mossy mushroom cake.

A pistachio olive oil high ratio cake layered with cream cheese buttercream, blackberry reduction and blackberries.  Then I garnished it with ground pistachios, a marzipan vine, pomegranate seeds, blackberries and meringue mushrooms.  It was my first time trying to make a lot of these things so it was a big experiment, especially for my final cake practical, but it all came together in the end and even tasted pretty good!

tarts tarts tarts.

Moved on from bread to sweets and spent the last 3 days making so many tarts - black forest, lemon curd, peach cobbler, and, my favorite, peanut butter mouse with chocolate ganache drizzled on top - oof.

artisan breads.

Whole wheat sourdoughs, corn breads, epis, olive bread, bleu cheese walnuts.  This class was a dream.

fancy desserts.

These last 3 weeks I've spent most of my time learning how to put together these fancy things.  Making pumpkin mousse, tempering chocolate, sculpting caramelized sugar - I spent more of my time sneaking tastes than actually prepping the food.  The funny thing is, while I can't deny I learned how to make some impressive looking things, it was a challenge for me to really enjoy the class.  Fancy desserts look great and all, but I'd really rather spend my time kneading dough for a simple bread than spending so much time to create a sugar rose or burning my fingers to make a tuile cone.  Even still, I'm happy to have learned these techniques, and if I ever need an impressive party trick, I have a wealth of new garnish knowledge to pull out.