Pastry School Diary: Week 39

Week 39 of pastry school was our last week of class before we all start the scheduled eight weeks of work experience. After work experience is finished, we’ll come back for a week to recap our summer and then we’re done. CRAZY!!

Official graduation isn’t until mid-October, but it’s so surreal how quickly the experience has gone.

For our last week of class before our work experience, we took a bit of a break from the classroom. On Monday, a small group of us got a chance to attend the Estrella Damm Gastronomic Congress held at The Hurlingham Club.

Estrella Damm UK hosted Estrella Damm Gastronomic Congress to bring together some of the world’s best and most exciting chefs to discuss the changing face of modern gastronomy. We were treated to live cooking demonstrations from famed chefs Brett Graham (The Ledbury), James Knappett (Kitchen Table & Bubbledogs), Albert Adrià (Tickets) and Joan Roca (El Celler de Can Roca).

All of the chef demonstrations were different and equally fascinating. Such a great time watching and learning from them all. It was great bonus getting to meet Albert Adrià, the 2015 World’s Best Pastry Chef and getting his cookbook Tapas in our gift bag.

Estrella Damm hosted a fantastic afternoon jammed packed with great information and a look at the evolution of gastronomic trends, as well as the current landscape of the industry. During the event we were treated to some tasty snacks and very refreshing (especially during the London summer heat wave!), ice-cold Estrella Damm beers!

I *might* have gotten suckered into answering some questions about the day… I blame Miranda & Ian for saying they would answer some questions too. 😉

On Tuesday, our class got together to celebrate the completion of the second half of the course and the beautiful summer weather with a little softball picnic in Hyde Park.

It was a fun afternoon of good food, tasty Pimm’s and a little competition! Later in the day, we lost most of our players to the food, drinks & shade, so we had a little batting practice/home run derby.

It was a great afternoon! I was a bit sore the next day from running around and my batting skills. Ha! 🙂

Wednesday was our final day and we spent the morning going over any last minute project questions we had for the remaining assignments that were due from our menu planning event. We also went over last minute work experience needs or advice.

More to come on my work experience plans, but they are a bit non-traditional (again, go figure haha!) and I’m still in the process of confirming everything. One of the opportunities I was really hopeful about fell through so fingers crossed the rest works out okay! 🙂