day 23

verrine au citron meringuee
YES! This is what it looks like! More heavenly lemon curd! Layers of lemon curd, meringue, crumble and a little squeezy thing with a lemon syrup in it. This was very sugary and very delicious.


verrine de chocolat et caramel
Layers of caramel mousse (same as from the caranougat pastry), caramel, chocolate mousse, chocolate glacage and candied almonds. I really thought this would be better than it was but I didn't like the texture of the chocolate mousse. Too much gelatin.


basilique saint-aphrodise
Today I visited another church and this one was closed to visitors as well! I'm on a roll here. The church is named for Aphrodise, a bishop and martyr who rode into Beziers on a camel. Chef said that there's a festival in the summer in his name where they still parade a camel around the streets.


...and in other news
I was very bored today. I had a brief moment of action where they let me mise en place recipes for cream cheese bavarois and vanilla chiboust. Did they let me make the recipes? Of course not! Idiots. I did get to make 20 liters of pastry cream at least for the mille-feuille that they had to assemble. Chef saw me at loose ends and had me help out for a bit with a catering event for tomorrow. I threaded pieces of foie gras onto wooden skewers then drizzled a garlic, oil and parsley marinade on top.
Yesterday they started making components for a French-style cheesecake. It's layers of chopped up sucree dough (in the style of a graham cracker crust), cheesecake, genoise soaked in passion fruit syrup, cheesecake bavarois and a glacage. Alexi and David haven't made this recipe for a while it would seem because they have had spectacular arguments about the assembly. They argued about the sucree crust and whether it was chopped up finely enough. They argued about the cheesecake and whether it was over baked or not. Today Alexi nearly ruined the bavarois and David yelled at him for that. They've been using Philadelphia cream cheese, which they clearly don't like the look of. Alexi kept mumbling about how they should use creme fraiche instead.