practical exam

After a long weekend, We were in the kitchen for the practical exam. Being the 3rd group in the exam day, nothing is too exciting as students from the other two groups told us most of the info.

Among three recipes, (pithiviers, St honore and Dacquoise)random draw one and finish it within 2.5hr. Plus to lined a tart ring with short crust pastry. Even and with 90 degree from the rim to the bottom.

I drew the easiest one, Dacquoise. If you remember the 70s marzipan rose and the butter cream with 350g butter. That’s a really exciting session while I got quite a lot of time to beat my egg white and butter cream, at the same time watched my fellow buddies work on their cake.

To make the atmosphere more like an exam, chef kept yelling and pushing us to finish asap. I’m lucky that i don’t speak French at all so that i actually ignored him and worked on my own. Some classmate told me that they are so annoyed by his mean pushing and almost made her cry!!

I beat crazy with the butter cream and when I started to assemble the rose, my hand was actually shaking. Here’s the steps:

Everything handed in on time and my cake was just fine. looking at the others with the puff pastry, I’d imagine if I made that, I must have rolled it like a tart. Exam is just like another lesson which the chef would come by and show u How to make it right. Sometimes i’d happy to have it once in 3 weeks so that I can used to work under stress and feel the excitement in the kitchen, I indeed enjoy that ^o^

before written exam

Didn’t show up for quite a while. Lazy is the reason, exam is the excuse.

I was not nervous or stressed, but some of my classmates really did. For the written exam, it’s like 40 multiple choice and true or false.
Haven’t been in an exam for almost 12 yrs., it’s so much fun to attend an exam, which is about patisserie.

To cope with such leisure topic, I better put myself in a leisure mood. So I headed to a park to study and made a visit at a nearby museum.

(These are the posters I saw in a metro, that they are actually juxtaposed in the same compartment.)

When I finished my study, under the sunshine and on the lawn, I visited Musee Nissim de Camondo. It was a living mansion at the turn of the 20th century, a part of the house was turned into a museum and remain a huge collection of painting and furniture.
Inside the house, seemed that every single piece of wood and bronze should be carved into some pattern or animals.


Typical French. but the most impressive is the kitchen. See the first time somebody has the same idea with me. The ceiling of the kitchen are cover with tiles so as greasy would be easily removed. And the cooking utensils are made of bronze, even the whisk! Oven and stove are beautifully made of iron…

Oh-la la, this is just the kitchen I want and it’s not fancy at all. And suddenly it seemed that what I did is related to the ‘exam’ i was prepare for, so, I’m still not too lazy~~

so back to the written exam, the MC Question about how many % of sugar in Chantilly cream? How much dry butter require in a croissant recipe for 1 kg of flour? What’s the temperature when sugar syrup heat to caramel?….. maybe the first time I’m interested in the content of the exam and try to find out the answer because I WANT to know.
For the recipe part, just fill in the blanks of some of the missing quantity or items within 6 recipes. It’s patisserie, other then flour, sugar, butter.. nothing is too difficult to memorize.( I got 100 for this part^o^)