A week in and counting

Sorry for the delay in posting, I've had a couple of early mornings the past few days which has left me exhausted. On Sunday I had my second day of school. The first hour was spent hearing from one of the career specialists at the school. She came in and talked to us about volunteer opportunities and how our externships will work. We went around the room and introduced ourselves to her and then said what we would like to do after culinary school. I was the only person who said that they want to be a pastry chef; which was pretty funny. Anyhow, it turns out that it is a possibility that I will get to do my externship with my favorite pastry chef! I was pretty excited to hear that. After we got that information our chef/instructor came in and began the day's lessons. I don't remember all that we did because it was eight hours of lessons, but I do remember that it involved math...

Yuck... Luckily it was some pretty simple math. Although I do have to admit that I always thought that my teachers were lying when they said that I would use algebra later in life. Who knew? After we got done with the math portion of the day we moved onto baking! We made chocolate chip cookies. For all of the baking, you work with a partner. It would have been fine except that I'm a control freak and my partner thought that anything I said was wrong. (Which by the way it wasn't.) Luckily we switch off to a new partner every class. Our cookies turned out alright, but someone didn't measure the chocolate chips before we put them in, so the cookies turned out a little weird, though very delicious. The recipe made somewhere around 36 cookies, I only took a couple home because I didn't really need 18 cookies to eat by myself... (look I just used math again!) Here's a picture of the finished product:

After we made cookies, we moved onto making cornets (aka paper cones), cornets are used to pipe chocolate for decorating and writing. They're made with parchment paper, I forgot to take a picture of them, but if you're curious I'm sure there's a picture on Google. At some point I was told that I needed to go to the registrar's after class. I was then nervous for the rest of class thinking that I was going to be kicked out of school or something. (which is weird since I'm never anxious about anything.) So my chocolate piping was kind of crappy because my hand was almost shaking and all I could think about was getting kicked out.  Well, it turns out that they just needed me to fill out a form for emergency contacts... hahaha. After school I went to the subway to go home and I not only didn't get lost but I gave directions to a foreign couple! I felt so proud.
On Monday, I started at Starbucks. I had to get up at 5am which was not too fun, but I made it to work and back home later without getting lost and without having to look at Google maps! I can pretty much only get to school or the upper west side of Manhattan though; anywhere else and I would probably get lost at least twice. That's about it for now, I have to make a ton of cornets for homework this week and do some reading. Talk to you soon!
-Kayla