Pie comes from Mrs. Smith. Cheesecake comes from Sara Lee. Not today. We got to make a bunch of stuff that I've never made before from scratch, which was a lot of fun. I would say most people "have to" cook savory food, unless you can afford to eat out all the time. But baking is something you usually only do on special occasions, sort of a treat, and I think that's why I like it. The meringue drop cookies put me up against that damned pastry bag again...but today was different. After working with that thing for three straight days now, it's getting a lot easier. I also drew these for my final tomorrow, which is okay because we had a bunch of the buttercream leftover today for me to use tomorrow. Chef A said the meringues could be a bit drier, so I'll just increase my oven time from 45 minutes to an hour. We used trablit for the buttercream, which is a coffee extract that made it taste wonderful. Weird fact: I like coffee-flavored things like this, and like ice cream...but I don't really care for drinking coffee at all.
So today we had the big reveal of the cheesecake that we baked yesterday. I guess it did need a full day to set in the cooler, as it shrunk away from the pan a bit, and was a lot more firm than the wobbly jello consistency it had yesterday. I feel really lucky to even have cheesecake. Some exploded due to being in the oven too long...some turned gray, maybe from some exposed aluminum in the mixing bowl. I got a good texture, no cracks and a nice yellow color, but Chef A said the crust could have been a bit more even. It's not too easy to crust the bottom of an opaque pan evenly, but I'm a fan of crusting all the way up the sides. The most crust, the better, I say.
I am most proud of the pie because I even came in early today to work on it. We were supposed to make pie dough yesterday, but it was so hectic with the eclairs, cream puffs and cheesecake, I never got around to it. Luckily, I did get around to mising out all my ingredients, so I just left them in the cooler to be nice and cold to work with today. Like the biscuit dough, we cut in the fat to create nice, flaky layers. And like the biscuit dough, I wasn't going to have nasty biscuit crap all over my bare hands, which also warm up the dough and makes it harder to work with. So I got gloves, and that worked great. Like my chocolate chip cookies, I also found that it just baked better if you bake them from frozen or as cold as you can possibly get it right before they go in the oven. I think I did a great lattice job, although I wasn't about to attempt Chef True's crimping of the edges. It looked so easy as he was doing it, but I've been duped by that before during demo. Chef's all, oh, look at me, look how easy...then you go to try it, and everything falls apart. I'm just kidding...our chefs aren't conceited about their abilities. But I have gotten pretty good at smelling something rotten when they make something look too easy and you just know it isn't.
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