Pastry 5

So today I'm going to share a few photos of some of the items I've been making at the bakery, followed by some thoughts I've had about my performance.

 The items are, in order: Lemon Blueberry Muffins, Chocolate Chip Cookies, Chocolate Macademia Cookies, Chocolate Chocolate Cookies, Gluten-free Chocolate Chip Cookies, and Almond-Anise Biscotti.

As for my thoughts, I just can't help feeling concerned about my organization. That was a goal of mine over my internships but I honestly don't feel like I've improved much in that area at all.
I'm having serious trouble remembering what I've done and how I did it. It seems like I can't even remember enough of it to write notes, or I feel like I'll remember what I've done and then don't. This applies no matter how many times I do something. Which is manageable when a plan is in place and there's someone there to help me. However, if I'm to excel and not merely output some product, I need to figure a way around my blocks. I imagine that my first step is to just force myself to write down the procedures I take and how recipes look at different stages so that I can refer to them later.
Also, I need to keep track of what is needed in the shop's case so that when orders come in I can judge how much of what we need to make to meet quota.
Finally, I should keep track of all of our products' decorations so that I can do that too. Maybe drawing sketches or at least taking photos would be a good idea for the future.

Pastry 4

Today at the bakery it was still a lot of the same old stuff.

I baked a lot of cupcakes, some muffins, and cookies today. Unfortunately, I had a bit of trouble with baking off some of the items. The lemon-blueberry muffins, for example, were put in the oven a total of three times before they were finally deemed complete. As I seem to recall, this happened last time too. They wound up tasting delicious and baked through in the end, at least.
The gluten-free banana cupcakes also seemed off today, and were in the oven twice, but eventually their quality was satisfactory for sale, but I want to make them better the next time I make them.

I just seem to have this weird issue with determining when baked goods are thoroughly baked.

Due to various circumstances, the bakery was short some workers today though, which made things difficult and more hectic than normal. Even the cashier of the shop was helping out. Hopefully things will improve in the future. This makes it all the more surprisingly that we all finished earlier than usual today.

Tomorrow I'm off from the bakery and intend to make cocoa apple cupcakes with peanut butter frosting and a chocolate drizzle at home. I had been thinking about how it's always been popular to eat apple slices with peanut butter even though the peanut butter never seems to stick to the apple. Seems like a good, sweet solution to me! Also I have around five pounds of apples for some reason and need to do something with them...

Post 4 - Sushi

So, I wanted to show off what my work station at the sushi bar looked like. I worked on the right table and my chef Jack worked on the left. In the larger photo, you can see the bucket where the sushi rice was kept. The ginger and wasabi were between us, and we could see most of the restaurant from where we worked. The only thing not visible was the bar.

In the smaller photo were my tools of the trade. Of course, gloves were needed for sanitation and for keeping the rice from sticking to my hands. The knife was a special sushi knife loaned to me. Oddly enough, my chef choose to use a vegetable knife for cutting his rolls. Also pictured is the plastic wrapped bamboo mat.

Finally, we had our white clothes used to wipe down the work surface. When working with sushi, it's very important to have a damp work surface otherwise the nori or rice would stick to the board and snag when trying to cut it. The only exception would be if you had to cut a sheet of nori in half for when people ordered smaller roll sizes. Unless you do it on a dry surface it won't cut right and will snag and rip.