Day one down from the Deathrow Week. I did nine layered cakes (well, most of the work with them) and a 5 kilo dough of Christmas (syrup+wheat) cookies, on top of the normal daily work. Took me almost nine and half hours, but still I liked the work. One of the regular workers there, same age as I am, said he was a bit concerned with how much work I received as “just a trainee.” I know it’s too much, I don’t even receive any pay for it! I only get 3.70 euro a day from the city as lunch money. I’m supposed to have only a maximum of nine hours of work a day, with a maximum of 35 hours a week, but this won’t be applying much this week. Luckily I do like the work very much. The regular workers at the bakery are also overenjoyed by the fact that they have a trainee that can do stuff and not screw up everything – somewhat of a rare occurance I was lead to believe. Besides, it’s not like every week is as bad as the ones before Christmas Eve, the workload worsening day by day as the dreaded celebration draws closer. Frankly, this little bakery took way too much orders this Christmas, and even with me making a pretty substantial amount of work there’re still people there working virtually around the clock from now until the early Christmas Eve hours (holidays start at around 3 am).

My technique with the piping bag got upgraded very generously after doing that many cakes in a _(death)row. If you do only one cake here, another there, it doesn’t give as good routine as getting to do a lot at once… After I’m finished with this workplace in four more days, and spending some boring holidays, I’ll try to get to a certain somewhat prestigious local confectionary kitchen (as a trainee). They have a reputation of being a harsh and demanding employer, so every bit of technique and routine I can build up before going in there would be a great help, giving me the chance to develop more advanced skills during that month than practicing just the mere basics. After that month, I think I’m going to try and get to the huge conveyor belt at Fazer and complete some of the ‘regular’ curriculum there. Though, there was also some talks of me having to go for a month to train in some restaurant as a chef and fulfill parts of my catering studies that way. It may very well turn out so that after completing my first year of studying to become a baker/confectionary chef I won’t have stayed even two full months inside the school building…

Having become used to this kind of schooling, I find it laughable how those of my class who haven’t been to any real bakery for a training course are so horribly left behind to hack in the flour dust. They’re still only looking forward to being introduced to things that I’ve been working with daily for a good while already, similarly to those others who also either got themselves a workplace for training or have been working in bakeries before. That sort of super laid-back pacing is good for the 16-year-old population in the class, but I somewhat pity the more adult ones there who haven’t had the initiative and activity required to drag themselves from the schooldesk to a real workplace.

Having had some distance with the youngsters in my class, I realized there’s even a couple people there I can relate with and spend reasonable, comfortable time in their presence. I already supplied them with all the information tidbits about real bakeries I could think up. :p And I’ll recommend them to any of the places I’ve been to, if it could help any… Three out of twenty isn’t such a bad ratio, hmm.

Today I finished the most work-filled week I think I’ve ever done. Things did get pretty hairy too, with a customer waiting in the store for her cake when I was still piping the cream along the sides. From the five cakes I did today, one was pretty interesting: A fruit cake. It was just like any other cake until the top layer, where I put mandarines, kiwi fruit, and raspberries… The mandarines did two circles, one along the edges and another three centimeters out from the center. I put halved kiwi fruit slices on top of the mandarines and raspberries to the remaining areas. The sides were decorated with ground almond. What I really wanted to do was to add pineapple and peach to the top layer, but sadly we were running short on time and had to hurry up the cakes. I even managed to take a photo of the finished cake, but it’s in my cell phone that strongly resists any attempts to connect it with a PC (it’s been tried in three).

Total tally for the week comes up to twenty-seven cakes that I either did alone or a good majority of the work with. One fruit cake, three cloudberry cakes, one chocolate cake (that I did everything but the chocolate covering to), three berry (mix) cakes, and nineteen cranberry cakes. Looks like it’s easy enough to figure which one sells the most. Truth to be told, seventeen of the cranberry cakes went in a single order…

Oddly enough my legs are fine even after standing for so many hours at a time. I talked about the stinging pain in the legs, especially the soles of the feet, with the pastry chef at this bakery, and she told me that every bakery worker has these pains for their two-three first years in the business. I never felt this type of pains in other jobs; they come from having to exert yourself while standing on the spot for hours and hours every day. It takes some time for the leg muscles to get used to this.

Reminiscing about my first experiences of working, around the age of thirteen, I think it’s a very good thing to have the kind of adult stamina that you just didn’t have as a kid. It also means losing some of the resilience that was still around on the teen years, but I’ll take this deal any day of the week. ;) I don’t know how to describe it, perhaps just increased pain tolerance, or reassembling all the energy used for body growth to maintaining it. Anyways, it means you can abuse the body with long days of work without as much repercussions.

I originally planned on getting some days of work done next week, from the 26th to 30th December, but then I realized I do deserve a little break. If nothing else, my poor feet really could use some days off. They’re getting somewhat crampy even with all the stretching I do every evening.