Graduation!!!

Hey guys!!! 

I'm finally touching on the super last entry which will sum up/round up/give a closure to the whole study duration I had, in Bangkok!

A.k.a MY GRADUATION CEREMONY! 

I value this diploma ceremony so much more than the one back in Singapore - I was supposed to receive my Business related diploma in Singapore sometime in Oct'13, but of course, as I wasn't in town, all I remembered was "whatever! It's not important to me yo!"

In any case, I already got the original certificate. That was just the ceremony, plus all of my classmates has long graduated way before me, I'll be all alone sitting for hours while waiting for my name to be called.

Anyway!!

First up first! Right before the ceremony, Ben and myself headed down to Terminal 21 at Sukhumvit so that I can get dolled up! I left my Bare Minerals Make up products back home, so the next best thing was to go to some beauty booth and get them to doll me up while I spend money on their products.

This was done by MAC's Make up artist!

I looked really natural with smooth skin in photos, but in reality, I feel like the make up is really a little too thick - like those typical Thai ladies who dress up all the time type.

In any case, I resisted the urge to remove my make up and just go for it! Look pretty in graduation photos is way more important!

Here's a picture of me and my lovely mummy in school! We all had to change into our uniforms for the last time before the ceremony. Mum and my brothers flew down to Bangkok just for me! :D

A picture of us both, with the LCB's signature teddy bear! So cute and flurry!! 

Lovely Jane and 85% of my face! 

The sisters! I'm obviously the oldest, followed by Mew, and the youngest of us all, Charmaine! Chef Aum kept commenting that we were like sisters! 

Team Awesome!! Charmaine, Tip, Mew, Framm and myself!! I miss you guys!!! 

A blurry shot of SP (B) and SP (D) and SP (A)!

And finally,  tadah!!!!!

I've obtained my "dodin bouffant" a.k.a chef toque, certificate and of course, my medal!! 

A picture from Ben's point of view!

All of us had a glass of champagne for toasting! Here's Char, myself, Poon and Jane! 

So much emotions going through my mind at that point of time! Excited, happy, sad, relived, determined, etc. It was like a rollercoaster of feelings! Looking forward to what life have to offer, excited to begin, yet sad because all good things come to an end.

I am grateful that I have the support of my family members, my husband and basically every kind soul I've been in contact; they'll always offer their best wishes to me, give me support and encouragement, allowing me to feel confident in myself and in my skills...

Without my family, I won't be able to venture this far.

After the whole giving out of medals and certification ceremony, it was time for buffet and also, photo taking session!

Here's Sabeel with Mew and myself. We all promised to stay in contact, but this fellow disappeared from the moment he left for Malaysia! Yes, he's a malaysian! If you know him, please send me his contact details or something to my email please! He has no Facebook though, and our old clique is always asking about him.

Prapone and I! With a smiling Sine at the back! He's a teacher by nature, so everyone calls him "teacher" as a form of respect. But not me, sorry! It's been a pleasure to have met you during my study period, and I'm glad we Facebook to keep in touch! He's a avid photographer and his Facebook feed is always full of yummilicious looking desserts, cakes, of nature and animals.

The usual suspects with Way. 

Chef Aum with the "famous" sisters! Charmaine got graduation flowers from her lovely relatives! :D 

More photos! 

My world and I. 

And with that, marks the end of my culinary journey at one of the world's best schools!

It's been a journey filled with tears and joy, and happiness! The time I spent there will never be forgotten, the skills I've learned will always be with me until the day I stopped baking/practising.

With a heavy heart, I packed up and cleared my lovely apartment, ready to head back on a plane to Singapore. This was all that I have, to bring back home nearly 10months of memories. I'll miss waking up to chirpy birds, taking the motorcycle ride to the MRT Station...having a hot cappuccino and wolfing down plain cream cheese bagel before a morning demo class.

I'll miss listening to Chef Fabrice/Willy/Marc talk about cakes, technique or hygiene...showing us how impossible is possible, baking, working together with my friends, having that minced pork basil mushroom rice right next to school for lunch.

Miss heading to the malls after school just to take a walk, catch a movie, visit the Robinsons and Central's kitchen section to hunt for new pastry related tools...or travel all the way down to One Stop Bakery to buy equipments and tools to bring home.

I'll also miss the food we can get from the daily hawkers along the road, except for Sundays; they seemed to take a day off on Sundays - the chicken rice, the curry noodles, the braised pig trotter's rice and the endless stalls of local delights.

But one have to always move on.

It's never easy; sometimes at the end of the journey, we will wonder, what's there left for us.

Sometimes I feel lost all over again; like there's no goal in life anymore. But that's not true! We have to always keep challenging ourselves to make full use of the time we have,build new dreams, create new goals. After my studies, I naturally thought that I would try to start working in a well-established company where I get to bake/assemble and do pretty much what I was taught in school to do.

I didn't want to lose the skills and knowledge which I have; but I soon fell into disrepair when Paul didn't work out for me. I was afraid that my creativity will soon die off, and so many other things.

Plus...it could be because of the erratic working hours, my body couldn't cope and went into shock - I was later diagnosed with  Hypothyroidism where I am now required to take medication for life. I was initially pretty upset at all the possible aftermath of having this condition, furthermore I was gaining weight faster than a bullet train. I had most of the symptoms , but have always thought I was just too tired because of the midnight shift, my body isn't coping very well etc. It broke me deep down to find that I had this condition just out of the blue, like that. 

I'm fine now! Under the doctor's care and daily intake of medication, my hormones level is now back to normal, and I feel less fatigue now as compared to before too! 

I also have a new goal in life! I have a upcoming job where I'm a pastry chef working alongside with a nice lady boss (Head pastry chef) and our goals and visions are almost the same! I can't wait to get started, and I hope that this new career change can finally revive the "me" when I was in Bangkok more than half a year ago.

Time waits for no one, and I always knew that.

I'm due to start sometime end of this month, and while the beginning is always the toughest, I hope that all will work out in time to come, and I hope to share more/blog more!

In the meantime, stay tuned for a few more entries where I will share a few of my own works during my short hiatus!

Till then!!

Baking - Final Exam (Entremet)

Hello Peeps!!

Since I've got bitten by the blogging bug, I've decided to just go all the way and clear as many back log as I can!

For the longest time since before the end of last year, I'm pretty sure my friends (those who have been following my blog since the beginning would love to see the very first cake I've created from scratch right!)

Today's blog entry is on my final exam entremet!! 

To be honest, our batch has got to be the luckiest batch so far in LCB's Bangkok!

Reason being, we get to create a cake from scratch!!! The past batches had to create a main entremet and petit fours, but using only one flavour or something. Our exam theme was Christmas Cake, seeing that it's December, and we have to create one new entremet with flavours consisting of dark chocolate AND banana, along with 3 other petit entremets of the same cake.

Our entremet has to be made up of 4 components, not including glaze. 

The moment Chef Fabrice announced our exam topic, the whole demo room burst into anatomies of excitement and panic mode.I can sense everyone's brain started to run through all the ideas and possibilities there can ever be into creating this cake.

Mew started to blabber some ideas and her biggest idea was Harry Potter related, my own mind was driving on adrenaline, churning out ideas after ideas, and basically, our super awesome group started to have insomnia, just staying up all night racking our brains harder than anything else!

Cake can seriously make you sleepless, I tell ya. Like what Chef Willy is always saying "I think of cake before I sleep. I think of cake when I wake up".

That was all that was on my mind - Cake.

We had to do a report with diagrams, clear written recipes and also do up a ordering form consisting of the exact amount of total ingredients required for our examination cake.

This was what I had in mind - I called my cake "forêt enchantée" because I wanted to create a christmas cake with lots of trees, a play between white and dark chocolate triangle decoration, and since I have mentioned to Mew before (a insider joke), I like guys with hot bod, so I shall create a "naked" cake, by using cake crumbs to glaze my cake instead of using an actual glaze.

There was endless possiblities, but I decided to play safe with my flavours, going with a crunchy hazelnut bottom, salted caramel cremeux, with a layer of sauted banana, chocolate flourless sponge and complete with a dark chocolate mousse.

The only challenge we have, was of us not having a kitchen of our own to practice baking!

We needed to experiment with baking - taking note of how well the flavours worked together, the time taken to complete the whole process etc.

Luckily for us, we had our good friend, Jane to help source for a rental kitchen, in a small baking supplier's store, where the owner was a former student at LCB. All in all, I spent close to 1700 plus baht for about 5 hours for the rental of the kitchen, on top of that, we had to purchase ingredients as well from the shop itself, spending another 1500baht at the shop - on chocolate, decorative gold leaf, flour etc.

The space at the rental studio was pretty big, we used all 6 tables available, fully utilise the portable stove and cake mixers in the shop, and the endless pots and pans and mixer bowls. There was 4 of us, and we all worked well together to fully utilise the oven, baking and tasting and assembling the cake components. I even managed to temper the chocolate using cocoa butter and spread on chocolate sheets for decorations.

The best part was - we didn't have to do any wash up! There was two store assistant in the kitchen to help wash and clean after us, so it was pure bliss and lesser time wasted on cleaning up!=D Well worth the money spent, I would say!

The first trial went well! But I was hardly happy with my final product! It looked so good on screen than in reality, how ever, I must say - It looks exactly as how I drew it on screen. HAHA!

The powdered red sponge crumbs was a hassle to make, and when I started to dress my cake, it looked kinda messy. In fact, the whole cake looked so bad! It was missing something, and I didn't like to use the raspberries at all, it's kinda extra to be on top of a cake that has no raspberry component within it.

The flavours all was really good, because caramel is one of the complimentary flavours which goes well with banana!

Below, is a picture of my petit entremet of the same cake. 

Mew, Jane and myself then packed up and left the studio, returning in another week's time for a final practice before the actual exam.

This time with Framm, I lugged along my trusty beloved IKEA stroller, filled with all of my tools and equipments and ingredients! I seriously looked like an auntie, but it was worth it - espeically when at the end of the practice, the rest was lugging heavy bags of tools while I just pulled my stroller along.HAHA!

Truth to be told, we were really scared to head out during that period of time because the riots in Bangkok was on going, just that day itself when we were in the studio kitchen baking, there was a bomb incident nearby, resulting in us being wary of our surrounding and returning home earlier as possible.

Charmaine, my good friend and classmate also came over to my place for a stay over, for fear that the riots/protests near her place will result in her being late for school and exams.

The traffic was slightly bad, but as we were all heavily dependent on the trains for transport, we were really lucky that the protest didn't occur very near our apartments.

After serious racking and going ideas after ideas, I decided to go ahead with a 50/50 chocolate mirror glaze!

***

This was the end product of my exam entremet - which, to my delight, was the first Christmas looking cake Chef Willy (Who was giving comments and grading) had seen so far during the cake workshop practice. He said the flavours was perfect, I didn't have to change the components. But the only thing is that I didn't managed to glaze well, and my sides was a little untidy, which he then suggest to me to cover up the sides with chocolate squares or something.

He also didn't like the white "christmas lights" which I've used on my dark chocolate "christmas trees" because he didn't like transfer sheets that much.

The thing is, I really liked that christmas light feel. I liked this transfer sheet so much I bought a couple of it to bring home. But since he was one of the judges, I decided to heed his advice and do without it during my actual exam.

A look at my petit four - the cake was so well received by the tasters, and that boosted my confidence by a huge leap! I was more or less rest assured already of my taste, and I looked forward to finishing up my last exam!

Within a week, the day for the exam arrived, and in a blink of an eye (Or rather afters close to 6 hours), we baked, assembled and presented our lovely creations to the judges for final tasting, final judging and final presentation - it was such an important day, that we even had a guest judge, Chef Joël Robuchon! It was such an honour! 

I'm proud to present to you, my exam piece..

 Forêt enchantée !!!

We presented our cakes in the exam room in such a manner - one 18cm entremet, alongside with 3 petite entremets; one with full decoration, one half with the intersection showing, and one fully glazed. 

Like I've mentioned, I've decided to heed Chef Willy's suggestions to do without the transfer sheet. I decorated the "trees" with gold and silver powder instead. And included a round of chocolate squares to cover up my glaze as well. 

The one and only mistake I made, and which to me, I wanted to kick myself in the ass so hard is that - my chocolate was too thick. 

Seriously...of all the chocolate lessons I've been through, this is the first time my chocolate is so thick. I really really have no clue at all, until it was time to assemble my cake, I was like staring real hard at the thickness, I thought there was something wrong with my eyesight!!! 

I remove maximum chocolate when I was spreading my chocolate on the sheets, so the only reason I can conclude is that, I may have grab the wrong steel bars; instead of 2mm ones, I may have grabbed the 3mm ones in a haste. =( 

In any case, the exam was finally over, and I was in a jovial, relief mood!! What's done has been done, I can't reverse that, but I really was feeling so happy, so delightful. Ben was also in town, giving me all the moral support I need!

I truly enjoyed the planning and the execution process. The end result was important, but it wasn't as important as the process itself.

Here's a picture of my petite entremet! Many of my classmates commented that it was so cute. Did you feel this way too? :D

Another look! It's the intersection with all the layers - sorry for the bad lighting! It was pretty dark in the room.

Everyone took turns to take a picture with Chef Fabrice while holding up our own creation. Thanks to Rae for sending me this picture; it was taken off from the board, months after our graduation.

Last picture to conclude that examination day!

This was taken during our practice day I believed! Because on the actual examination day, we had NO extra time like this to take photo! HAHAHA! Everyone was rushing like mad!!!

Looking back, I am so glad to have gone through all these with this bunch of people, who have become friends for life, on Facebook etc. The memories is never forgotten! It still feels like yesterday when I've just completed the cake. HAHA!

Again, SP (B) ROCKS TO THE MAX! WOOHOO!! 

Coming up next would be an entry on my graduation!! Lots of photos and of me looking prettily! Cannot believed that this is already the last entry on the last cake I've baked in the lovely classroom kitchen in LCB Bangkok, I am all teary thinking about it again.

=')

Till then!

Baking - Wedding Cake + Sugar showpiece

Hello!

HAPPY JULY'2014!!!

Damn. Its already more than 6 months into the year'2014. Just like that!

I'm have so much to share - a new job coming up, orders I've done during my short hiatus since I've got back from my Perth trip...creating new memories and new goals - there's so much to share and so many old entries to complete and post up, HAHA!

Huge thank you to all those readers who dropped by my blog recently. I've seen a huge surge in readership and I have no idea why!! And where are you guys from?! In any case, I hope my blog is informative and helped you in one way or another!!

***

Anyway!!!

I'm here to update the demonstration being carried out...sometime between early November to early Dec'13?

First up, we have the birthday cake looking wedding cake workshop, where we learnt how to decorate a 3 tier fondant cake and played around with pastillage, which is something also known as gumpaste.

 If anyone would like some sort of proof that in the world of French patisserie,  "fondant" is very much detested, look no further - just right here is a good example.

If this isn't the worst wedding cake available, I don't know what else can top this.

Everyone (believe me), moaned and gasped in horror upon finding out that we had to recreate this during our practical class, and trust me - we weren't even allowed to use just a few pastel colours, we has to use a couple of colours; dark rich colours, no pastel ones allowed for the macaroons!

The end product was so much like a birthday cake man. I nearly died.

We also had the chance to create gumpaste flowers, with royal icing yellow centers. These was then rested overnight in a egg tray to create a blooming look. (Please note that at this point of time, we were all weeping for this cake).

It being a wedding cake, everyone created different toppers for their cake, and I, in a throwback moment to my wedding day, created a pair of love birds!

We stayed back after class to complete the cake within a day. We stick the decorations using glue guns, and boy, these guns was really HOT!!! Some of my classmates burnt themselves real bad.

Lovey dovey love birds, haha! 

We also created a huge flower using 5 pieces of leaf looking petals, added a stamen, created leafs and some twirls looking thing for deco and volume.

This was then stored in school till the end of our sugar exam, where we have to place the sugar showpiece on top of the cake!

Then!!!

We had like a week or two out of our final last month in school to learn, practice and complete a sugar workshop and examination.

Chef Fabrice did the demonstration for the whole sugar workshop, and we learned a few different stages of sugar art; namely - poured sugar, bubble sugar, blown sugar and pulled sugar.

Here, we have the different forms of the rose petals done by Chef Fabrice - look at how shiny it is!!

The rose petals or any sort of floral decorations are usually created using the pulled sugar recipe/method.

Pulled sugar consists of sugar, water, glucose and acid drops. In a large pot, we will first cook the the sugar with water and let boil on the highest cooking temperature as possible, removing the foams (impurities from the sugar) just before the boiling point.

Glucose is added once the sugar liquid starts to boil, and upon the mixture reaching the temperature of 160℃, we add the acid drops.

The sugar mixture is now usable as poured sugar (for bases/structure building) or onto baking paper laced with alcohol to create bubble sugar (More on that later.)

Below is a picture of a completed sugar rose done by Chef! 

Gorgeous isn't it!

This is pulled sugar without any addition of colouring - plain pulled sugar which is transparent will tranform into a beautiful pearl white colour upon satinage - a pulling action or rather, a folding action of the sugar lump repeatedly to cool down the sugar down enough to handle.

Below is the completed sugar piece done by Chef. It is also what we have to create for our sugar examination.

Bubble, loops of sugar, ribbons and structural pieces - these are just some of the variation of pulled sugar shapes we can create, molding it around any objects we can use/find.

For the examination, we have to create at least 3 flowers for decoration along with ribbons and other optional creations.

Chef's sugar piece left us all in awe, it was so neat and beautiful...arranged in a way that it's so classy and big. But do you know it's really tough working with sugar, you have to handle the sugar at its hottest stage - which can go up to 170℃!

Here is a picture of my first sugar piece created during a workshop, where we spent hours pulling the sugar, reheating the sugar lumps in the microwave when it gets too hard - we first poured the sugar into entremet rings which was oiled with vegetable oil to create the base - the ring was placed on a silpat mat.

We also wore special gloves (some bandaged their fingers with heavy duty plasters and wore latex gloves for extra protection from the heat) while working with the sugar, screaming in pain and enduring the heat emitting from the sugar while carrying out the process of satinage.

The corals looking sugar pieces was created by pouring the sugar into a bowl filled with ice cubes and over time, created these beautiful unique coral pieces.

As you can see, I wasn't very good with creating petals. HAHA!

We worked fast and quick under the sugar lamp and most of us tried to create petals as big and glossy looking as possible - if you did not pull enough from the middle of the sugar lump, your petals will shine as much as it should be - of course, this depends on your ability to be fast and quick because the god damn sugar is uber hot. :(

We also created ribbons and loops and strips by having strips of different coloured sugar (which we exchanged different coloured sugar from our classmates for those colours we don't have/ran out of) and pulling the whole lot together till it's long and cut using a hot blade. Again, the longer you pull, the shinier it is, and during demo, Chef actually pulled the sugar against the back of the assistant to create super strips for the ribbons.

My arms has limitations, so I only managed to pull a few strips for decoration; not enough to do pretty ribbons. :(

A picture of me and my sugar piece! We threw these away at the end of class, because none of us is able to bring it back - the humidity level in Bangkok would have these pieces melted into the same original state just before we reached home. HAHA!

After the initial practical regarding sugar, we then had another long practical consisting of 6 hours to create the whole entire structure from scratch.

This time, instead of just a single base, we have to do at least 3 disc-shaped bases, a curved standing structure, and a smaller curved structure to create the towering sugar piece just like from the demo classes.

For my practice, I chose to go with a pastel pink colour; created with drops of red and titanium powder.

The struggle I had here, was to create the structural pieces! It was so tedious, even though it's just a simple act of pouring sugar. We had long flexible rubber wire shapers which we used to form the shapes, sticking alot of black plasticine around the outer gaps of the shapers - to ensure that the rubber wire shapers does not move out of shape when we pour the sugar down. Also, we have to pour it well and in a steady but not slow movement so that there is no air bubble created.

You also have to make sure that it does not overflow, unless you will have to trim the excess part of the sugar and there is every risk of the structure being damaged due to cracks and what not.

And that was my mistake - pastel coloured bases is super obvious when there's cracks/finger prints etc. I also slightly over poured the sugar on my structure and I had to trim it, resulting in the removal of a lot more sugar then I had intended. I hide those parts with my flowers and coral pieces.

The bubbled looking pieces was created by pouring the sugar onto a baking paper laced with alcohol, this created a bubbling sensation, resulting in nice solid slab of sugar with lots of bubbles in it, you can then snap these into pieces and use it as decorations. 

Here's a picture of my completed sugar piece after the whole workshop! We only had a day to practice constructing of the showpiece before the exam, and due to the intensive pulling and handling of the sugar for such a long time resulted in this - huge ass blister on my index finger!! Which is not a good thing because its the main finger I used to create and pull flower petals with.

I was biting my lips and enduring the pain as I was racing against time to complete my sugar piece. Half way through the practice I was thinking why is this part of the glove so loose, I kept pulling my glove to fit my hand better, it was only after a while that I realised, it was my skin which I had accidentally pulled and peeled off. ='(

Anyway!!! After the super tedious practice, Charmaine, Mew, Framm and myself went for a good hearty meal at Carl's Junior!! Super meaty, refreshing and basically, we ate and slacked there all the way, talking about everything and anything about what we love and hate about sugar, sharing our pains and battle scars.

After a short break from school, the day rolled over to our sugar exam!

Presenting to you my sugar piece!!

First of all, don't ask why we had to stack the sugar piece on top of our birthday looking wedding cake.

All of us was pretty scared of our sugar piece toppling over.

Mine was a far cry from the gorgeous pieces all of my other classmate created! I was having a really hard time during the first half of the examination creating the flowers - my petals somehow wasn't created well and big enough - resulting in really smaller looking roses.

I chose to go with a red transparent base this time with a hint of orange for the corals and a mixture of pearly white and pink for the flowers and ribbons.

It's super shiny!!! At least that's what I was really proud of! Coupled with my injured finger, I really tried my best at this.

Me and my examination sugar show piece!! I was the only one in my class who decided to create this look - which was exactly what the assistant created for the examination theme, but due to the tendency of imbalance in the structure, the top piece will snap off and break. Luckily for me, I managed to pour just enough sugar and create a lighter weight top curve.

Round one down, one more exam to go!!!

A group shot with all the other show pieces and with Chef Fabrice! =D

Everybody did a great job! Some of them created swans and birds and even bird nest to adorn the base of their showpieces! Super good job! Looking at this picture of us, it really evokes all the happy times and tiring moments I've undergone during the time back in Bangkok. I really, really missed those times!

SP (B) Rocks!!

Till then!! 

I'll try my best to clear all my backlog entries, HAHA! :D