"We're Not Making Cookies Anymore"

How was everyone's Thanksgiving? I hope it was full of delicious goodies and fun times with those you care about. I didn't have a chance to go home, but my favouritest guy friend (read: boyfriend) and I cooked up a wonderful vegan feast. Yup, we eat vegan at home. My diet currently is 80% vegan, 20% vegetarian. The sneaky 20% mostly comes from treats at school. :P So what did we eat instead of turkey? A lentil walnut loaf! Actually, it wasn't the best dish on our delectable delights. It wasn't bad, but not the tastiest meat-loaf like substitute. Mixing the gravy, stuffing, and roasted garlic mashed potatoes was my favourite. :)

Thanksgiving dinner

The title of this post is actually a quote from one of my Chef's. On our first day back to school, he gave us this huge list of tasks and said "We're not making cookies anymore" which was exactly what the class next to us was making. Fast forward to Special Projects class and we're making cookies, again. Once again, it is all about consistency and perfection. All the cookies had to be the same height and diameter, not too dark, not too light. We had the added "challenge" of packaging them neatly. If the round cookies were too wide, you had to cut them down to size which meant some cookies lost their outer coating of sugar or almonds.

Left to right: Nut shortbread, raspberry linzer, almond sugar cookie, sugar cookie,
fondant dipped lemon, chocolate dipped cherry

Yummy linzer cookies!

We also started making little pumpkin tarts. In the end, it will be a layer of salted chocolate with ganache topped with a pumpkin creameau - a fancy term for pumpkin cream. I haven't tried the creameau yet, but the caramel and ganache were delightful.

Chewy chocolatey deliciousness

In summary, nothing very exciting has happened thus far. The exciting stuff is going to start happening next week. This class is all about setting up a dessert buffet. That means we get to host our own dessert buffet! Each pair makes a dessert for the buffet, and each table of four creates an action station in which we can interact with the customers while making them something scrumptious.

We haven't been assigned our flavours yet, but my partner and I are looking around for inspiration. She loves little silcone moulds and I like poprocks or surprises. The dessert buffet will be Halloween themed so maybe dry ice will make an apperance. :)