It's February!!

YAY! One more month down! 3 more, that's it!! Woot!

Anyway, finished up the Skills PEI competition yesterday - what a long day! I don't know what my marks were - as a nice kick in the ass at the end of 2 days, they wouldn't tell us. We just know who got 1st-3rd and the rest of us were left out in the dust. But we did get a "Participant" plaque. Overall, I'm happy with what I produced. I think if I'd changed one of my french pastries, I would have done better, but oh well! Here are the pics!

First up is my chocolates, all presented! We had to do 2 chocolates, 12 each and a chocolate box that could hold at least 5 of each. On the left are Bahos which are a Ginger-Lime Caramel in a molded White Chocolate. On the right are my Anise Stacks which I had pictured before. My Anise Stacks turned out worse than in class - the smaller batch just didn't work as nicely as the big batch. The molded chocolates however turned out nicer. The box I wasn't so pleased with in all honesty. I liked my other one better. But Chef Pam had said that my last one was too thing, so I tried making this one thicker and it just made it a bit uglier. Bleh.


My pride and joy - Miniature Dobos Tortes. One of my french pastries. I was totally making this up as I went along and they turned out so nice! I love 'em! A Dobos is a classical torte that is layers of chocolate sponge cake and chocolate buttercream (typically about 6 layers of each...I cut it back to 3 layers) with pieces of caramel on top. These just looked so great and I was so happy with them!


My birthday cake! Can you spot the mistake?

My uglier "I can speel gud" birthDay cake! Overall, I suck at piping and so it wasn't so great. This was the absolutely last thing I did. As much as it sucks, this is WAY better than anything I could have hoped to accomplish prior to coming to culinary school, so that says something!


My mousse cake on a tile and with a piece presented. Man I was happy with this too! The checkerboard was PERFECT. Except something happened when I took it off the wire rack after ganaching it and the bottom square of mousse on the right got scraped away, causing my cake to be lopsided. Oh well. What matters is that if I could send you flavour over the internet, your mouth would be in heaven right now. It tasted DIVINE.


This is a picture of how dirty I was! The cameraphone kinda white-washes things, so this doesn't do justice to how dirty I was. I had dripped cherry juice all down one side of me.


One of my classmates, Josh. This is his Plan C for a chocolate box - paint a paper bag with chocolate and then pull away the paper. The funny thing is that if he had painted a few more layers of chocolate, it would have worked!


7:31!! All our stuff had to be out by 7:30, so 7:31 was a great time!

My stuff after the judges were done picking it over. A lot of people didn't like my Religeuse - the pink things. I took a chance with that. It's a classical but rare dessert. Oh well, it was something different, which is what I was going for!


Now for the competitors! Here's a few pictures of what my classmates produce. First I've got a picture of Josh's stuff. I don't actually know what it all is. But here's a look!


This is Stephanie's stuff. She got 2nd place. I was really impressed with her Chocolate Box.


And now for the winner. I was REALLY happy with who won - Courtney! She wanted to win SO bad and so I'm glad she did. Plus everything she made was wicked! Here is a picture of her Birthday cake which was just ridiculous. The piping of Happy Birthday is just amazing. Her chocolate box is beside it and it had a very unique shape, yet actually very easy to do. Looked great though!


The rest of Courtney's stuff. She made a (don't quote me on this) Rasperry Pistachio Opera Cake - that's what's in the white thingies. I don't know what the other 6 French Pastries are. Once again, the piping on the top of her Mousse Cake is just really impressive.


And here's the team! I was trying desperately not to fall into the sink during this picture.