Week Three: Pound Cake, Devil's Food Cupcakes, Ganache, Swiss Roll and Genoise

Translation: dry cakes with lemon curd. Gross. Well, not gross, exactly, but I'm not a huge fan of lemon. The cupcakes were awesome though. You can see the pics in my previous post.

These recipes were all pretty neat though, since many of them involved equal parts. For instance, pound cake is equal parts flour, sugar, butter, and eggs. Ganache is equal parts chocolate and cream. Genoise is equal parts flour, sugar, and eggs. Chef is fond of saying that if we are ever stuck in the Amazon jungle and have a craving for genoise, we don't even need a recipe! It's that easy! We just need access to a stove. And a mixer. And an oven. And hopefully some icing, cause this stuff is dry as hell.

Final week of class is up next, and we're re-creating some items we've done before as part of our practical final, and then taking a few tests. Should be pretty easy. And the next class we start working with yeast doughs! I've lost a bit of weight from the stress, exercise, and dinners-on-the-go this first month, but I don't know anymore. I can very easily hand off a plate of cupcakes to my husband and say "here, take these to work." But a loaf of bread? Forget about it. I can eat that single-handedly while watching So You Think You Can Dance, reminiscing about when I used to dance and weighed 120 pounds.

Ah me.