Hi.

After Basic was complete, we had a few days off and now we are flying through Intermediate classes.  During the next few weeks, there are a lot of days where we have the class Demo immediately followed by the class Practical.  There are pros and cons for this.  On one hand, you just saw the process and hopefully were able to take some decent notes so you could properly repeat it. On the other hand, its nice and somewhat of a luxury to be able to mentally process it so you can repeat it the next day and look like you know what you are doing.   Remember we get graded on everything… method, product, hygiene and presentation. When I say hygiene I not only mean that we and our uniforms are clean, but there is no cross contamination of the product.  Where you crack and egg and what you immediately do with the shell and how many times you clean your work area during practical all count as hygiene.  But all that aside, we are plowing through Intermediate and the new norm is Practical follows Demo.

Sunday morning while walking in Hyde Park, the Royal Police or Military were practicing some maneuvers. This is the day after Harry and Megan were married.

 Quite impressive.  These pics don’t do it justice.

What to do on the last night of vacation before classes start up?  Why take a course from guest chefs from Le Cordon Bleu Mexico of course.

Elaine and I signed up for this culinary workshop.  The two chefs were Cedric Careme and Aldo Omar Morales.  The first pic is of my Mole.  So excited to cook this for Bob.  It really turned out nice.  This picture is of the early stages.  It was a beautiful dark brown color when finished.    The second pic is of the Chef Morales plating pork loin, mole, black bean puree with Chochoytes and a Mole tile.   3rd is the final product and the last is a 3-milk cake with a Genoise sponge cake, three milk syrup, Mexican vanilla ice cream and Swiss meringue.  Lovely.    I would like to have had Bob’s beans with this dish instead of the black beans the chef had us make. Bob’s have far more flavor and would have complimented this dish nicely.

On Wednesday class was back in session and we started with an easy one, a Dobos Chocolate slice cake and a Puff Pastry (from scratch) to use in the next session.  The Dobos is a sponge cake with Ganache inside and a chocolate glaze over top.  The kind you see where they just pour a ton of chocolate over something and it runs down the sides and just looks delicious.

I see this as a nice holiday cake.  Super easy to make and keep over holidays when friends stop by to say hi.

  Of course you would doctor it up a bit with holiday decoration.

Thursday was a couple technical classes and a second lecture on Cheese.  Tom Badcock is the specialist who talks about cheese and is the most passionate and animated cheese enthusiast ever.  He knows every little nuance of cheese, the history or cheese, the history of cows, of whey of … everything that has a remote connection to cheese.  He buys cheese and purposely waits for the expiration date to pass so the cheese can continue to ferment for some time.  We have to taste a lot of cheese in this class and when it came to the really old stuff, it was all I could do to take  an ever so slight pencil eraser size piece just so I could say I did it.    I had really bad dreams that night about old economics classes and I blame the cheese.

On Friday we made Pithiviers and Mille-feuille aux Fraises.  Yum on both accounts.

The Pithiviers is a puff pastry in the form a cake with almond cream inside.  Really light and delicious.  The Mille-feuille is a puff pastry base that isn’t allowed to rise with a Mousseline cream mixed with fresh strawberries and a fondant top.  Wow.  This one is over the top and sinfully good.  You really can’t stop to think of the calories in this one.  (Mousseline  cream is a basic pastry cream with lots of butter added.)

Saturday was a full day of classes.  We created a Brioche dough and more puff pastry dough for next week.  Then we also prepared a basic bun dough for Hot cross buns and Devonshire splits which we made that day.

Bun dough is super simple and kind of fun to make.  Actually relaxing in a way.

The Devonshire Splits are in the back.  They have jam inside and whipped cream peeking out.  They’re OK.  Not quite like a donut.  Frankly not as good but do compliment a cup of coffee as do the Hot Cross Buns.

Just to show you what I’m walking into on this Tuesday’s class, here is a picture of what the Chef created in a couple of hours. No problem.

Well it was a short week last week and today, Monday the 28th is a Bank Holiday here so we had the day off.  I start again tomorrow making pasties galore.   I hope everyone back home had a nice Memorial Day weekend.

So I now have Dobos, Pithiviers, Mille-feuille aux Fraises, Devonshire splits and Hot Cross buns in my fridge.  There is also one container of yogurt, some almond milk and OJ ( … with juicy bits.  What’s that all about?  Don’t try and make pulp sound appealing.)

Talk later.

Mel