided, i had a seriously long talk with bryan and we came up with a really great plan for the immediate to possibly long term future.  after i get done with school, i am going to head back to the big IL and get this silly knee of mine fixed.  as soon as i am able to move well enough again, i am coming back to COLORADO!!!  my husband loves me so much that he's going to finish his degree at CU, so i can stay in this beautiful place forever.  he will probably have to do a semester at the local community college before he can start at CU because he needs another physics class and more calculus before he can start the engineering program at CU, but he seems really excited by it and it should help to resolve our residency requirements as well.  out-of-state tuition would really suck.  

so after this crazy, but delightful phone call i spent several hours researching residency requirements, veteran's benefits, and all sorts of other fun stuff.  i still have a lot of figuring out to do, but it is nice to be working towards something solid.  i also did a little apartment searching and i am unbelievably excited that i get to stay.  GOD is good!

school tonight was amazing, even though i felt horribly under-prepared for my quiz.  we made pastry cream for our practical today and i was not entirely happy with the way that mine turned out.  it was pretty tasty, but not as thick as i would have liked it.  sadly i think this means that it will end up getting weepy and possibly tasting a little starchy once it has chilled overnight.  pastry cream is so much harder than it should be and sadly is extremely essential for almost every item you make in a bakery.  much more practice will be needed.  i think i did well on the written quiz though, which is good.

we started our rich doughs tonight, which include croissant, danish, and brioche.  croissant and danish dough are yeasted, laminated doughs, which make them like puff pastry only yeasty and truly delicious.  brioche isn't laminated, but it has lots of eggs and sugar and butter, which make it delightfully silky and rich.  we made the de trempe or base dough for our croissant and danish doughs and mixed our brioche doughs.  tomorrow we will fold in the butter for our croissant and danish doughs and prep the rest of the ingredients for the weekend.  it is going to be a wonderfully tasty weekend and i am going to need to eat only salad for the next several days because it will also be quite caloric.  

i am also on the bread team this week, which means i have to help make the bread for lunch on saturday.  we are having savory croissants for lunch, so i think we are going to do a lighter bread, though it seems really crazy to be making one at all.  the whole point of having a bread team is so that we get practice with baking different kinds of bread.  hopefully i will get to do it again so that i can make a more difficult bread, but i think it is crazy to make bread that no one is going to eat because we have croissant out the wazoo.  we've got at least 10 different products that we are going to make with each of our doughs so there will be tons of left overs coming home with me saturday evening. 

time to go feed my little yeasty guys before i go to sleep.

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