So thinking that I am 35min. early I walk into the locker room to find one of my other classmates getting dressed into her uniform, racing against time. The next thing I know I'm doining the same thing. Aparently on mondays the class starts 1/2hr later than the rest of the week, so I basically had 5min to get completely dressed into uniform. When I get to class, along with the other girl, we are put into groups of two and start making the cream puff pastry for the eclairs. While everyone is doing this Chef puts our guest, Sevetlana, who is here doing a piece on the school for the Russian Marie Claire, charge of refreshing the starter dough from yesterday. After finishing the cream puff pastry, we start making our eclairs from the from the chilled puff pastry that we had made yesterday as well, this is starting to become a trend, lol... well we each had our turn with the pastry bag, learning how to properly squeeze the bag and get perfect and beautiful little eclairs and the three parts to the nuns (which is the classic eclair) after which we put them in the oven and started working on the brioches. From the eclairs to the brioches the room was getting quite hot from the oven, when you open the oven door it would let out very, very hot air. but being two floors, well more like 1 1/2 floors, below ground there are no windows and so when the hot air was released into the kitchen, it stays in the kitchen. Since the brioches were going to be in the oven for a while and the eclairs were know in the fridge we decided that now was probably the best time to take a break. So we went into the parlor and had a tea/coffee break, with some biscuits. Of course there was also lots of water as some of us were looking a little on the fainting side. I do not say this to make my classmates sound like there a little wiltering flower and they need to suck it up and stand the heat, it was just that hot, even the only guy in our class and chef were looking a little under the weather. So we go back into the kitchen and pull out our eclairs, if your wondering about our brioches in the oven chef was just a head of us and took them out of the oven. We each took our eclairs and the three parts of the nuns and put three little holes on the bottom and just one for the nuns. Here is were the true fun begins, we all filled up our pastry bags and pipped in the orange cream puff pastry filling for the eclairs and the chocolate cream puff pastry for the nuns. Of course with out furthe ado we had a little food, well actually cream fight, I say little as we some how managed to only get people and the oven door and not get the intire kitchen messy. Well after we settled down and cleaned up a bit, we them took out the chocolate and the orange ganache and with a quick drip with the spatula put some on their respective eclairs let the ganache harden a bit then decorate them with the toppings; little candied orange pieces on the eclairs and white chocolate pieces on the nuns, which just happen to have R's on them, for the Ritz, but were's the fun in that, I decided that the R's were for of course Rabinowitz. After this exciting day by the time I got home I was extremely tired, so I took a little nap until my roomamtes got home then I decided to stay in, which they went out and watched the game France vs. Portugal. Well my little "quite evening at home" wasn't realu just that, it all started about 10:30-11ish when France beat Portugal and were now going to go on and play Italy for the World Cup on sunday. The whole place erupted with shouting and firecrakers and I thought they had been happy when France had beat Brazil, this was nothing. I finally went to bed around 2am, and not because I wanted to, you see the courtyard in the middle of a couple apartment complexs is like a big microphone, if you get the picture that I'm getting at. Well i'm off to sleep for a nother day at the Ritz.
Eclairs à l'orange // Religieuse au chocolat
Brioche parisienne
