Pastry Boot Camp kicks my ass (Day 1)

It's 11pm, and I'm exhausted after day 1 of Pastry Boot Camp at the Culinary Institute of America in beautiful Hyde Park, NY. We started with orientation at 6am (yes, 6am -- that's 3am to my jetlagged body), and then went straight to lecture, 4 hours of production (that's baking time), lunch, then lecture and critique, campus tour, R&R (afternoon break, or nap time, as I call it), and then dinner at Caterina de Medici, the campus's Italian restaurant. And I am pooped.

Some observations from day 1:

-Our instructor is this really awesome, slightly kooky pastry chef who's credited with bringing the crème brûlée to America. No joke. The guy is a bad ass. He used to work at Le Cirque (remember Top Chef with the fish and potato recreation dish episode?), Tavern on the Green and the Savoy Hotel in London!

-The food here is really good. It's like food from work (cuz it's all gourmet and free), but not all obsessively organic. For lunch we had this incredible wild mushroom risotto with sausage, a salmon dish (fish was cooked perfectly!), and cheesecake. Dinner was at the Italian restaurant where I had beef carpaccio (too much oil) and a tube noodle pasta called garganelli with a green pea and prosciutto sauce. It was delish! Dessert was tiramisu, of course. :)

-In class, we made pâte à choux (base pastry for cream puffs and eclairs), pastry cream, and a custard based dessert. Our team got bread pudding. Not sure how it all tastes yet since we are finishing them tomorrow, but preliminary critique says that our pate a choux was excellent, our pastry cream was slightly bubbly (not good) and our bread pudding was "okay". Not sure what that means

Tomorrow we are making cakes...sponge cake and chiffon cake and buttercreams!!

Oh, and did I mention that I was exhausted. Time for bed. Pics from the beautiful campus can be found here.