This week was all about baking and pastry. Or at least that was the plan. First a friend of the school who's a amazing baker couldn't come and teach and then our school-leader got sick too. So we basically tought ourself this week. So basically we got a topic, for example cookies, and then we had to decide ourself what type and all that we wanted to do. The only "restriction" was that it suppose to be a challenge. Like not a simple plain cookie but I for example made cream-puffs out of a choux-dough. For this dough you melt some butter in lightly salted water and bring it to boil, then you pour your flour in and stir it until the dough is just a big clump and there's a light white layer on the bottom of the pot. Then the dough is done. You let it sit and cool until it's not hot anymore but still quiet warm, fill i in a piping-bag and do the puffs. Then you bake it in the oven, cut them right when they come out and fill them when they cooled down a bit. Really cool. I just couldn't find a proper piping-bag so I used a small plastic-bag. The sides broke so the dough came out everywhere. At that time I was already a bit pissed about the process so I dumped half of the dough. Thinking about it now and seeing the result a bit of a over-reaction but hey,...

I also made apfel-strudel from scratch, without a recipe. Not the puff-pastry, I'm not that amazing (yet). I cut some apples into pieces, add some lemon-juice, cinnamon, raisins, water and sugar to it and cooked it on the stove until the mixture was reduced a bit. I let it cool down a bit and put it on the puff-pastry. Apareantly it wasn't cool enough so even then the butter in the dough melted already so I thought it won't turn out very well. After I rolled/ folded it together and baked it, it was beautifull. A bit chewy in the inside for my taste and not too sweet. So I asked our über-chef who runs a restaurant in the area who was around at that time about his opinnion and how I can make it a bit more fluffy in the inside, and he said it was first of all really good. Oh yeah, this definitly boosted my ego quiet a bit that day... :-)

That friday we had again a simple task: We had 15 minutes to prepare our station and then cook anything we want in another 45 minutes. By that time whatever we cooked had to be plated and had to be hot, ready to serve. I took something simple and turned it in something amazing. Hamburger. Sauted onion-rings, grilled tomato-slides, toasted bread, some salad, bbq-sauce and to crown everything a super soaky-moist meat seasoned with just salt&pepper, finely diced onions and some olive-oil for moisture. As a side I did some french fries, so potatos cut into nice "fingers" and fried in the fryer. Look at it, LOOK AT IT!!! :-)