I am going French...

I was so busy before I left for France, that there are a few things I wanted to do but didn't.  One of them was get a haircut and dye my hair.  Roots is not a good look for me.  So I decided to do it here.  It was a prime example of my epic fail in learning the French language.  So I found a salon and the woman spoke NO English.  Go figure, but she was really nice.  So I walked into the salon and I say "Je voudrais un colour et un coupe." The woman giggled at me but nodded yes that she would do it.   I figured she was laughing at me accent.  Oh how I wish it was my accent.  Now I had asked my French teacher how to say "I want a color and a haircut", and I assumed that is what I said, but of course, it wasn't. Now the word for haircut and the word for ice cream sundae are very similar, and looking back, I defiantly said to the woman that "I want a color and an ice cream sundae."  Ughhhh, go me.  Well anyways, this is way shorter than I wanted, but I ended up loving it!    Here is my new French hairstyle!

Sugar Artistry!

One thing about pastry school is that you never really get to design your own dessert.  You pretty much just make it like the Chef made it.  Which when you have creative juices in you just dying to get out, it becomes very agonizing.  For the first time ever (drum roll please) we actually got to design our own work... and it was a sugar sculpture none the less!  When we first got the assignment, our teacher told us we could do whatever we wanted, and only gave us a height limit.  So my partner and I designed a pretty cool sculpture.  The next day our teacher told us that he forgot to tell us that there was a theme, which was "exotic", and we could only use three colors in our sculpture.  Ummmm, what?  So with little time to actually plan out, my partner and I started our work.  She "worked" on god knows what for most of the time, which I didn't mind because it let me have most of the creative freedom on the project.  So here is our exotic sugar sculpture!  It is mostly mine, the only thing she made on it was the one crazy looking flower on the bottom right hand side.  Everything else I did.





Here are a few close-ups of our work:





And here are the sculptures from the rest of the class... I don't think many of them followed the rules!

My Favorite Class... ENTREMETS!!!

This was hands down my favorite class, mostly because this is what I want to do in life.   They are called entremets and are fancy french cakes.  They are usually only about 2 inches high, and contain some sort of crunchy layer, a creamy layer, a cake layer, and a mousse.  I love the endless combinations you can come up with.  For our buffet, me teacher picked only the best ones to display.  And guess what... he picked every single cake I made!  Woo hoo!! I wish this class could have lasted so much longer!  Here we go with the pictures...

Thursday Morning Markets in Town

I loved the Thursday morning markets in Yssingeaux.  They put farmers markets in America to shame.  You can buy so many things here, tons of fresh produce, meats (some with a twist as you will see), clothes, tires... almost anything!  It was amazing and so cheap!  We would by tons of fresh veggies and fruits and in America, it would have cost you about $30 and here, we would get it all for about 5 euros.  Insane!  Here are just a few pics.  This is one thing I am gonna miss so much when I come home!





And this is how you buy your meat (not even kidding about this...)



They have all other kinds of "meats" too, including live chickens, roosters, ducks, and rabbits!  But for the weak hearted... they also sell meat like you would see in a grocery store too! :)

Chocolates Lab! (Not about a Dog)

Luckily for us, we had chocolates lab the week before Easter.  So our teachers let us make all sorts of Easter candy....with one exception.  It was traditional Easter candy.  So apparently in France, instead of a bunny delivering eggs and chocolates to children, an Easter Bell does it.  Yea, I don't get it either.  And there is a huge emphasize on chocolate hens (makes sense) and chocolate fish and seashells (I give up on French Culture!)  Our teachers also tried to have a little fun with us and we made angry birds out of chocolate!  Had to be one of the coolest looking buffets we made!









And we made a chocolate cake and a chocolate tart as well!!  Chocolate overload!!

I scream, you scream, we all scream for ICE CREAM!!!

In going back through my photos, I relize I am further behind on this blog than I thought.  Sorry everyone! (and by everyone, I mean the one or two people who actually read this!)  Ice Creams class was a lot of fun and was very cold!  We got to work on this really cool table that you could turn on and the tabletop turned into a freezer surface.  It was crazy! And unless you a pastry nerd like me, I am sure you consider this pretty dumb!  I can't remember what all of these are, but here are a bunch of pictures....













We also made popsicles made of blueberry sorbet.... I loved them, but they turned my teeth blue.  It was a very good look for me! NOT!

Just an update....

I am still alive :) I have been really busy with school and traveling but I am here.  I will work on a few posts for you now, including my trips to Milan, Venice, Paris (again) and lots of pictures from class!