DAY 43

OFFICAL COUNTDOWN TILL MY BIRTHDAY: 7 days
Well 3rd times a charm because I finally got to submit my visa application. I arrive at the Embassy a little over an hour before it opens. When I am a block away I see all these people standing outside, and I am like WTF it's not even open and we have half of Paris here. I then figure out that it just looked like alot of people because they were all satnding outside the gate, since the Embassy hadn't opened yet. Which made me feel a whole lot better. At 9:30am they opened the front gate and handed us our ticket when we walked through. I went straight inside and took a chair near the windows so when my number was up I would be close and wouldn't waste any time. Well since there wern't mzny people in front of me I only waited about 1 1/2 hours before I went up. The only annoying thing about all this was I had to pay more money than I was told for the visa, this was beacuse they had to send my passport back to the states because I had an American passport. But I didn't care I just needed to get this visa because if I didn't I would be "homeless" for 2 months. Afterwards I left and started making my way towards the Ritz. I get to my metro stop and realize that I still have some time before needing to be at school, so I head down the street and go to Starbucks. I will never complain about the prices at Starbucks ever again in the states. This is because the European Starbucks sell things at the same number price, but because of the exchange rate, i'm actually paying more. For example, if your coffee costs $5.45 (and in Paris they would charge the same but in euros, so that would be €5.45) the new dollar price is $7.03. After eating my breakfast and drinking my very expensive coffee I walk over to the Ritz to go change into my uniform. We were very busy today. Nothing was very dificult, lots of steps. We made Layered Hazelnut cake with light praline cream and coffee sauce and Melon Soup with Beaume de Venise sweet wine and grapefruit sorbet. YUMMY!!!! We started the day with the chocolate hazelnut sheets, made the batter and then with the help of the stencil put them on the silicon baking sheets, put them into the oven. Now the secret with these is that as soon as they come out of the oven, even though your going to burn your fingers, you have to take each rectagle up and wrap it around the mold then press on the seam so it becomes one. The reason why you have to do this quickly is that they cool very quickly qnd when they cool, they harden, which means that if you try and wrap it around the mold it will just break and crumble. Setting those aside we moved onto the the praline cream and coffee cream and sauce. While making it we all kept tasting it, well who could blame us it was freaking amazing. We took the melon and with a (appropriately named) melon baller, scooped the inside of the cantelope. After which we put the cantelope onto a plate and put ice underneath and around it, adding a little water. We put this into the freezer, so when we took it out it would be one mass object. While the cantelope was in the freezer we took the chocolate hazelnut sheets and put them onto the plate. Then adding the two different creams and putting on some carmelized hazelnuts on top. Then lastly decorating the plates. Then came the best part........... EATING IT!!!!.........., we ate these with our coffee or tea, it was the perfect dessert to have since there is coffee in the dessert, it just tied it all together. After the break, which today was a little late so there wasn't as much time afterwards as there normally is, we cleaned up the kitchen then took out the cantelopes. In a bowl we put the melon balls and added some other fruit like strawberries, blueberries, currants, raspberries, etc... and then put them into the hollow cantelopes till they were full. Then we put in a couple scoops of the white wine. Following with a scoop of grapefruit sorbet fruit sauce and the garnish.


Fruity-ness coming my way!