We had already planned the crawfish boil for the 9th, which turned out to be the day after our wedding, and so it became our unofficial reception. There was the mass genocide of many many bugs, plenty of other foods. DmentD’s delicious cheesecake, I made two sorbets (lemon lime and berry, the lemon lime was my favourite), and I used the event as an excuse to try out a cake recipe. One of our guests has some interesting dietary restrictions, and I sort of set myself the challenge of making her a cake she’s able to eat (I’m aiming to eventually work out cookies, cakes and a tirimisu!). It was vegan, gluten free, and cane sugar free. The frosting was surprising, I used a recipe she had for a chocolate avocado dip, I don’t like avocado and damn that frosting was good! For a first attempt it went down really well, though I’m sure in my experiments with this I’ll have plenty of failures. Anyway, it was a fun day (aside from the clean up!).

Then before I knew it it was back to school for finals week! We had the theory on Monday and we had basics to make to last us the rest of the week; pate sucree, pastry cream, ganach, choux paste, meringue etc. For the rest of the week, we knew what had to be made, however we didn’t know what we’d be doing on each day (there were four groups of items that people rotated around). I was lucky and got the order I wanted, starting with the easiest (fruit tart, macaroons, pavlova, muffins) and working up, so on Friday when I would have had the hardest group I only had to make one item! The Friday started with a toast from some of the Chefs and school officials (who we’ve never met before and know nothing about us but are going to give us a speech anyway), then the final exam, we cleaned up and then had a pot luck, some people were writing all over each other’s jackets.. as I need my jacket for my externship I let them write all over my hat instead.. it’s now perched on one of the skulls in the office!

I started my externship this week, so far I’ve done two days and I’m really enjoying it. Rather than having my schedule jump about lots (currently I’m set to do two bread shifts a week, one closing shift and one midday) they’re planning on changing it so I do a set period of just one shift, then move on to the next etc. I’ve currently done one bread and one closing and enjoyed both, though my arm took a couple days to recover from shaping the hundreds of bread rolls. It’s kinda cool to be able to say that if you ate bread on Tuesday at California Pizza Kitchen, Terra Burger or Do Good Deli (in Austin obviously) then I either made it on my own, or had a hand in making it.

Sunday night we made it to see Rent which was awesome. Aside from the usual number of people needing to go to the ‘special hell’ *grins* It was a fantastic performance, and the staging was very well done, just one set with props moved about. I also liked that if a person wasn’t in a scene but couldn’t move offstage as part of the performance then they stayed there, unlit, very still, and facing away from the audience. It meant there were less distractions.

Since we were busy with immigration paperwork all weekend DmentD and I went shopping last night, just as we got in the power went out! So we got to put shopping away and start cooking by candle and torch light! Our wedding present from my parents arrived, an awesome firepit for our garden, so we put that together as well.