the final course

As I get older I realize more and more how fast time goes by - even as I counted down the slowly passing minutes of my final Saturday pastry class last week. And the final hours of my desk job this week. It's crazy how a year can seem like a lifetime or a blur depending on your point of view. Spending all day Saturday in a kitchen with other students for the last twenty months has been fun, fascinating, exhausting, overwhelming and many other adjectives that I could take up space with here. But more than anything it has allowed me to learn a lot about myself and what I can accomplish if I put my mind to it. And now I get to put those skills to use in my new bakery job. Bonus: I won't have to adjust to working long Saturdays since I've been doing it for so long already. My learning and fascination won't stop either, so I'll still blog often with updates on my internship/job.

The last Saturday of class was sort of underwhelming as we were all itching to get out of there, but my partner and I managed to put together a pretty nice ice cream cake. Or an ice cream brownie in our case. We made a fairly flat brownie, churned up some vanilla ice cream with Andes mint chunks, and baked some fancy pirouette cookies to place on top with the whipped cream. In the end, the whipped cream's job was to keep the fast-melting ice cream in between the brownies. This dessert works best when everything has time to chill sufficiently, which we've never had the time for on Saturdays. In any case, here is the final course I will produce in the school kitchen.

While it wasn't my prettiest or tastiest work, Greg and I still enjoyed eating it last week. And I will really enjoy not having to set a clogged foot in the school kitchen anymore. I do have ten more weeks of book class (Business Entrepreneurship), but then all I have to worry about is completing my internship paperwork until it's all over in October.

This weekend Greg and I are off on a mini-vacation to West Virginia to visit Greg's grandparents. We are looking forward to a very fun visit and I made a special cake just for the occasion. I hope everyone enjoys this lemon cake as much as I enjoyed making it!