Gingerbread Man

Want to know what a sack of s#&t looks like? It looks like Benjamin. So he was finally back at work today...that’s like a week and a half. And turns out he wasn’t sick but fell down the stairs or whatever and hurt his knee. Shit, I’ve worked with sprained ankles and after dentist’s appointments and stuff before...I don’t let small things hold me back.

Man he was slooooooow. And he was making mistakes. And pissing Alexandre off which is never a good thing. Like for the poolish he just weighed off the water, yeast and flour together but didn’t mix it. Wtf? And forgot to shape epis at the normal time so they weren’t ready when one usual customer came for them.

Other than that it was a pretty standard day. Oh and baguette with jambon cru and Roquefort ftw. J

I didn’t sleep at all last night. Apart from a 2-3 hour nap in the afternoon I didn’t really sleep. I stayed awake talking to Magen. She’s a girl that studied with Nicholas, my brother, and we never really spoke before but since about 2 months ago we started talking every day and now she is just part of my life. I literally stayed up until my alarm went off to get up. And even then I didn’t want to stop talking to her. It’s really amazing when you meet someone that you can have endless conversations with.

I think if it wasn’t for her company, Lyon would’ve made me miserable by now. She makes me more aware of my actions and beliefs and stimulates me intellectually and challenges me constantly. Every day brings us closer and I can’t wait to get to hang out with her in Dec when she is down to visit.

So even though I didn’t sleep, I had a coffee and a croissant with frangipani and just owned today. I was on the oven and was pumping stuff out left and right. Sack of s#&t was slow again, nothing new there. I can see he really pisses Alex off as well...

I made my brioche recipe yesterday and shaped it today so we’ll get to do a taste comparison tomorrow. Now I just want to make ginger beer!!!

Ah and we made gingerbread houses today and started cutting out gingerbread men...the recipe was a nice end product, with Alexandre adding some minced dried orange peel which really lifted the flavour. Although my favourite is still the German lebkuchen.

Nothing beats that...I could eat it until I enter a food coma.

It was really cool to see how the houses got made and I helped put together the chimneys. We used melted isomalt as the glue. It works like sugar but doesn’t crystallise; oh and it burns like sugar too. F*** me I had forgotten what that felt like. So there was a lot of swearing going on...and if you ever watch peoples reaction when there’s sudden pain they always swear in a native language... lately I swear in French but that time I was swearing in English and Afrikaans J even tried teaching Alexandre some words but French people struggle with the hard, guttural sounds..

Anyway, so 60 houses down, now we just need to do 40 more and make the bigger houses. But as for gingerbread men, we cut out about 50...and we need 600. So it’s over 200kg of dough we need to make; that’s a lot of gingerbread men.