First Day in the Bakery

Today was my first day actually working in a bakery.  While I've baked many things before at home, working at a bakery is very different.  The pace is quicker at the bakery than at home and the bakery has different types of professional equipment that makes baking that much faster.  In the beginning, I learned that fresh eggs aren't necessarily the best to use when baking, and that aged, pre-whipped eggs are used to help with the texture and consistency of the pastries, especially with pastries like meringue.  In addition, although this was my very first time working in the bakery, my mentor and all of the workers were extremely nice, and I actually worked under/alongside two of the other workers as well as my mentor.

The first type of pastry that I helped make were the amaretti cookies, which I helped pipe on to the trays and then sprinkle white sugar on top of.  Doing so helped me with my piping techniques, increasing my piping consistency in particular because I had to make sure that the cookies were roughly the same size.

The second type of pastry that I helped make were the eclairs.  While each part of the eclair was already pre-made (the pastry, custard, whipping cream, and chocolate), I helped cut, fill, and decorate the tops of the pastries.  I learned another technique while piping, which is to twist the end of the piping bag to increase the pressure in the bag, which would make piping quicker and easier.

The third, and last, type of pastry that I helped make this morning were the Easter sugar cookies.  Although I had to leave before the cookies were baked, I helped make the dough by measuring the ingredients and using the mixer.  Next, I rolled out the dough using the rolling machine and then cut out the cookies using different cookie cutters.  I made two trays of each of the shapes, which were: two sizes of bunny heads, a chick, and two sizes of eggs.  After I finished cutting the shapes out, I put pink, blue, yellow, and purple crystal sprinkles onto the cookies by spraying some water onto the cookies and then putting the cookies on the trays with sprinkles on them.  Some of the cookies were designated to be decorated with chocolate, but I had to leave before I could help decorate those cookies.

The next thing I hope to do is to continue to increase my piping skills as well as continue to gain experiencing making different types of pastries.

Time Logged for this Session: 4 hours
Total Time Logged: 24.5 hours