A glimpse of what I do in pastry school

Each lesson in school begins with a Demonstration class.

This is the only session where the Chef would show students how to prepare a dish (or pastry in my case), from mise en place to technique to final presentation, with critical details embedded throughout the session.
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Don't blink, or worst still, fall asleep or you'll miss the important tips and tricks from the Chef which will, more often than not, make or break the results of your bakes during the practicals. Just like Friday's demo session. I had shifted my attention just for a minute to fidget with my camera and failed to catch all the ingredients which must be added together. During the practical, intuitively, I mixed the dry ingredients together just as I had done at home so many times. After all, don't you always fold in the dry ingredients together? Oh boy, the correct method couldn't have been more different than what I'd done! Fortunately, Mean Chef didn't oversee our practical session, I  could correct the error and they turned out great. A huge sigh of relief. It's easy to forget sometimes that I'm in pastry school and things aren't done exactly the same way they are done at home!

We got our mid-term results this week. I'm already halfway through?! . There're so many things on my to-do-in-Paris checklist that have not been crossed off. Heck, between classes, catching up on class notes, traveling and hanging out with new friends, I haven't even found the time to post the remaining results of my initial pastry taste-tests and it's been a month and a half already? It's amazing how fast time flies and I know the next half of the semester is just going to fly by even quicker. We will have the written exam in a little over a week, with the finals a couple weeks thereafter. My midterm grades are above the group average, although I try not to put too much weight on that; we tend to have different Chefs for the practicals and each Chef has their preferred style and way of doing things, so consistency can be a challenge. I get to have a one-on-one with mean Wonderful Chef soon and I'm looking forward to that session a whole lot!