Previously, on Prepare to Meet Your Bakerina…
Wednesday, May 7. Carla picks me up and before saying good morning, says, “Go inside and ask them how to get to I-89. If we take I-89 to I-91, we can miss all of the traffic through Hanover.” This is like saying that the shortest distance between two points is an angle, but I tell her I’d be glad to try it tomorrow morning, i.e. not today, when we have five minutes to get to class. En route, she tells me that her boss is not taking her news well, and wants her to work for them for one more week. She doesn’t want to say no because she doesn’t want to burn any bridges, but she can’t, just can’t work with those people for even one second more, so what she has decided to do is tell them that she will be back next week, then the day before they’re expecting her, she’ll call and tell them that she has car trouble and is stranded in Vermont, with no way to get home. What do I think? You can probably guess. 
Woo-hoo! Puff pastry day! We take our fully turned, sheeted dough and start baking it for napoleons. We cut more puff into circles for apple galettes and Italian kerchief turnovers. We also - and this is big fun - learn how to make marshmallows, which will top our s’mores tarts tomorrow. (S’mores tart consists of a graham-cracker tart shell, a chocolate diplomat cream and a marshmallow garnish, which we will toast with the blowtorch.) We take our rugelach dough, which is similar to puff even though it is not puff, and make big, gorgeous rugelach with them. I am a fan of tiny rugelach, about the size of cockle shells, but I will make an exception for this rugelach here. We also make a 5” flourless chocolate cake that we will decorate on Friday. This is a lethal cake - nothing but chocolate, butter, eggs, sugar and Chambord, which you need to keep the cake from curdling.
The day proceeds like ballet, where I work so fast and so hard but with such concentration that now I know the true meaning of flow. There is a moment of nerves when the time comes to assemble, decorate and cut my napoleons, but in the end I manage to conjure up half a dozen saleable, if not perfect, little napoleons. The desk crew at the Rezz will fall on these, too, and on the apple galette, and the kerchiefs, and the cream horns. We taste them, and I marvel at how light butter can be. Not that I’m saying that it’s a diet food, not by any stretch, but that when you handle butter properly, at the proper temperature, how light and non-greasy it bakes up. I bite into a cream horn and it shatters against my canines. I want to go home and make a new batch of puff and use it for pithiviers, the French cake made with puff and almond cream, a cake that is nasty if you get it wrong, but amazing if you get it right. I reward myself by going to the KA store and spending $70 on a French textbook on decorative bread techniques.
Thursday, May 8. When Carla picks me up - after I tell her that there’s no way to travel on 89 and 91 in less than 20 minutes - we have no way of knowing that today will be an adventure day. We are preparing genoise for the cakes we will fill and decorate on Friday. Each of us has been given our own butane-fired burner, over which we will whip our whole eggs and sugar to 120 degrees and then immediately put it on the mixer and beat at high speed until we have a stable foam. Because all of the cakes have to go into the oven at the same time - sponge cakes will not stand - we all synchronize our burners and start beating together. As I am beating, I notice a piece of hazelnut sponge batter that I apparently forgot to clean out of my bowl. Tim, the Verizon guy, announces that he has hit 120 degrees, then cries out, “Wait! The eggs have scorched!” I look closely - that wasn’t hazelnut batter in my bowl - that was scorched egg. All six of us have scorched our eggs at precisely the same moment. We throw out our rapidly-curdling eggs, get new bowls, and try again, this time over a bain marie. Genoise progresses without incident, at least until they come out of the oven, where we discover that all of our cakes, including Chef’s, have fallen. He vows to try it again tonight, to see what went wrong.
After our baptism by fire, we are relieved to see that that will be the worst of it. Our tart shells are baked and ready to go. We also spend a few hours with the head pastry chef of the KA Bakery, who teaches us a neat trick for putting a fast woven lattice on our torti di ricotta and our linzertortes. We bake the t.d r., the linzertortes and a lemon meringue pie that has the tartest, lemoniest filling I have ever tasted. We also make a fresh fruit tart filled with diplomat cream, an apricot/frangipane tart, the vaunted s’mores tart and something called an “extreme chocolate” tart, which is filled with an extra-bittersweet ganache that is like a truffle, but more so. It is a wondrous day, marred only by my need to physically turn away from Carla because I can’t bear to watch her hold a pastry bag. At some time in her life she taught herself to use a pastry bag, but she did not know how to place her hands to get maximum leverage from the bag, so as a result her hand is always in an upside-down position, so she has no leverage or control over what she is piping. Both Chef and I, at her request, have showed her how to hold the bag, even physically taking her hand and placing it where it needs to be, but she can’t retain the memory of it. As I feared, her dustup with her boss has broken her concentration for the week, and she cannot hold information for more than five minutes. I know that she has dreams of running her own shop, and I want her to succeed, but what I have seen of her this week indicates that she has a long learning curve ahead of her, and I am worried for her. On the other hand, she did raise four children while working full-time, so I think I just haven’t seen her in her element.
Friday, May 9. Today is my brother’s 25th birthday and, slacker that I am, I have forgotten his birthday present. (Later I call my mom and she said he told her that he had forgotten until two days ago that his birthday was coming up, a far cry from his childhood when he used to plan for his birthday weeks in advance.) Today is our day to wrap it all up, fill and decorate our cakes, say our goodbyes, marvel at the speed with which the week progressed, and go home. Except for me, because at 5 p.m. I am going to the Norwich Inn to attend a reception for Peter Reinhart, who will be teaching a demo class at the school the next day. Peter Reinhart is the head of the bread program at Johnson & Wales, the former owner of Brother Juniper’s Cafe in California, and the author of six bread books, including the truly wondrous Bread Baker’s Apprentice. He also has a loyal following of breadheads who have taken his classes repeatedly and will travel hundreds of miles to see him, much like Deadheads. Deadheads...breadheads...heh.
I get a tremendous sense of deja vu on Friday morning, as it shapes up much like Monday. Carla can’t pick me up because she is waiting for a call from her husband (long story, one that I will not share, for once!), the taxi service is booked, the hotel shuttle is unavailable...so at 6:50 I head out, arriving in Hanover an hour later. Because I have some time to kill, I stop at the Dirt Cowboy Cafe, order an iced chai and a biscuit, and think quiet, pleasant thoughts. The Dirt Cowboy is a really neat little place, one that no college town should be without.
By the end of class, we have produced a hazelnut torte filled and iced with praline buttercream, one of the best substances in the world. We have made a raspberry mousse cake, genoise filled with raspberry mousse and iced with whipped cream. Chef makes an alternate mousse cake which he ices with white chocolate ribbons. Chef is a genius. He breaks my heart. (He has also cracked the code on the genoise; the pans were too small for the amount of batter produced, so we all overfilled our pans, causing the sides to set up too quickly and the middles to collapse.) He also saves more than one of our lives; as we have our cakes on turntables, piping the rosettes on which we will place our hazelnut decorations, he walks by, watching us, complimenting us, giving us pointers. He stops in front of our bench and says, kindly (much more kindly than I would have), “Carla, this is something you’ll want to work on when you get home. You’ve been holding the bag wrong all week, which means that it’s become a habit, but I know that it’s a habit you can undo.” What a man. We make a torta meringata, an orange/olive oil cake filled with that amazing puckery lemon filling left over from the pies, iced with Swiss meringue, toasted with the blowtorch and showered with edible glitter. Mine gets a wee bit too toasty, but it is still beautiful. We taste, we evaluate, we are done by 3 p.m. Since I am not going back to the hotel, I give one of my cakes to the retail staff at the KA store and the rest to Chef, who regularly donates cakes to a charity that provides rooms for the families of hospitalized children receiving care at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. I have two hours to kill, no plans to go to the hotel, no real inclination to walk into Hanover or Norwich...so I sit down on my rock next to the pond, take out my notebook, and proceed to write this letter.