week 5- The greatest gift in life is time - manage it well

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Democracy is a beautiful thing to experience as a student in a kitchen. Today, Team France had the choice from four formulas to pick two to bake.

Our first choice was the golden pound cake (as a muffin). Although choices are good in life, our selection of equipment was a total set back. Let's look at the formula:

12 oz granulated sugar

7 oz butter

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 tsp milk powder

10 oz cake flour

1 tsp baking powder

8 oz eggs

4 oz cold water

1 tsp vanilla

1 tsp lemon zest

1/4 rum aroma

add to water (yellow food color)

So here are the ingredients. What mixer would you pick? Well if you selected the handy 5 quart Kitchen Aid mixer that's what I would have picked after reviewing the quantity of ingredients called for in this formula.

However, we chose the Hobart HL200-1STD Planetary Mixer - 20 quart capacity. So yeah, it worked. However, it was extremely time consuming scraping down the mixing bowl while mixing to maintain a proper mix. See picture 3 above.

Next time we will review formula, scale ingredient, then select the proper equipment to ensure a more productive experience.

The pound cake was delicious and was a great learning experience.

Our second choice was to bake the pumpkin cranberry muffin formula as a loaf:

3 cups cake flour

1 tbsp pumpkin spice

2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsbp salt

Sift all dry ingredients together.

3 cups sugar

14 oz pumpking pulp

4 eggs

1 cup vegetable oil

1/2 cup orange juice

1 cup cranberries or cranberry sauce

The only catch to this formula was we forgot to include the cranberry sauce. So we ended up with lovely pumpkin loaves. If this was a commerical setting it would have been an expensive mistake in cost over run to redo this batch because of ingredient errors, as well as the expense in labor (time) for for us to produce a second batch. Hence the term - time is money.

Upon completion of the above baked goods, chef had us whip up a batch of basic muffin mix.:

1/4 lb butter

1/2 lb sugar

1/4 pt eggs

10 oz cake flour

2 oz bread flour

1/2 oz baking powder

1/2 pt milk

30 oz sour cream

4 oz raisins, crasins, or any dried fruit

or

3 oz chocolate chips

I picked chocolate chips topped with strudal crumbs and raspberry filling. Yum Oh!

On next week's menu: Team France will be working on ciabatta bread and a biga.