You Gotta Check These Out!!!

I'm posting a picture of today's chocolate croissants simply out of pride...

Look @ all those layers...mmmm mmm mmmm.  Today we made these with chocolate which had choco nibs in it...shut up!  OMG, they were freakin' delicious :)

Again in class this morning Chef gave us a time limit to make our croissants within.  Before he established a time limit I was making a syrup for the whole class, it was maybe a 5-7 minute project.  Once he gave us a time limit I freaked out...yesterday my croissants suffered greatly because of the time limit I had to work under.  I asked chef 

if I could stop making the syrup & go work on my croissants.  Now, normally I would never try to get out of one task because I felt another might suffer.  I would just work hard at getting them both to be awesome but I'm telling you this whole time limit thing is throwing me a huge curve ball.  After I asked to switch projects Chef looks at me and says, "no, you can just do your croissants in 25 minutes, hee hee hee"....WHAT?!@?!  Freak out!!!  I completed my croissants in 30 minutes and as you saw, they turned out wonderfully delicious :)

We made some new, and some old, brioche today.  We made, again, the Brioche de Paris (the super cute ones) and mine actually came out 

worse today.  They are rolled and smooshed and tucked and smoothed and are to remain in one piece through the whole process and while I only broke one, which wasn't too big a deal, there was incorrect smooshing in my technique.  They looked quite busted and not nearly as cute as they did yesterday:

These guys are actually all leaning on one another, well except for the one guy that looks like he's leaning (on the right), that one's standing upright & the ball on top is spilling over. 

The two other brioches we made today were a Raisin Loaf; brioche rolled up with pastry cream and raisins, (a.k.a. Escargot):

Mine aren't rolled as tightly as they could've/should've been.  I am finding I often do not roll things tightly enough...there's a skill I never thought of refining.

And we also made a third brioche called Brioche Saint Gengoux, this is an area of France where these originate from (or are at least very popular):

The pink is a praline wrapped almond (I do not know why it is pink) which is also stuffed inside the bread:

Not the best photo but I wanted you to see...

These are super sweet.

Tomorrow we're making more danish, so I'll get more practice with rolling dough, more croissants (guess who's not taking on an extra task beforehand...), brioche, and...oh, pretzels (that'll be fun).  Dude, why is lye used in the making of pretzels...that seems totally jacked up to me...who first decided to make food with lye?!?!?  What the...?????  Yea, so I get to play with lye tomorrow, and while I'm not looking forward to that part I am excited to rock my Thursday!!!!

**I'm not sure what's up with the font on this blog.  Just typing this sentence I've had to adjust and re-adjust about 5 different times...WTF?!?!?!