week 5

I was really excited to find out what we were making this week in my classes because I knew we had another experiment in Ingredients, and we were finished with quickbreads in Breads and moving on to yeast breads! 

In Ingredients class, we made Butter Cake (after tasting it, I would name it Almond Cake - it has a lot of almond flavoring, which I love!  I'm going to try it in cupcake form with some lemon buttercream icing, yummm)  The experiment part was that every group used a different kind of flour, so each cake had a different amount of protein/gluten.  My group had bread flour, which actually didn't turn out bad.  It was a lot more dense than a regular cake texture, but it was still pretty tasty (the whole wheat group didn't get so lucky).  There were a lot of variations, including cake flour, pastry flour, semolina, and a few others - I was only able to get pictures of a few. 

I thought I was going to be able to resist eating all the goodies we are making, but I am having trouble for a few reasons -
          1. We can't take anything home or give it away, so except for a few items they save for the school bake sale, it all goes in the trash.  And I really hate wasting food, so I find myself eating as much as I can just to save it from the garbage. 
          2.  We usually take stuff out of the oven right around 11 am, which is EXACTLY when my 6 am bagel starts to wear off.  It's really hard to get excited about my sandwich and apple when there is a whole cake sitting in front of me.  Definitely going to have to work on that, or I am going to get really huge, really fast.

Then in Breads class, we started on yeast breads.  I was really excited for this because I think it is really impressive to make fresh bread by hand, plus I just plain love bread.  We made soft yeast rolls and French/Italian bread in baguettes.  Although it was easier than I thought (my wrists didn't agree the next day, students aren't allowed to use mixers to knead dough), turns out I do not love the smell of a yeast dough.  Again, something I'm going to have to work on, because the finished product is definitely worth it. 

On a side note, I got a 96 on my first test in Food & Bev Management class - really glad about that, I was kinda nervous.  The material isn't hard, but it has been a long time since I had taken a test!

Oh yeah, and I probably won't be blogging for a couple weeks, seeing as how the wedding is in 10 DAYS!!  Between all the prep and then the honeymoon, I'm thinking the blog is going to get forgotten for a little while.  But I'll be back!