Relief

YIPPEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!
Sorry, had to get that out of the way... Today was my written and practical exam. The written portion took place first and I had not studied very much so I was pretty nervous. After the written part we had to make a creme anglaise and then souffles. For the practical we worked by ourselves instead of with a partner. For the souffles we had to time things correctly because we had a window of time in which we were to present them to the chef. The creme anglaise was first and it is a pretty easy thing to make, the only way that you can really screw it up is if you don't temper the eggs properly which makes it so that you scramble them. I finished and the chef came to check it out and said that it was "very good." :-) So then I moved onto doing the mis en place for my souffles. I made the souffles and put them into the oven and was fairly nervous that they were not going to turn out so great. The good thing about this portion of the practical was that we only had to have one souffle turn out perfect to present to the teacher. Crazily enough, all of my souffles turned out lovely. I presented one to her and she stated that it was "beautiful" (!!!!) I was so excited! Then I got to see my grades for the whole exam. Drumroll please... Out of a possible 200 pts I received  198! I missed one question on my written portion, so that was the 2 points. I felt great after that and was thrilled with the result.

I never wrote about last Sundays lesson so here you go! We took the choux (puff pastry) that we had made the day before and filled them with pastry cream. We ended up making cream puffs, eclairs, paris brest and some lovely swans. One pastry cream was vanilla and the other was praline (it pretty much tasted like Nutella - so in other words it was delicious). We took the cream puffs and assembled them into a croquembouche. A croquembouche is a traditional French wedding cake and is a tower of cream puffs bound with caramel. The ones that we made were pretty small - and also not very nice looking. Without further ado here is my personal croquembouche:

It doesn't look great and it cost me a blister and a singed fingernail, but it could have been worse I suppose. We only did one lesson last Sunday because the second half of the day was spent with career services updating our resumés and discussing our options down the road for externships. Well that's it for school, I'll leave you with a couple of funny stories from work.
1. A Jewish lady that comes into my store thinks that I'm Jewish... I think it has to do with the fact that she heard me saying that I don't eat pork and also because I said that I love to bake Challah. Either way it's pretty funny and I'm not sure how to break it to her that I am indeed not Jewish.
2. One of my coworkers thought that I was Spanish... She swears that she heard me speaking Spanish to a customer. I had to break it to her that I indeed am the whitest person imaginable and cannot speak Spanish to save my life...
3. My coworkers keep telling me how funny I am. In my head they're saying "Oh my gosh you're sooo funny - you should be a standup comedian!" While in reality they might actually be saying, "You're so funny... I think you might be mentally ill." I'm going to keep thinking the first one. ;-)

Hope that you're all well. Love and miss all of you!
-Kayla

P.S. I wanted to quickly put all of your minds at ease. I always close with the same shift supervisor at work and he also lives in Queens. So, we get to ride the train together and I get off the train before him - so I'm never on the train by myself late at night, so you can all breathe easy :-)