The $100 Croissant

So over the Metro

I am exhausted. So exhausted I could not even go to dinner with super fun friends from Dallas last night who graciously included me in their plans. They invited me at 5:30 to join them on a fun little booze cruise down the Seine—who doesn’t love that—and I was so excited! They had rented a private boat and there was champagne and delicious little snacks-a perfect start to the evening.

The Eiffel Tower from the river—always a show stopper!

Beautiful boat, yummy champagne!

Sadly though, by 7pm, when the cruise was finished, I was so tired I couldn’t hang for dinner. Lame, I know. But getting up at 5am every day will do that to you. I am not proud, but I was desperate for bed and rest.

This week has been a killer. We had 10 hours of class straight with two 30 minute breaks Monday and Tuesday and only a slightly shorter day on Wednesday.

Monday began with rolling out pastry dough for almond cake, croissants, pain au chocolate, four different kinds of brioche and some experimental pieces. I have never worked so hard in all my life. They should send prisoners sentenced to hard labor to LCB. That’ll break them and make them sorry!

It is amazing to me that a croissant sells for under two euros when it took me all day to make six! If you throw in the pains au chocolate—which also were six in number, I think, that for ten hours of work they need to sell for about $100 each just to insure minimum wage for the baker! It was so very labor intensive. We rolled out the dough, added the dry butter, made two turns and put it in the fridge to rest. Then, just for fun, we whipped up an almond cake while we were waiting. After that we started the brioche dough. Immediately following, we got the croissant/pain au chocolate dough out of the fridge and rolled it out again and made two more folds and turns and put it back in the fridge. While it rested, we kneaded the brioche dough and then it went down for a rest in the fridge. Honestly, babysitting dough is like having a real baby in your keep. It cannot be left unattended, and must be watched and worried over.

We then swapped out for the croissant dough, rolled it out again, cut it into the correct shapes—rectangle for pains au chocolate and triangle for croissants and back to the fridge it went. Out came the brioche dough and we made about ten balls and five pig in a blanket-type shapes out of it. Another rest in the fridge for them and we commenced molding the croissants into their recognizable twisted shape, while also rolling up sticks of chocolate in the rectangular dough for the pains au chocolate. We also gently washed them with egg and put them in the proofing oven to rise. Chef was very emphatic that the dough will know if you don’t work with passion and love and won’t rise as well—so we all sweetly cooed to it. Silently however, I was cursing my aching back and sore feet.

The brioche dough was ready so we put it into molds to make different shaped loaves of bread and they also went in a special oven to proof. Then we washed the croissants and chocolates once more with egg and in they went to bake. Next we washed the brioche and sprinkled these little sugar pellets all over the top. For the loaf shaped like pigs in a blanket we also cut the top of all five pigs and stuck a dollop of butter into each slit. Just to make sure they were well hydrated.

I don’t know and I am not going to check, but brioche must have a 1000 calories a slice packed into it as there is so much butter and sugar, inside and out. I used to always buy brioche to make French toast with when the kids were young—God only knows why they don’t have diabetes today. Knowing what I know now and remembering how I coated it with egg and milk, and then rolled it in cinnamon sugar, before I fried it in butter and doused it with maple syrup—truly makes me question my parenting skills.

By the time the day was done, I had little sweaters covering all my teeth from tasting so much dough, sugar and butter. I was desperate to brush. My mouth was humming with sugar and all I could think about while we were waiting for everything to finish, was that I need a dentist appointment stat! But, after all the baking was done and everything came out of the ovens—I was amazed!! I can’t believe we actually made all these baked goods and they were beautiful to behold!

My pastries scored some more fives! I am on a roll—haha!!

Almond cake intermezzo

I nearly skipped to the metro loaded down with all these goodies, only to be told that there was a delay due to an abandoned bag at Odeon station. We metro riders sat and patiently waited and finally after about ten minutes the train began to move only to stop again with the announcement that the line was shutting down due to this unattended bag. At this point there was nothing to do but get off two stops into my journey. Way too far to walk with all my pastries, homework and dirty uniform. So, I exited the metro in an unfamiliar place and appeared up top at street level. I immediately began to look for a cab, having no knowledge of whether this was a cab-popular location or not. Turns out, it was not so popular. Ten minutes later I finally got a ride and I arrived home about an hour after leaving LCB. Bummer. I have heard nothing further about the abandoned baggage so I am guessing there was no drama to it. But it really derailed my trip home.

Tuesday was another 10 hour day and we made a baba cake and kugelofs. It was hard! Below is chef’s cake and then mine. Sadly, it was not a day for grades of 5 as my light pastry cream was not whipped solid enough and was sliding off the top by the time it came for my evaluation. Oh well. It’s a process…

Chef’s cake

My cake

After all the baking and clean up, I went to my performance review at 4:30. Chef praised me for my efforts and my grades, but then wanted to know, in all seriousness, what I was really doing at LCB—what was my future goal/plan? I nearly laughed out loud. I am 58. These are the plans. There aren’t any others. Maybe I should have made something up, like my goal is to invent a new dessert and name it after LCB or Chef. Or better yet, I could have told him that I am secretly working on an exposé of LCB and the mean chefs from cuisine.

I was still laughing to myself as I got on the metro to go home. On the way, another passenger started singing a little ditty and then yelling, “Je m’appelle Corona!” ( My name is Corona) over and over. He had a voice like Louis Armstrong—dark and gravelly, and at first he seemed harmless enough, maybe even entertaining. But as his singing stopped and his ranting grew in volume, I began to become a little nervous. He was particularly accosting a young woman seated behind me, so when we pulled into a station and I saw the gendarmes on the platform, I tried to alert them to the problem. Well, no such luck. They didn’t even bat an eye, even though the man could clearly be heard by this time, shouting at the other people in the car. When I got off at my stop, I went directly to the counter where tickets are sold and told the operator that there was a potentially dangerous man on the train. The man behind the counter just looked at me, and then he shrugged a quintessentially French shrug. He shrugged in a, “your problems are not my problems” sort of way. I was kind of stunned and super annoyed. I was reporting a serious complaint about a possibly crazy person on the metro and he couldn’t have cared less. But by all means, let’s shut down the entire metro line leaving people stranded over an abandoned bag. These are strange times and frankly, I am a little over the metro and the people who work there.

On a more positive note, Wednesday was a slightly shorter day and we made a dacquoise. Have you ever even heard of such a thing? I had not, and I eat a lot of pastries. The dacquoise is a veritable dream, or maybe nightmare (your choice) of meringue and buttercream topped by a an even more sugary marzipan rose and leaf, made by—you guessed it—Yours Truly.

La dacquoise.

I was really proud of this jewel as it was very difficult to make. There were about a hundred different steps. First, just making the meringue made my arm hurt from whipping the egg whites so long. Second, caramelizing the almonds. Third, making the buttercream and piping it in an approximation of a circle pattern. Finally, making the rose and leaf out of almond paste— hard but so fun! At the end, though I thought it was pretty to look at, it was a lot like eating frosting on a sugar cracker—no balance or depth.

Maybe the dacquoise is a metaphor for other things in life that are enticing at first glance, but really have no enduring appeal.