Baking, Sore feet, and hat hair

Whew, it has been a busy few days. I closed at Starbucks on Friday night and then had school the next morning. One of my co-workers asked me to trade shifts with them and work on Saturday night. So, right after school I rode uptown to work and closed and then had to get up bright and early for school the next morning. I thought that my field trip was this last weekend, but it turns out that it will be this coming weekend. So I should have lots to blog about next weekend. We did a lot of baking in class this weekend and even though I only had a bite of all that we made, I went to work on Saturday night with a terrible stomach ache. Too much sugar! Right now we're learning about eggs and such, so on Saturday we made meringues and flourless souffles. We made "ordinary" meringues and also Swiss meringue. Oh I forgot we also made a chocolate mousse as well. The meringue was made into cookies which we sprinkled coco powder on.

This is the chocolate mousse with a meringue cookie in it

After the mousses and meringues, we moved on to our first souffles. The most basic souffles are flourless. First we made a chocolate one - which I didn't get pictures of, but don't worry they did not turn out great haha - and then we made strawberry ones (I should say that my partner and I made strawberry, other groups did different flavors. Here they are pre-baking:

and post baking:

It's pretty hard to get a good picture of a souffle because they start deflating right away. I had never had a souffle so I was pretty interested in trying them. Our chocolate ones didn't look great, but they tasted so good. We added coffee in with the chocolate and it was delicious! That day we also made buttercream frosting, which we again added coffee to and it was the best frosting I've ever had. After our meringue cookies were done, we piped some buttercream onto them. I think that's all we made on Saturday, onto Sunday!

On Sunday it was all about gelatin. We started by making some marshmallows:

You can't see it that well, but that is just a sheet of marshmallow (with a little powdered sugar to stop it from sticking). I put vanilla bean into mine. I made them all by myself because my partner did not show up for class on Sunday. After marshmallows we made panna cotta. I chose to do the vanilla instead of chocolate and the recipe ended up calling for too much gelatin, so it was pretty solid once it set (the other two groups that made the vanilla had the same result). I didn't get any pictures of that either. (Sorry!) After panna cotta we moved on to gelées (by this point I had joined a group, because the rest of the baking was a little more intensive). They're kind of like jello except not as solid. For these and the souffles we made later, we got to use sheet gelatin which was pretty cool. Anyhow, we made champagne gelée with fresh raspberries:

Hey you can see someone else's panna cotta in the background!

These look really pretty but tasted soo boozy it was ridiculous (it might have to do with the fact that there was a whole bottle of champagne in them). Although once we added a quenelle of whipped cream it was pretty good. The last portion of our day was spent making flour based souffles. First we made chocolate (sorry forgot pictures), second was pistachio (again no pictures), and third was lemon:

These had already fallen a bit because I had to wait to take a picture, but they came out perfect!

The lemon were so good! I actually ate a whole one rather than a tiny bite, we even put a raspberry in the bottom which made it even better. So far this is my favorite thing that we've made, I recommend making lemon souffle if you're looking for a new dessert to try. They weren't very difficult to make either. I think that's it as far as school goes.

This weekend I had a revelation that I will never have a good hair day in New York. I have to wear my hair up and a hat at Starbucks and at school. So my hair pretty much looks like a disaster at all times. I'm happy to report that I haven't forgotten to wear my glasses lately so I've actually been able to see, which is nice. Otherwise things are going pretty well, getting a little homesick every now and then but still liking it here. Things are going really well at Starbucks, today my manager asked me if it would be ok to schedule me between 34 and 40 hours every week, which was awesome. I've had a couple of funny interactions with customers this week, so I thought that'd I would share.

Funny story 1:

There is a regular who comes in every day and he is probably mid - late twenties and he's pretty nice. Well last week when he came in there was a horrible construction noise happening which prompted the following conversation.

Customer: "Oh my gosh that noise is horrible..."

Me: "yeah it's been going on for a good hour, it's driving me crazy."

Customer: "It's sounds like robots farting..."

Me: "..."

Customer: "it definitely sounds like robots farting."

Me: "Well, that seems to be the only logical explanation."

Customer: "either that or it's the noise from Inception."

After he walked away I laughed so hard I almost cried. He must have said "robots farting" at least five times. I was dying. haha

Funny story 2 and 3

The next stories actually take place in the same day/shift and both were customers hitting on me in really lame ways. The first customer was around my age and had ordered two drinks. He said that the one was for a girl he liked that probably didn't like him. Then he said that if things didn't work out with her he might have to come back and give the latte to me, which prompted this:

Me: "Well, actually I get drinks for free here, so that's not very tempting..."

Customer: "Well, there's other stuff, like I'm really good at giving hugs and stuff too."

Me: ... (as I hand him his drinks) "Good luck with that girl!"

Weirdly enough this didn't come off as creepy, the guy was really nice/sweet, it just made me laugh really hard. 

The second customer to hit on me that night was some older guy who asked me if I wanted to split his coffee with him... I again had to state that this was not a great offer, since I get all the coffee I want for free. So work has been pretty entertaining to say the least. I think that's all for now, I have to go to bed soon since I need to get up at 3am tomorrow to open :-( Hope everyone's doing well! 

-Kayla

P.s. I got a private mailbox so I can get mail! I don't really want to post the address here, but if you'd like to get it you can email me at kaygriffi@gmail.com