My first year of TAFE

I thought while I was in the mood to blog, I might as well write another one. This one is an overview and reflection, of my first year of my Certificate 3 in Hospitality (Patisserie) at William Angliss so hopefully it’s not too long and boring for you all. If it is, you can just look at the pictures!

I feel like I have learnt a lot this year, both from the teachers at TAFE, and from my other classmates. I’m not going to write anything here about the theory classes that we had to endure for two reasons. The first is that it would be quite a boring read and the second is that if you got me started on the ridiculousness of our first semester theory it would probably become an endless rant of all of the problems that we had. The main thing I would like to write about is our practical classes.

I remember the very first practical class when we were all standing around outside our classroom with our brand new, oversized chef whites and feeling like we were back in the first day of year 7. We spent our first lesson cutting up lots and lots of vegetables and learning fancy words like julienne, brunoise and macédoine and thinking about how this was going to help us in our careers as pastry chefs. To be honest I still haven’t answered that question, although I did feel very clever knowing some of these fancy terms when they used them during the last series of Masterchef.

After these few weeks of general cookery we progressed to the pastry kitchens and began our unit on cakes. While the cakes we made were quite basic it was great to have some new recipes and practice the basics of cake making. Probably the best cake we made was the Chocolate Mud cake. I have used this recipe numerous times since making it at TAFE. It is extraordinarily easy to make and the result is a very moist cake that is easy to cut.

Our next unit was Pastries. I was excited to see the picture of a croissant on the front of the workbook for this unit, only to find out that we actually weren’t going to make croissants during the unit at all. Instead we practised making sweet and savoury shortcrust, choux pastry, filo and puff pastry. 

We followed our pastry unit with hot and cold desserts. The highlight of this unit was probably making the Bomb Alaska. The low of this unit was definitely the assessment. After making a perfect chocolate soufflé in class on our first try it took 3 attempts to get it right during the assessment.

 

Our Yeast unit was next and this was definitely my favourite unit of the course so far. This was when we finally got to learn to make croissants and Danishes! I learnt so much in this unit about using yeast and dough, and I’m sure it will be very useful in the future.

 

Our final patisserie unit for the year was present desserts. I found this unit a real challenge. I am, and always have been, artistically challenged. With a lot of the things I cook, they may taste great but often they are not plated up very well at all and this unit was all about plating up. We learnt how to make simple garnishes to finish off desserts and experimented with height and colour on the plate. 

Our last unit for 2011 was in the Angliss Bistro. I must admit I didn’t enter this unit with high expectations and they diminished even more when I found out that we weren’t actually having customers while we were in there. The unit did get better towards the end when we were all able to make cakes, of our own choice, that would be used at the bistro during the week. In the final week of this unit we were able to invite our family and friends to come to lunch in the bistro. I was lucky enough to have my husband John and two of my best friends, Kate and Gav come. It was such a great way to finish the year, sharing what we have been doing with our loved ones.

Esterhazy Torta

While I have been enjoying a few Saturdays without the early morning starts, I am really looking forward to going back for this last 6 months. I look forward to sharing the things I learn with you all!
Thanks for reading!