PREHEAT.

Generally, the first step of baking is to preheat your oven. Since baking is such a fine chemistry, if you skip this step, you could destroy the equation and cause more harm to the final product than intended. When you’re working with delicate flours or chemical leaveners (ie baking soda), you need heat and you need it quickly, so that the gluten structure can set properly. Not preheating the oven will result in dry, flat, crumbly, chewy, or just really disappointing baked goods.

I was thinking about this concept outside of the kitchen recently. Several weeks ago, I tore my hamstring because my muscles were too cold and not adequately stretched. If I had just completed step 1 and preheated the oven, err, my hamstrings, the results would have been much less painful.

Ok, so if it wasn’t obvious enough, culinary school has taken a very sweet turn. We’re officially bakers and wannabe pastry artists, and I’m not mad about it. For being in a Health-Supportive Culinary Arts Program, I do love my sugar and butter. It’s about balance, right?

We kicked things off with a crash course in “conversions,” which may have been my favorite classes to date. Each student was assigned two recipes to make 10x, altering one ingredient every time to see how these ingredient changes affected the final outcome. We started with a traditional recipe (I had the Tollhouse Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe), and veganized, de-glutenized, and attempted to make more nutritious versions by removing all white flour and sugar.

While the chocolate chip cookies were mostly successful, converting a traditional Black and White Cookie proved to be much more difficult. Versions 1 and 2 in that photo were the tastiest by far.

One of my new favorite pieces of knowledge is the difference between baking soda and baking powder. As long as I’ve been baking, I never stopped to wonder why we use one or another in a recipe, and I naively assumed they were interchangeable.

Basically, baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) requires an acid in the recipe (like lemon juice, yogurt, buttermilk, or molasses) in order to produce carbon dioxide gas for leavening. It’s 4x stronger than baking powder. Baking powder, on the other hand, is a mixture of baking soda and cream of tartar (an acid), so you would use this if there is no other acid present in the recipe. Most baking powder you buy is “double-acting,” which just means that it releases some gas when mixed with a liquid, and the remaining leavening occurs when it is exposed to heat.

After we tested and tasted our weight in cookies and brownies, we moved on to galettes and pies! We perfected the art of a vegan and butter pie crust for both sweet and savory pies.

Yesterday, we took what was probably the most fun exam I’ve ever had in school- a galette baking practical. We all had to make a vegan apple galette from scratch, sans recipe.

Once we got in our baking groove, we dove into more technical cookie art. I jumped at the chance to make checkerboard cookies, which were tricky little buggers. The entire process took maybe three hours to complete. Then they were gone in about twenty minutes. Ha!

My checkerboard “scraps” did not go to waste and were rolled into slice and bake marble cookies. Because marble is so in right now…

Isabel made these fabulous fig swirl cookies, and gave me her leftover filling and dough to play with while my checkerboard cookies were chillin’…

So I made fig newtons! Duh.

Are you still with me? Because I have a lot more sugar coming at you. I feel like a person could get diabetes just from reading this post.

We arrived at cake decorating day and were challenged to make a layer cake with vegan cake AND vegan frosting. Let me just say, vegan frosting is tricky, y’all. Give me all the buttercream, please. That photo up there is my attempt at a vegan banana cake with leopard print frosting made with chocolate ganache, chocolate-peanut butter frosting, and coconut-cashew frosting.

Just when we needed a little break from baked goods, we moved on to ice cream, sorbet, gelato, chocolate, and candy, of course.

We had the option of making avocado sorbet, black sesame ice cream, rich chocolate gelato, or basil sorbet, so obviously I chose to make the…vanilla ice cream ;) What can I say? I’m a vanilla girl.

For the lesson in the art of chocolate and candy making, we learned how to properly temper chocolate for truffles and chocolate bark, and the delicate process of making almond-thyme brittle. Look at that focus.

Alright, friends. I’m retreating into a sugar coma. I’ll see you again for bread baking, pizza and pasta.

And don’t forget to preheat your ovens!

xx,

J