Quassonts

My obsession for macaron perfection lasted for quite a while, but over the time I could see improvements in my attempts... and I would say it paid off.

Caramel Macaron

Recent batch just a few days ago.

The croissant on the other hand is a huge pain the ass.


Yesterday, I decided it would be a good idea to try my hands on making some croissant, thinking it would be simple and thinking I would be getting myself some quality croissants, think Maison Kayser, PAUL or Tiong Bahru Bakery standard, also I thought maybe I could bake some and bring it to class, set my standards really high and really just be an asshole and show off my amazing techniques I have learned on the internet and just absorb all the praises I will get and let that all get into my head.





Long story short, I am not Maison Kayser, Paul or Tiong Bahru Bakery material. I blame the weather, I can't even blame the oven because the dough can't even be made properly for me to actually put it into the oven. It was just a buttery mess of a dough, butter was literally leaking out from all possible crevices in the dough and all I could think of was how much money I have just wasted on good quality butter, which of course went on to never wanting to attempt it again for financial reasons, and then attempting to make another batch thinking I found the problem. Obviously the problem I found did not offset the whole other mountain of problems that was present in the formation of the croissant making experience.



That being said, I do still have a small sheet of croissant dough left in the fridge, but at this point, I have given up on the whole thing, so that would probably give it sufficient time to rest in the fridge to get firmer and maybe tomorrow I will have a proper croissant, if not then fuck the idea of making croissant at home, I'm just gonna buy it from a bakery, at least it's cheaper then my failed attempts. This is not France, the weather's a bitch

School Again.

School started 2 days ago.



Realized the majority of my classmates are pretty much my parent's age, can't say I'm too surprised considering the fact it's a 5 weeks course rather than a 1.5 year diploma course that I had originally aimed for.  The people in my class are nice, since they are all mature adults, although that being said, I do have trouble finding common topics to talk about because they don't play computer games and they probably won't get my humor because I'm fucking hilarious in all the wrong ways for a 40 year old Mum... it's like my brain is in full filter mode... no pervertic jokes are to be spoken and all sexual connotations, remote as they are, are to be kept to myself.



The first day was all about orientation and today was all about hygiene, this whole week and the next will essentially just be lectures of things that I didn't really sign up for, NEA standards for a working in a professional kitchen and all that fun stuff, really insomnia curing stuff. The thing that I'm really interested about, and what I actually sign up for will only be taught to us on the third week, which is like the middle of the course. The lecturer today kept talking about Chicken and Meat and all that Culinary Arts thing. and I realize a lot of people were actually interested in it, I really couldn't care less about how to cook a turkey, which was a question someone actually asked, so I'm guessing I'm probably a small handful of people in my class who are actually wholly interested strictly in baking and pastry, which is pretty awesome, that shows how close minded I am... some would say a purist, and by some I mean me.



One awesome thing about the school is the lunches, lunch is provided by the school and they are prepared by the chef instructors, and this instructors can really whip up a dish, they are experienced in the F&B industry, so the food they cook are all probably 5 star hotel quality standard.




Well, I was constantly comparing them to my Army food and the food I have been eating in the army for the past 1.5 years are abysmal. Piping hot mediocrity on a hot afternoon in a sweltering hot bunk definitely did not help the cookhouse get any brownie points from me.




So..... I had some free time today and decided to photoshop some photos of my cupcakes. I took the pics with my HTC Phone, the images are sharp, but the colours are pretty shit, so I did a bit of tweaking and it came out looking pretty good.

Guinness Cupcakes with Irish Bailey Buttercream.

Had a lot more kick than the one they sell at Twelve Cupcakes, just makes me wonder exactly how little Bailey they put in their buttercream, it was definitely not worth the extra 50 cents. Me paying an extra 50 cents for their buttercream is like everyone else paying $50 for a plate of hawker center chicken rice. That's how little Irish Bailey they used.

Since I had some more stout leftover, I decided to make another batch of Guinness Cupcakes, but this time, decided to use a Caramel buttercream, I would like to say it's salted caramel, but it's not. Made a lot of caramel that day.

If you are fugly.... be nice

Today marks the last day working at my father's office before I am off to school again.


I think I jinxed my previous attempts at entering the school by announcing it to almost everyone I know, talking about how I WILL be studying Culinary when I get out of the army, and then I didn't, got into a design firm, and thankfully that place was a pretty dreadful environment to work in, I still scoff when I remember the boss telling me how they are like "family".



 "Like family" and "like a high school clique" are two very different things, just to be completely clear of how her version of "family" looked like to me.  I think it's because it really brought me back to the days in Primary School when the girl cliques were really just haughty bitches.There was even this clique of fat girls who keeps sucking up to the teacher, it's so fucking annoying... fat and annoying, zero redeeming factor at all. That's how I remember my classmates in primary school, ugly on the inside and out, that's why I never bothered contacting any of them. I remembered seeing one of the fat girl in the bus once years later, she was still on the lumpy side. Oh I have no idea why I made that connection between my primary school and that design firm, but I did and it didn't bode well for me and also my impression of them/


It's called bitterness, that's why I am still talking about it even till now. Talking about that company is like my fuel to blog, I need to have something to bitch about otherwise my post are gonna be shit boring like those first few post.



Talking about something to bitch about.



I actually met my BMT mate by pure accident a week ago, literally by accident because my Mum actually had to drop by the hospital whilst we were on our way for a family event thing and it so happened the Starbucks there had an employee who was my BMT mate and because hospitals are really boring, even though we were in the A&E Department, I decided to head down to Starbucks with my sisters to relax and sip a bit of coffee while my mother slept her stomach cramp off.


A&E Departments are usually where all the action happens, in Grey's Anatomy, but apparently in real life, the biggest action I saw that day was some woman having to pass a kidney stone, she didn't actually pass out the kidney stone in front of an audience, but I assume it was a kidney stone or maybe she had to have her appendix remove and like another kid who apparently knocked his head on something, and despite looking perfectly fine, was send to A&E, where he was also acting perfectly fine.


Anyways, I went to Starbucks and saw my BMT mate there, and I remembered him as one of the few I really like, because he actually drove me all the way home after a BBQ party at a friends house, that's from Kembangan all the way to Bukit Timah. I remember sitting in the car and thinking to myself, there's no way I will treat as him as one those friends that I will ignore completely on the street when I see them, because I have a tendency to do that with old friends whom I have not contacted for a very long time, which is probably like 90% of my Facebook friends, then again 90% of the 90% are really people I don't really speak to at all when I was around them.



So I decided to actually go up to him and ask him how he's been doing, after he's finished preparing my drink, because I thought he hadn't notice me when his colleague was taking my order. And so he finishes making my drink, calls my order and then as I made my way towards him, we looked at each other right in the eye, smiled at each other and just when I thought he remembers who I was and was about to greet me,he turns and walks away right after handing me my drink.



Okay, usually when I see someone I know on the street and I don't really want to say Hi to, I will try and avoid eye contact, but when we do happen to make eye contact, I take off my earphones, begrudgingly, and start small talk with them if they are bothered to or just wave at them, because I don't want to appear like a pompous dick.


So it was extremely weird when someone whom I am actually going up to say Hi to decides that it's OK to not even wave back AFTER that person has made eye contact, and me going up to someone to say Hi is rare as fuck. I ended up walking back to the table really confused and decided to actually sit outside because it was way to awkward to sit inside after that scenario.




Which is why now if we were to ever have a BMT meet up, shit is gonna get really awkward because I can't go....

 "How's life?" .....because I know that he knows I know how his life has been. Full of caffeine high and Starbucks Beverage recipes memorizing.

Well that's long...

While working at my father's office today, I remembered how anal most of my co-workers were at the previous few companies that I've worked in when they ask for your help. By few I mean two because that's how bothered I am about looking for jobs during school breaks... even though I didn't bother to find any job, I did feel extremely useless at home, and then Procrastination told me I will get a job later in life, which made me feel better about rotting at home.



So I digress....


Part of the reason why I left my previous job, out of the mountain of reasons I have, valid or invalid is UP for ME to decide so it's definitely a mountain and not a molehill, was because I was helping this colleague do her presentation to show one of her clients because she had a shitload of clients and I was happy to help because I was literally do nothing all day except scrolling through Pinterest pretending I was looking for "inspiration" when in actual fact, my eyelids were battling with gravity because I was so freaking bored....  that's why I hate commission based, because to earn money, I have to actually do stuff, whereas with a monthly salary, I can spend the entire day "looking for inspiration" on Pinterest and still get paid.... well they are really paying me for successfully not giving in to the temptation and letting my head go and have it smack against the filthy keyboard of my laptop.



And I digress again... when I digress, it's a good thing because when I don't, it means my brain is dead and needs to be brought back to life.... and that also pretty much equates to a shitty post.





So I did her presentation and found pictures that I thought were pretty decent, I am pretty anal when it comes to picking pictures, I am so anal in fact, that the likes I give on Instagram are just plain selfish, I only like the photos of people who like my photo on a regular basis, or people whose photo are actually good, well more on the latter. I put so much effort into taking a proper shot and I only get 3 likes , and then I see other people who have taken a blurry picture that's out of focus, of themselves eating rojak in the middle of the night with the worst lighting ever, and that shit gets 50 likes.




So I managed to get around 20 to 30 pictures for my colleague, all of which are pretty good if I may say so myself... brought it to her and she asked me to present it to her picture by picture, to get an idea of how to present it to the client, and by the way, I am not getting any share of her commission by helping her, the idea is for me to "learn the ropes", me, a diploma holder in that field, learning from a greenhorn who has worked in the field for 4 months with no prior experience in school... not just in the field but in design. Granted the working world is very different from school, but being exposed to Interior Design for 3 years has got to count for something, and it's just 4 months from her side.


She looked through my slides and outright rejected almost 80% of it. Told me to look for contemporary, and I did, most of them ARE contemporary and she said they weren't because there were wooden elements inside. Said they were too Scandinavian.


Okay, contemporary designs are essentially "designs that are popular now".... and she always told me that "Scandinavian is really popular nowadays"...   WHICH MEANS THAT Scandinavian IS CONTEMPORARY.  She made me really hate the idea of contemporary design, and it was of course impossible to find anymore pictures for her afterwards when she told me to redo because her concept of contemporary wasn't actually contemporary. So she told me she wanted shiny surface and clean, and of course in my mind, I went straight to minimalism.... and then she told me it wasn't what she wanted because it was minimalist and not contemporary.... and then she asked me to help her with another one, and then I quit.




It's so annoying when the people you are helping have their head so high up their ass they don't even listen to what you have to say to defend yourself.... or to prove them wrong.



The other one I met who had her head so high her ass she came out of her own mouth and created a wormhole, was this girl whom I met during my internship. Me and my group of intern friends, also known as the underpaid workers, were tasked with cutting out boards to make a material board display, which is essentially cutting out a frame and sticking that frame onto another cardboard, exactly what minimum wage employees do.



So she took a board that she herself did, and she told us the measurements, and the fact that she actually has a board that she crafted herself just proved to us how low she was at the corporate ladder, it was probably just like a few feet above the underpaid interns.


After she did the briefing and introduction to the equipment we will need, she proceeded to leave us be and went on to do more important stuff, like getting coffee for the person who gets coffee for the boss.



I did a bit of cutting and because I have the attention span of a goldfish, I can only be bothered to measure to the exact millimeter for only so long, I decided to do a little give and take and plus minus like literally one or two millimeters.... and I did a few boards while my friends assembled them together.



A few minutes later the girl came back and decided to do "quality control", and she switched on anal mode and measured everything to the exact millimeter. Mine were considered fail because they were off by a few millimeters, my plus minum did gradually increase overtime so I think I went off by like 5mm for one board, but considering that they were A2 size boards, 5mm is extremely minute. That's like when a girl with long hair cuts her hair short by a few inches and expect people to tell the difference, it used to be touching the end of her butt but now it's slightly above the crack, no difference because she's still going to get a massive headache from the weight of the hair tugging at her head. I get that though, when they assume people can tell the difference, because every time I cut my hair, I thought people will comment on it, but no one does because no one can tell the difference between short hair and short hair.



So I got a bit annoyed as she was piling up the rejects that I have so painstakingly cut out that I decided to one up her and measure her board that she left for us to see as an example and lo and behold, her shit was 3mm to 4mm off. Told her that hers wasn't accurate as well and she brushed it off and pretended she didn't hear.  Typical. Had to redo most of it, but after realizing that no matter how many times I did it, it was still going to be that 2mm or so off, she decided to just close one eye, God knows she has been closing one eye on her own work.



Gotta learn to practice what you preach, like my co-worker at my previous company, practice plagiarism, so she preach to us about embracing plagiarism. And she can really preach like a fucking priest in a Catholic church preaching to people about the sins of harboring thoughts of loving people of the same sex and then inviting little boys into the confession booth later that night for 7 minutes in heaven.