learn to bake

Just to update on my quest to become a baker… I’ve turned more towards pastry chef studies, and have found them more interesting than baking.

This autumn we’ve had some short special courses with fun stuff. First there was marzipan course, where we made figurines and flowers and leaves. This week we’re doing chocolate, and the poor picture is a little (~130 grams) Santa I had some fun doing earlier today.

I did a couple of these chocolate figures with molds just for kicks, while the main course consists of candy. There’s two sets of pear confections (caramellized pear and nougat with pear liqour inside), and then another set of salmiac fudge candies (salmiac = ammonium) that I’m going to dip in chocolate.

I also wanted to use chocolate film to make long flat stripes of chocolate, then use the film to shape them like a set of bow ties. However the course is only one week and I’m pretty tight on getting all the rest done before it ends…

Working with chocolate is very comfortable, I find. With marzipan I was always feeling a bit disoriented, but with chocolate there’s nothing like that. It requires some care with the temperatures – they have to be exactly as stated and not almost – but once they are handled the rest becomes easier.

Chocolate is very versatile. It can be liquid, but it turns quite hard. In the middle states it can be flexible, easily shaped with hands. If it’s still warm, you could drop a chocolate item to the table and it won’t have any damage. If it’s tempered correctly and a polished mold is used, the chocolate will have a very reflective, beautiful shine to it. Of course other types of surfaces can be made with some work: Freezing the target surface and then spraying the chocolate to it results in a rougher look. You can use differently colored chocolates to make fun color effects to the surfaces.

There are countless other little tricks. One recipe told to put the chocolate to the mold first, then use a toothpick to scratch it from the inside, and then fill it with another color. This brings yet another type of visual look.

Perhaps the most intriguing part about chocolate is that we don’t know everything about it. Scientists still figure out new effects and functions to chocolate, and new ways to use it are brought forward at a decent rate. I’m seriously considering becoming a worker in a chocolate workshop. There’s not much choice in Finland (I think two choices, of which only one has any real work done by hand), so I might have to aim towards Central Europe.

It’s been a few months since I last wrote anything about baking.

I finished my first year as a student in the bakery school, having applied a bit of a weird study plan compared to the rest of the class. From the nine-or-so months that school lasted, I spent six at different workplaces doing practical work. At each of them I spent one month as a trainee, with the aim of completing my baking classes (and general food industry classes) in a fully practical form. Five of the months were spent at bakeries and for January I trained at a small luncheon. I didn’t get any grades for any of them. They’re all as good as failed!

Turns out, the teachers didn’t really bother going out of their way to find out enough information to give proper grades for me, therefore I have to pass separate examinations for each one of the six workplaces. Gah! Actually it’s not as bad as it first sounded like: I have permission to train on my chosen ‘examination pastries’ at my leisure. I don’t know how many of them they want me to make, but I thought of two per workplace.

So the list would look something like this:

1. An industrial (large) bakery. A long wiener and something(??).
2. A small bakery. A Finnish Christmas pastry and a simple layered cake.
3. A small restaurant. General food industry studies. I don’t know what they want me to do with this. A beef with French fries? I did do some rye breads while training here, although I wasn’t training for anything bakery-involved…
4. A medium sized bakery. A “cask” wiener and some coffee-bread loaf.
5. A small bakery. A “comb” wiener and basic meat pastry. (Or perhaps a barley bread – if I’m feeling adventurous)
6. A small bakery. The pastry chef course. A gluten-free strawberry cake and a carrot pastry. (Or maybe just a lime or princess cake instead of the latter. Chocolate cake remains as a joker card!)

That’s for next autumn, anyhoos. Through June I’ve worked at a nice bakery in Helsinki, the medium sized bakery in the above list. This is actually a job where they pay wages for me. It’s about time to give some money for it, seeing how I already did one month of free work for them. Work starts at 5 am every morning, meaning I have two alarms set at 3:50 and 3:55 am respectively. The first week I had some adjustment problems with waking up, but after that it’s been easy to get up in time. I’m only going to work there for three more days next week, and after that I’m switching over to the number six place in the above list, which offered me higher pay and a much more involving job. I took it knowing I’ll be slave-driven to Hell and back twice over, probably verbally abused all the way. Job starts at 6 am the earliest there, which isn’t early at all, with some evening shifts starting very late at 10 am.

That place is problematic in its own ways. My immediate boss there said there’s never a busy time in the bakery. This belies the fact that the queues are massive, with people pushing in constantly and buying everything off the shelves. What he meant by never having a busy time is that if you work fast enough as your regular pace, you’ll never run into problems. The necessary regular pace just happens to be very, very fast. I could get away with it while I trained there for free, but now they’re going to pay me a good amount of money for it. On top of this, I’ll be handling shifts where I’m completely alone in the bakery. If something goes wrong, well, too bad! Better fix it beautifully before the next shift comes in.

More importantly, everyone in that bakery does everything from mixing doughs to handling the ovens and doing the packaging. Usually in a bakery, everyone has their own preserves: You do that one job you’re told to do. There’s someone (or a few people at most, in a larger bakery) that handles mixing the doughs. There’s a lot of foot soldiers shaping the pastries and breads, and then an exclusive group that handles the ovens. The second foot soldier platoon handles the packaging. I’ve so far worked as a foot soldier in the different bakeries, with only occasional dips into the other sides of baking. The workplace in question doesn’t need a specialized worker like that, which creates its own stress in some ways. I’ve never been held responsible for handling ovens, anywhere. In this place, anything you put in the oven is fully your responsibility. It’s been a hard school.

Sometime before the summer vacations I spent one month back at the school. That was such a let-down on so many levels. I joined the evening class that was graduating. They didn’t have much of a hurry to do anything, except for their final exams. (Later I heard the daytime classes were even more relaxed. What gives?)

I wasted a month there doing some baking four nights a week: School was from half past four to eight-nine, evening time, and Fridays off. At least I managed to start cycling to school and back every day. With just four days a week, the tally for cycling was over a hundred kilometers every week. Just as that month drew to a close, I got used to cycling around a bit – which helps a lot when you’re going to work at 4.30 am without a car. ;)

There’s about a billion new recipes I’ve learned since the last post. I’ll have to see how I can do some of them and present them here in some fashion.

It’s been a while since I last updated on the progress of my learning to bake. To sum up what happened since: I trained at a bakery I wanted to work in the future at. I started training at another interesting bakery. I got a workplace at a third place, which is a very high quality cafeteria/luncheon – a lot classier kitchen than anything I expected to get hired at. The place is Cafe Esplanad right in the middle of Helsinki. It seems a good amount of foreigners visit there while in Finland, and I can agree to that after one day. While carrying endless loads of goods to the front I heard discussions in quite a few languages along the way. From the other staff I heard there are many, many times more tourists in the summertime compared to now.

I’ve already made plans of attaching small flags of Great Britain and Japan to my work suit (none of the workers there have any such language signs) to help a potential confused customers who wonders if they can ask someone about something or not. Of course I can’t speak that much Japanese, but I have most of the basic dodging moves ready so I can hold up a friendly conversation.

Also what’s interesting in this kitchen is that it’s totally clean. After we finished with the daily cleaning, you couldn’t spot dirt anywhere even if you tried. This is done because there are lots of visitors and even magazines photographing there quite regularly. It’s quite a long way from the normal bakeries I’ve worked at – the one I’m training at currently has loads of various flours all over the floors and the tables, and the staff there nearly reprehended my cleaning when I started digging up age-old unbaked bread doughs from whatever hidden corners they were stashed in. They thought it’s not good if everything is too clean, for whatever reason. I also think the flour in the air is something that makes me feel out of breath and tired the further the day goes. In the clean air at Cafe Esplanad, I did 9 hours with minimal sleep to buffer the morning, and never once felt tired enough to get my mind start to wander around. Once it starts to do that, it’s easy to figure out the day is going to be a long one from there on.

At the place I was previously training at – Haaga Bread – I did agree to some kind of summer work. They offered me pretty poor wages so I started dismissing it as a last resort. Even if I got another place with higher pay, I don’t think I’d want to give up the Cafe Esplanad workplace too easily. It’s not only in a busy place, but it has a line-up of very popular pastries and cakes on the bakery side. I’m going to be doing those mainly while I’m there, but eventually I’m supposed to become reliable enough so that I can handle the foodbreads there more or less alone. Also very interesting is that I’d sometime later get to go there alone in the morning to start the shift (about 3 am). Then I get to monopolize the radio to whatever end I see fitting. It can play CDs hopefully too. I’ve had a couple goals involving music and baking that I can fulfill then. One of them is to make a cake to Beethoven’s 7th Symphony, and another is to just bake to classical music. One of the remaining ones is to bake to techno, which I’ve already tried a little.

Well, I’m too tired to write a long entry, so this’ll do until I get either photos or something new to ponder about.

I’ve kind of had something to say during the past four weeks, but I’ve held my tongue since it has only limited relevance to “Learning to bake.”

Better just to let it all out at once! ;)

That said, I did actually get to bake something during the time I spent as a trainee in this little lunch restaurant. Basic French breads and rhye loaves and wheat rolls – there were several little tricks and experiments I managed to learn from the different breads. The biggest problem remains on how to shape a bread about 450-500 grams in weight (think F- to G-cup boobs), because I keep hitting the table with the tips of my fingers while doing the rotations. It becomes somewhat painful after a while. My left hand doesn’t work as efficiently as my right hand, and it tires faster. I’ve done some benchpress in my time, but repeated shaping of bread really taxes on the breast muscles (mainly because my technique is wrong). This is something that I have to focus on fixing…

Anyways, this week was my last one at the restaurant, so it’s back to baking fulltime. So did anything happen during this month…?

Biggest single thing was that I finally learned how to work in a kitchen environment. It’s subtly (but decisively) different from working in a bakery; the main difference being that foods are served immediately, as opposed to breads that are always prepared ahead of time. With a prepared dish in front of you, the tension is more ‘at hand,’ while a batch of breads going into the oven will still be scrutinized for a long while before consumption. It’s easy to see why some would choose one over the other.

This sense of laid-back responsibility in baking easily deceives. Even with the added control between working on the product and the customer receiving something for their money, a baker has so many projects going on at once that they have to all go smoothly, or else! However, it’s easier to feel the adrenaline rush when you can actually see all the people coming in to eat what you prepare for them. For a baker there’s no real equivalent reward, as people buy their breads and then go home to eat them. There’s not an established routine for going out and eating bread, while restaurants have long since specialized in cultivating this system for themselves.

The realizations along this road made it easier for me to see why a kitchen reminds me most of a military boot camp. At first you start as the lowest of the lowly slaves, scrubbing the toilets with a toothbrush until you have shown inner complacence.

(This is figuratively speaking, of course.)

Starting from cutting the vegetables is more or less clear to anyone who has been working in a kitchen and thought about it. Every kitchen has their own flavor and working methods, and a new worker has to adapt – rather than everyone else adapt to the new worker. Cooks are overworked enough as is, constant changes in their work routines bring in unnecessary stress. Going with this, we get the urban legends of a Chef having experience from various Michelin-restaurants spending their first weeks at some kitchen cutting the carrots, and the potatoes, and the cabbage, and the zucchini, and… well, you get the picture. Inbetween of cutting and mincing and slicing they have to memorize how the products are supposed to look like. Work orders on different dishes, how they taste, where all the tools are located at, how to move around in the kitchen chaos, etc.

For me it was a humiliating revelation, and well deserved because of it.

The two first weeks at the restaurant were sort of wasted for me. I didn’t understand at all what was expected of me. I didn’t have any theory studies on cooking (still don’t have), so everything was new and wondrous to me. Baking was something I had experience on already, so that’s what I did there. Some mornings I’d do the salads and other cold foods, but it was clear from my attitude that I had zero interest in this. I thought I came there to cook! As a free worker even! At this point I had a very useful conversation with the owner of the restaurant where we cleared several misunderstandings about each other, and from there on I switched from the cold foods/breads to working on the lunches and served dishes. The amount of stuff I got to cut multiplied by the dozens; my right hand is still slightly worn out behind the thumb. This change was good, nevertheless, and the two last weeks I spent in a much more constructive way. I looked with a sharp eye as the owner did the foods and I asked about anything I could think of. On the final day I more or less did one of the lunches all by myself. If that had been the end of my second week there, I think I’d have gotten much further along after two more weeks of cooking. (Naturally I had to learn about the cold foods at some point too!)

On the technical side of cooking, I realized that I have to taste each and every dish before any customer gets to eat them. (Doesn’t apply to the meat in beef dishes and similar situations, naturally…) If it so happens that the dish tastes totally horrible, like somehow double the amount of salt went in it, it can be pulled out and rather apologize profusely to the customer than give them something like that to eat. All the dishes tasted fine… but of course there was the little thing called vegetarianism I had to push aside. I now eat all kinds of meat again, after almost ten years of vegetarism. I wasn’t a total vegetarian since I ate eggs and fish meat sometimes, and because of that occasional fish bringing in the rest meats wasn’t any problem to my stomach. Maybe there was a slight queasy feeling for a day or two, but after that I could eat a whole beef and not feel any real difference. I don’t think I’ve lost anything by having been a vegetarian for so long. Rather, I can appreciate meat in my own way, not having eaten it in so long. At home I cook mostly vegetarian dishes still, because I’ve become so used to the routine… Maybe now I add some meat element somewhere.

Another technical part was that in the two bakeries I worked before, both of them had someplace you could sit for at least few minutes for some breaks like a snack/lunch break/etc. In the restaurant there was absolutely no place to sit down inside the kitchen! It took a while for my legs to get used to this. I even ate standing up every day. If I didn’t go to the toilet during the day, I ended up standing and walking all the way from the bus stop in the morning to the same bus stop in the evening. Sometimes the loading area had some boxes that you could sit on while eating, but I quickly learned that if you start to sit a little, then you start to sit a lot. Easier to just bite it and stay upright.

Baking inside the restaurant was a challenge of its own. There were several critical problems that dominated the decisions on what and how to bake…

• The room temperature was awfully cold. Between the bigger oven and the stove was the only really warm place, but there was no room for baking anywhere near there. The breads were done in the back where a nice smooth working table had been installed just for the purposes of baking. It was a plastic table, albeit a high quality one, and as such couldn’t compete with a real wooden worktable—but it was definitely passable for the purposes of baking.

• No specialized chamber for leavening the breads. This gave some real headaches for me, having to leaven the breads on top of the 20 kilo food boxes that were kept above 60 degrees Celcius, or on top of the dishwasher, or on top of the oven, or anywhere warm where there was space… If you thought you could leaven the breads in conditions like this, it didn’t work with normal times or amounts of yeast. I put about a quarter to half the amount of extra yeast (and some extra sugar) in all the bread doughs, since the fermenting was problematic enough as it was. After putting them in the oven, the “oven leavening” part of fermenting usually worked overdrive since the breads didn’t leaven enough even with longer times. If you look at a bread along the edges, just where the bottom crust starts to turn up, if you see the bread being ripped upwards from there it means the baker had the same problems as I had. The crust is supposed to be mostly very smooth there. Also because of time constraints, sometimes the breads had to be put to the fridge for a couple hours after shaping before I had time to keep an eye on the leavening. Surprisingly the hours they spent in the fridge seemed to help the leavening more than harm it.

• An unpredictable oven with its weird steaming function. The oven was running on overdrive always, and all the suggested baking temperatures had to be decreased by about ten to twenty Celcius to get a good baking temperature. The steam was very funny in this oven, it just spit water inside the oven that then steamed if it was hot enough. For the foodbreads I put that for about half a minute then turned it off. In a oven designed more for baking you can set a timer for how many seconds it blows hot steam (really blows it inside the oven) before turning off. Eight-twelve seconds is usually enough.

• A tough customer crowd. It was a restaurant where people came to eat food, not bread. Most of the breads I made were sliced and put on the lunch table where everyone could take what they wanted if they paid for the lunch. Only a few people realized you could buy fresh bread loaves from there (with quite competitive prices), so it was more of a curiosity than anything to do business with. Anyways for a small restaurant, every penny counts…

Even with all this, we managed to make several good batches of bread. Most of the time I worked alone on them, but the owner’s wife (a student on the ‘adult side’ evening school courses) and I had some good challenges with these conditions.

I’ve often thought about becoming a cook in the past. My uncle is one, and I’ve been at his restaurant in the past. (He moved out from Finland quite a long while ago, and it’s been almost ten years since I last visited) Becoming a baker was more of a twist of fate in the road to becoming someone who works with food. Actually this happened while I was working as a dish washer and kitchen helper at another place, before I enrolled at the baking school, and all the cooks there said they hated being cooks. One of them said if he’d thought about it more, he’d have become a baker instead of a cook. They can do cool desserts and such and always have that side well in hand, while everyone can do food because it’s so simple to do.

While there’s some truth in this, I do realize there’s more to it. ;)

Now after one month of cooking behind me, I could conceptualize one good reason for not becoming a cook: I really hate throwing away food that I’ve prepared.

Some of the food gets always thrown out, that’s a given. People can’t be expected to lick the big containers clean, and you always have to prepare a tiny bit more than is eaten, just in case. This becomes a problem when there’s a big container full of untouched food that could feed 20 people. And it has to be thrown into the trash. My heart feels betrayed at the unfairness of this.

I’m not alone with these sentiments, it seems. It’s just something that I have to mull over before I can really consider myself becoming a full-time cook. Some restaurants pack their old foods into little lunch boxes and sell them at discount for weekend snacks or whatever. Others try to donate their foods to the poor or something. I’d do this most likely, but seeing it up close made me realize that it doesn’t work. Once people learn that they can get free food if they wait until the restaurant closes down, you get queues forming up five minutes before closing time. If you want to take the food to someplace where they donate it to the homeless, who will pay for the transporting? I have to go home and sleep so I can work for another day, I don’t have the time and strength to go around the city handing out free food on top of a very tiring day at work. Therefore, off to the trash it goes. Almost every day, I stuffed myself from the foods about to be thrown out. And my heart wept for all the food I couldn’t eat.

In a bakery you don’t see this process firsthand. Bakeries generally offer to buy back all the bread that the stores couldn’t sell for them, which means you do get your children back in your hands, only so that you can close your eyes and throw them away.

I don’t think I’ll ever get used to throwing food away.

Last point was about my new workplace. I still didn’t get to the confectionary kitchen I wanted to go to (Cafe Eckberg, the oldest cafe in Finland it seems), but my teachers promised me I could possibly get a training place there before the summer break. I’m placing all my hopes to May this year, it being a very busy month in confectionaries with all the graduating around and cakes being sold everywhere, and almost none regular trainees being out from the baking schools at that time of the year.

Anyways I got a place from a very good place, one that I sent an application earlier already to try and get a workplace for the little vacation weeks and weekends, but no cookie. I now know it was because I sent the application to the wrong person. ;D

It’s one of the last middle-sized bakeries in Finland. They’re all but extinct as the bigger ones have been swallowing them up for the past decades. Really only big factories and tiny bakeries remain, with an odd one out still making a name for themselves like the Haaga Bread. (I have no idea if this is the official translation, but it can’t be too far from this).

They have a bakery and a confectionary side both, and a lot of people from the school I go to have found a job there after graduation. I’m definitely trying to get a summer job from there, so I have to do a good impression during that month. All the three previous training workplaces did give good feedback on the work I did for them, so I’m hoping it went right so far.

The only snatch, work starts at 6 am. It wouldn’t be a problem in summertime, since I can get there in 15 minutes with bicycle… We got a sudden snow attack here in Finland just in this month, so the cycling option is out. The only bus I have a chance at getting there in time leaves 5.20 am – because I have to switch to another bus midway – so I’ll have to wake up probably before 5 am. Well, I did go to work at 6.25 am every morning before Christmas, but for that one I left with the 6.05 am bus… Waking up 5.45 am. It remains to be seen what kind of sleeping rhythm I settle into. I’m guessing I have to go to sleep at 9 pm at the very latest, and probably take naps after work.

Only thing I can draw joy from is that another student from my class will be joining me in this Hell-routine. ;) It’s his first training job place, and my fourth. I hope I don’t have to worry about his work pace. He’s so young too, only 17. The work starts in February and lasts for a month, ending in early March. I’m waiting this with mixed feelings – ‘hopeful’ on the forefront.

At school I’ll be finally completing the ‘hygiene passport’ in a test. Have to get 33/40 points to get the pass. It’s supposed to be an easy test, but I still hope I’ve prepared enough…

First week down from my ‘general food industry studies,’ which led me to become a cook trainee at a local lunch restaurant. The place is owned and run by a married couple, the husband is a chef and the wife handles the jobs of a waitress, the cashier, and also baking fresh bread. The speciality of this restaurant is that they do their own bread. Actually she goes to the same baking school as I do, on the evening classes after her work shift, and that’s where we met and I got the training job for the duration of January.

A signifigant portion of the regular customers are still on holidays on the week after the New Year’s Eve, although so are some of the other lunch restaurants nearby. It’s been somewhat quiet this week, with not even remotely as much to do as on the hectic weeks before Christmas. Weirdly enough, while I was supposed to be a cook for them, I’ve so far learned a lot about baking. The restaurant sells mostly food bread and some coffeebreads, and food breads are something that I was supposed to study in my previous training workplace but never did. It’s been about three months since I last did any general foodbreads, so it’s been a welcome refresher to get the chance to do them daily again…

That said, my ass received a bolt of the Divine Lighting of Inspiration that enables a baker to handle dough correctly. My dictionary doesn’t have the English for the specific word used to describe this particular action, sadly… It’s that thing you do when you shape the bread into beautiful and even round shapes, before it goes to rising. It’s easier the more gluten the dough has. My major mistake was always applying too much strength to the dough while shaping them, resulting in a blistery, uneven shell for the bread. This happens because the gluten is broken. The trick is to apply enough strength to shape it a beautiful round shape, but not enough to break the dough… I was singularly stunned from the roundness of the breads resulting from this. Earlier last autumn someone crudely commented to me that the breads should be perky and smooth like a young woman’s boobs, and only now I understand that means in reality. The A to B -cup breads (up to ~100 grams) should be handled much more gently than boobs of a similar size, just slight circular touching against a smooth table is more than enough to shape the bread. If you did that for a girl they would ask you what the Hell you are doing. —Which sounds like a new 43Things goal in the brewing.

And yes, the world of baking is so packed full of innuendo you wouldn’t know before trying.

I also did some rye loafs, which are notoriously difficult to shape. With this newly found piece of information about shaping breads in mind, I kicked the sticky rye dough into proper shapes and baked them perfectly. The loafs were sold at 3.50€ a piece and the customers were happy. This rye loaf is an important bread for me (and the rest of the students doing the baker course), because it’s something that’s asked on the final exams’ practical part every year. The dough is super sticky and there are no set times for rising or baking, both are about an hour but depend on too many things. I know for a fact the students in my class who haven’t trained in any workplace are still waiting on their first chance to do this bread. This suits the students going at a slower pace very well, but I think it’s almost criminal towards those who learn by their body, perfecting the process from doing repetition after repetition.

The chef at the restaurant promised that next week the place is going to liven up more, as customers return from vacations and more complicated dishes will be added to the menu. I’ll hopefully get something more involving to do than cutting vegetables, baking bread, washing the dishes, and tasting the foods.

I’ve been very tired from all the standing. You can’t find a single chair anywhere in the kitchen! Sitting on the tables or on the floor is something that you just don’t do, it’s much too unhygienic. And I’d never want to eat anything from a kitchen where people sit on the tables. I’m doing about 7-8 hours a day, which is a long time to stand and walk around. I even eat standing up. At the last workplace the confectionary chef told me that it’ll take a couple years for my legs to get used to this, and I can’t wait until that happens. They’ve been getting more and more cramped as the week went by. Better yet, I fooled around drunk on the New Year’s Eve, and managed to catch a little flu that never had the chance to go away during the week. This weekend I’m prohibiting any alcohol from myself, and prescribing 10 hours of sleep every day with leg and back stretches twice a day.

I’m also a vegetarian that eats fish meat occasionally. This makes it very interesting when I have to taste soup broth from pork or beef soups. My stomach has been slightly upset from this, but not nearly as much as I expected. I’ve been thinking about taking all meat back into my diet, because it’s very silly to work with foods you can’t taste. It’s not like you can sell something you haven’t checked for any mistakes in taste.

During these four weeks of work, I’m going to do six weeks worth of studies. This means I have to write a bunch of essays that cover the theory portion of this course…

The essays include:

• Meat and meat products
• Fish and fish products
• Eggs and egg products
• Milk and milk products
• Cheese and ice cream
• Sugars
• Vegetables and vegetable products
• Spices and additives

I’ve understood the essays don’t need to be overly long, which is maybe a good thing or not. I’m sure I won’t learn it before working with all of these as daily work, anyways.

Here’s something I put together half-joking. It’s a chocolate cake with mango and vanilla-choco-rum creme filling.

I was supposed to do a step-by-step picture guide about this cake, but then I got lazy and just bought a ready cake dough from the grocery store. I hated it! It was just like a piece of styrofoam.

Anyways I put a lot of sugar water (spiced with rum) on the styrofoam, and of course readied the creme before that. Here’s the recipe for it:

Vanilla-butter Creme

2 dl Cream
1 dl Sugar
2 tablespoons Potato flour
2 Eggs
200 g Butter
2-3 teaspoons Vanilla sugar

Optional:
2-3 tablespoons Cocoa
Rum for spicing (I put 1 tablespoon)

Put a kettle to low heat, then add cream, sugar, potato flour, and eggs. You might want to add more sugar if this isn’t sweet enough. Add the cocoa and rum if you want (the base taste is very bland). Keep mixing it constantly and heat it up until the potato flour starts to function, but don’t boil it! As soon as the sauce goes thick, remove the pudding from the stove and let it cool down in room temperature. Mix it for a bit every few minutes.

When it’s cool enough, just slightly warm to touch, boot up the blender with the butter in it. Add the mix to the blender bit by bit (so the egg gets enough time to work) and finally add the vanilla sugar. Keep the blender on until it becomes even and light in color. Put it to rest in the fridge until it’s needed.

The cake itself was done as simply as possible. Boatloads of sugar water-rum in the styrofoam to make it edible later, then a layer of the creme and a thin layer of mango sauce on top of it. (I bought three bottles of some baby mango “marmalade” sauce, it was way too watery!)

On the top layer, one special trick is to put an extremely thin layer of marmalade on top of the top layer, so that it’s there under all the decorations. I do this to every layered cake I do. It does two things: Adds taste to the top, and also makes the top layer somewhat waterproof. Well, more than without it…

I melted 250 grams of chocolate in the microwave and poured it on the cake. The shape I learned to pour chocolate is to go in a circular shape, as if following the area just inside the circular decoration you can see along the edges in the final cake picture. From there you use your favourite cake tool to make it an even layer and also push enough out from the edges to get a smooth chocolate layer. Actually, you should have enough chocolate that you can pour some of it down the edges from all sides. Under the cake I put a wire tray and some greaseproof paper under it to catch the falling liquid chocolate. Once the chocolate starts to cool down, you better be finished with this step! If you try to push it around after that, it will look very ugly. Yes, you can cover this up with random decorations, as I did. After this I lifted the cake very carefully and placed it on the tray in the picture.

This cake is about 25 cm in diameter and the 250 grams of chocolate just wasn’t enough. Should have been at least 300 grams, could have used even 400-500. Through a stroke of insanity, the top layer is sprinkled with small sugar pearls that could have been kept out of this cake. ;) I used the rest of the creme to do those silly decorations, S-shapes and dots on the edges, etc.

Next time, I want a home-baked cake dough, thank you very much…

The last day at work, after everything was pretty much done and they were about to let me go… I was told to throw a prepared “dream pie” dough into the trash because no one had time to do anything about it. Then I spotted some whipped cream that was similarly on its way to the trash can, and finally some apple marmalade lying around. Then I quickly put the ingredients together, added a little icing sugar on top, and you can see the result in the picture. The flour in this dough is potato flour combined with some cocoa – which doesn’t make it rise like wheat flour does – resulting in the feelings of utmost fluffiness when you put it in your mouth. These dream pies got a little flattened during transporting, they had a perkier shape before that.

The recipe and baking instructions for the Finnish christmas pie are posted in the replies…

Today I had the weirdest of inspirations about doing some baking at home. I settled on a short crust pastry something, anything really that I could think up on the go. I cheated and bought some frozen dough – an oat short crust pastry dough – mainly because I hate the mixer here at home. (The one at work is so much better…)

After deciding on some pies, I still had half the dough left. Part of that I cut into thin stripes and shaped into the spiral cookies you can see in the picture. Except that you can’t see much anything of the shape at all, I should have made it a lot airier and not so stuffed. Problem is that this dough is extremely unflexible…

Then I had a stroke of insanity and did two d00d-cookies before I made myself quit it. The rest of the dough became those three uneven blobs of dough, after which I piped some marmalade on top of them. The piping bag was a wondrous triangular piece of greaseproof paper, that lasted just barely for the duration of this operation.

Can’t upload more pictures at once, so more about the pies below…

It’s been another hefty day at work, taking something past eight hours since half past six in the morning. Now just five days of work remain before I move on.

For a while I thought this tiny, idyllic bakery wouldn’t stray from its peaceful slumber, like the surface of a serene lake unknowing of blowing winds and worries, but ohh no… The closer Christmas creeps, the more hectic things get at bakeries. It turns out that my being a fast learner at baking stuff became more than a little handy, even while I claim that just about anyone could do basic cookies or cakes with minimal training.

Anyways, the three layered cakes I did earlier… Now I get to do twenty of them – in two days. I don’t mind doing some work, but I’m a bit worried about the one who normally does all the cake orders that come to this bakery. She’s a bright lady in her forties, with an even brighter daughter around the age of nine. If I wasn’t there to help her with the cakes, she’d have to pull three or four all-nighters in the weekends before Christmas, possibly even during the weekdays. While I took a few monkeys off her back by making two huge cookie batches, also now with the cakes and some cheese pies and doughs for the layered cakes and a couple huge apple pies (~100 pieces) and some of the daily work, it’s still not exactly easy for her. Not that it’s that easy for the other people in the bakery either, they’re all doing workdays of at least twelve hours a day. I’m just a trainee so my doing more than nine hours a day could bring some uncomfortable questions if there’s an accident and the insurance people would come take a look around.

During this time of the year none of the schools send out trainees because it’s such a stressful time to be in a bakery. I had to specifically request this month-long training period leading to Christmas, and even then the employees at this bakery were worried if I was the type who can do independent work or the type who needs someone to hold their hand while trying to do anything…

Even with the big orders and constant hurrying, I’m kind of happy that we can complete everything in time. I’ve so far done just about everything else at the bakery other than watch the oven (it’s a quirky old oven, broken from many places) which means that all steps in any given project are accelerated with a pretty good amount. There are so few workers present that a single pair of hands can make a huge difference.

I can also say that an idyllic little bakery at its most hectic beats any conveyor belt streaming out pastries steadily by the thousands.

I didn’t do the cake in this photo, however I did do some layered cakes at work that looked very much like this. There was no chance to photograph any of the ones I did, since they all were whisked away to a delivery as soon as I had finished piping the cream in the appropiate places. I shaped the whipped cream in the simplest possible way: Little buttons of cream pushed out of the piping bag along the sides, in vertical rows of three. The edge around the cake was (only) slightly more complicated, with flowing little U-shaped jumps outwards from the center.

On the top of the first cakes I put cranberries on top of a very thin marmalade layer, later there was a decision to put some blackberries amongst them as well. The moistener was just sugar water, inside layers had cranberry marmalade and whipped cream. The third cake was the same, but it had a caramel layer on the top instead of the frozen cranberries.

All in all, it was all much simpler than I had imagined. It took me a few minutes to steady the output of cream from the piping bag and to find the correct body postures to use it with, and I’m sure it’ll all only get better with experience. There were some faults in the cakes too, like the piping didn’t become all even… The pastry chef I’m training under said the customers won’t be paying any attention to slight mistakes in the whipped cream shapes, but that’s no reason for me to get complacent about it. :p