Nine Things To Do In The First Week Of A Patisserie Course

It is tremendously exciting when you decide to leave familiar ground, take a chance to learn something new or start something personally significant. The excitement is also accompanied by extreme self-doubt, strangeness and performance anxieties. If you are like me, there are moments when you lose your normal swagger and feel clumsy, like a shaky youngling trying to stand up right after birth. I've been on this roller-coaster before and experienced it anew three weeks ago when I started as the student of a 5-month Baking Science and Patisserie Diploma at a baking academy. The journey so far has been absolutely thrilling, to say the least. But, it has also been nerve-racking to interpret a somewhat alien language.

In order to not lose my nerve in the early stages of an intensive course such as this and be on my game, I started to list a few to-dos and not-to-dos. I am hoping they will prevent me from curling up in the fetal position on the floor at the end of my first month.

1. Figure out the 'tea' situation: Learning where the tea is, is a good strategy. It's also important to figure out the unwritten rules of the school that, if violated, may make people go ballistic. When is that 15 minute break? Which shelves are communal? Who washes the cup? At the baking academy I attend, there is a full-fledged cafe on the ground floor and our classes are conducted on the first floor. Is it ok to buy a cup of tea from the cafe like a guest? Be a sponge, and watch how people are doing things. And lastly, there's nothing wrong with taking your own tea bag and then asking for a cup of hot water from the cafe.

2. Get your act together: This academy is extremely organised. Apart from being a baking school, it is also a great place to improve your bad habits. If you have struggled with time management, quickly get to mapping out how you'll spend each day and begin putting it into practice. Getting organized from the start will make your life easier down the line. It will help you get to class right when it starts at 8 AM, finish pages and pages of hand-written assignments, not miss packing a single thing you will need in class (apron, jacket, cap, notebook, dusters etc.) and swim like a duck.

3. Form your ‘Oh Shit’ Team: Since feelings of anxiety are amplified in this stage of development, you may forget to carry a dusting cloth along or worse, miss something critical related to grooming (after essential rules of personal presentation have been made clear on Day One). You may also place a full tray of beautifully kneaded dough in the proofer instead of the freezer. Finding true OST members who are ready to rescue you during such moments will give you a safe place to stand for a while.

4. Test that first dish at home: Generally, when you are doing something new, it will not work perfectly the first time. But in that very first class, when you make perfect doughnuts such as you can see in the pictures here, you have got to be skeptical and execute it at home all by yourself to know for sure if you can reproduce the recipes without an instructor giving turn-by-turn directions. 

I’m pleased to report that, with no one reminding me that tablespoons are bigger than teaspoons or to not over prove the dough, I successfully baked half a dozen doughnuts a couple of days later.

This list is to be continued in the next post. I know that my ‘don’t go into the woods’ dreams will continue for a little while longer but ah, learning is growth is joy!