A Very Bad Week

This has been a tough week. First, my cake was stolen. Then, as I walked home that night sans cake, feeling very forlorn, I dropped half of my sugar free $5 candy bar on the sidewalk. Luckily, when I got home, my roommate had a lovely noodle stir fry with chicken and broccoli waiting for me. That really cheered me up. His friend Ian burned me some Edith Piaf and Neil Diamond CDs. I took a hot shower, had two mugs of green tea and slept off my frustration.

Today, however, was no walk in the park. Class seemed like it was 18 hours long. Thank God I'm resourceful. I played tic tac toe with the guy next to me and when that got boring, we played connect the dots. I lost. Oh well.

I showed up for class to make my genoise with buttercream and homemade raspberry jam and I was doing great at first. I had everything organized and my cake was one of the first ones in the oven. When the cake was done, however, so was my luck.

We have to slice off any imperfection if the cakes are at all uneven. I did this yesterday with my Alhambra and had no problem. Today, however, I had serious issues. After about the fifth slice, the piece of cake didn't come off as I'd planned. Instead, the knife went directly into my thumb. And this was no ordinary knife. It was a serrated knife almost as big as a chef's knife. It looks deceptively dull but let me tell you, it hurt. Blood was everywhere. Mdme. Flour assisted me with the bleeding, which took some time to stop, and gave me a band-aid. All this put me way behind schedule. When I went back to work, I was so rattled I sliced the layers lopsided. Then, I iced the wrong side of the cake and she had to come over and help me re-ice it. She was really nice about it. Problem was, tonight was our assessment and we weren't supposed to have any help from the teacher or our peers. Damn.

The tears started coming at that point. My finger hurt and I'd messed up a lot. I turned away so no one could see and just took a deep breath. Pastry chefs don't cry. You've got to be tough, so I got back in the game. I started icing the cake a second time, piping around the edges where I messed up (a clever cover-up, I thought) and put almonds around the sides where the lopsided edges didn't hold much icing. I put a raspberry in the middle and piped several rosettes around it. Voila.

I can't be sure if the teacher took pity on me and didn't want to say anything bad about my cake, but when she came to critique it, she said the piping was 90% perfect and the icing was a good texture. She cut into it and said it was perfectly cooked, nice and soft and airy. She even compared the other students' cakes to mine. She showed them mine as an example of what it should look like. Theirs were either over whisked or over folded. Other students wanted to taste mine to see how it was supposed to taste. That made me feel good. My raspberry was lopsided, though. "You do know the centerpiece is supposed to go in the center, right?" she smiled. It's true. In all my haste, I put the raspberry somewhere on the upper left quadrant of the cake. Oh well.

I decided to taste the cake for myself. Dear God, it was good. I didn't get to taste my Alhambra, but I can honestly say that of all the desserts I've made so far and all the desserts I've tasted in my 30 years, this was one of the best desserts I've ever had. It's such a simply conceived dessert, but it's the effort and the quality of the ingredients that make such a difference. I made my own jam. I created that luscious buttercream. I put on the lopsided layers. It was mine. Maybe that's what makes it taste so sweet.