Le Cordon Bleu Dusit Basic Pastry Lesson 1

Today was the first day of the class. Indeed, as expected, the atmosphere in class was quite a serious one. Our pastry chef, Chef Geraldine Mueller started with just a little introduction of herself before spending about 40 minutes on the house rules at Le Cordon Bleu. We then moved on to make 4 types of pastry - The Diamonds, Shortbread Biscuits, Brittany Shortbread Biscuits and finally Madeleines. Will put the french name the next time I bring my file back. There are really too many things to carry to school so I thought I will just leave them in my locker.

In the afternoon it was the pastry practical class and we were asked to make the diamonds and the mixture for madeleines to be made tomorrow. I thought practical class was quite interesting. The instructor checked that we all have neat and clean uniforms with our hairs tied up properly. Our working area has to be neat and clean as well while making the pastries. Everything went well for me except that towards the end of the lesson, I cut my finger! It happened while I was helping my classmate William wash his knife. Like my brother said, I am really accident prone! Oh well the wound took a while to eventually stop bleeding and it is ok now.

For the Diamonds, I feel like it is lemon flavored butter cookies with sugar coatings. The toughest part about making this pastry has to be the rolling part. Every time I tried rolling it, the pastry became so thin in the middle. We did ask the chef if we can recombine the dough again if it becomes thin in the middle. He said yes we can put it in the fridge and take it out and redo. But since time is of the essence in practical we couldn't do that.

Here are my precious diamonds! Odd shaped! I think I would call it shortbread cookies.

This is what the Chef did