Culinary School Update: End of semester wrap up

So, I have to start this post by telling everyone how incredibly sorry I am for waiting so long to post again!  It has been a long, rough, past few weeks, so again, I have to apologize for how I've fallen off with the blog.

That being said, I owe you guys a culinary school update. Its the end of the semester, and I have exams all week long. I can't believe my first semester is already almost over!  But I do want to pick up where I left off with the school updates.

A couple weeks ago, we played with fresh pasta dough in cooking class.  First, we made ravioli with mushroom duxelles.

Then, we made fettuccine alfredo.

We also made orzo with creamed leeks.

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We didn't have baking class that week, so I'm moving on to the following week. The next cooking class we had, we worked on grains.  We were really busy that week. 

We made grits,

risotto,

fried polenta, 

and red beans and rice.

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The past couple weeks in baking class, we've been decorating the sponge cakes we baked a while back.  They were frozen immediately after we baked them.  Here is the chiffon sponge with oreo whipped cream frosting that we decorated 2 weeks ago:

Last week, we decorated the walnut genoise cake. We made a Swiss buttercream icing to go with it.  This was really hard to decorate!  The meticulous, nit-picky side of me struggled with trying to perfect the cake, but I really enjoyed the process.

Cross section: the bottom layer was spread with raspberry jam.  I loved this cake- the ground walnuts added a nice texture to the cake.

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Finally, we had breakfast week in cooking class.  I didn't really think anything was photo-worthy except the eggs benedict I made.  Obviously, we didn't have any Canadian bacon, so I just used regular bacon. I wanted to practice making hollandaise sauce because its on the final next Monday.

Whew! That was a lot of catching up to do! So, I'm off to my baking final to make pate a choux. Wish me luck!