Week 2: Custards, crèmes and a case of vertigo

Need to work on that piping, straight lines aren’t happening just yet…

So, I mostly survived my second week. Mostly. This week the focus was on custards, stirred and baked, which meant that I got to make crème brûlée, crème caramel and crème anglaise, with a couple of extra bits on the side.

To start this week I had a two hour lecture on teamwork in the kitchen and the effectiveness of an action plan when cooking. It was mostly common sense, but that’s ok. It was still interesting to hear from a chef’s perspective how they seem teamwork in the kitchen. And how they plan their time. The action plan was kind of interesting, but also really pretty much just writing down a logical way of doing things. Still, pretty useful thing to have when you’re in the heat of the moment in the kitchen, maybe panicking a little, definitely could have used one last week…

My first demo and practical this week were focused on crème brûlée, tuile biscuits and making a coulis to go with it. We also had to think about plating for the first time, how were we going to present this dessert? We worked in pairs and individually to do different tasks throughout the practical, making 8 crème brûlées, one batch of tuile dough and one lot of raspberry coulis between two of us. However, we had to “brûlée” (the sugar topping) and make our tuiles separately and our plates were judged on an individual basis, not as a pair. I did pretty ok for my first marked practical!

Then after class I went and did some more flat/house viewings and after a month of looking, I found my new home! I’m very much looking forward to moving in next weekend. Exciting times!

This was the chef’s from the demo, need to remember to take actually decent pictures of mine…

Unfortunately, this went downhill the next day. I woke up feeling immensely ill and with a huge amount of vertigo. Because of this, I decided to stay in bed and miss my demo class and see how I felt later about going in for my practical. Thankfully, I felt mostly ok again, and went in. Unfortunately, I hadn’t realised that my attendance for my demo and practical were linked, so I would be down as an absence anyway and wouldn’t be marked in my practical. The chef would give me feedback, but couldn’t give me any formal marking for the day. I’m not at all sure I agree with this way of doing things, especially as I did a pretty decent job (my crème anglaise was banging…), but them’s the rules. The crème anglaise was pretty fun to do, as was the crème caramel, although mine and my partner’s were a little over baked. We also had to make sugar cages for our presentation, and mine was genuinely appalling. Definitely needs work…

Then Saturday came and my Level 2 Food Safety course took place. If you ever decide you want to do a Level 2 Food Safety course just for a laugh, don’t. You have to sit through six hours of really quite tedious lectures (however nice and funny your teacher is), and then sit a multiple choice test, which frankly you could probably have passed with just your common sense before the six hours of sitting in a classroom feeling not very well because your vertigo still hasn’t fully passed. Would not recommend.

But, I survived. Week 2 done, crèmes brûléed, new house found and apple pie made. All in all, pretty decent week!