Battle of the Royal Icing Masters and the Marzipan Enthusiasts

The Fraisier cake is as delicious as it is beautiful. With a layer of sponge cake soaked in Kirsch, strawberries crowing the outer rim, vanilla cream, strawberry jam, another layer of sponge cake, pastel pink marzipan, and finally the white royal icing decor on top, this cake looks like it was made just in time for Valentine's Day. Although we are still a few weeks away from the day of everything love and stuff, the Fraisier will make you re-think grabbing that iconic heart shaped box of chocolates and upgrade to this towering moment of decadence. 

I wish I could say that everything went perfectly today, but sadly it did not. My morning started off to a late start. I was 20 minutes behind and had to be at the school getting all of my equipment in 10 minutes. It's times like these where that stash of 20 pounds in your wallet is put to good use with hailing a taxi. Running out the door into the freezing cold morning, with my cake box in one hand and my apron in the other, I literally yelled for a taxi. I made it to school on time, blue hairnet and all. You see this was a very important practical, because the Fraisier is one of the cakes we have to make for our final exam. Deep breath and off we go...I started making my sponge cake. While the chefs have let us intermediate students upgrade to using the Kitchen Aid for our mouse, sponge cake must be whipped by hand in the biggest bowl you have ever seen (round-bottom bowl) and the biggest whisk you have ever seen (balloon whisk...that is seriously the size of a balloon). I put my eggs and sugar into the bowl and start whisking vigorously over a bain-marie. You must mix the mixture until it is about 6x its original size...in the patisserie, it is called ribbon stage. When your arm is about ready to fall off, it still need about 5 more minutes of whisking. When the burning sensation turns into a numbing sensation, its probably about done. I slowly add my flour and melted butter (that must be the perfect temperature or the batter splits). Needless to say this isn't your Betty Crocker, add oil, and bake kind of situation. Onto the pastry cream...everything was grooving along just as it should, made my marzipan roses and leaves, then rolled out the pink marzipan topper, cut my strawberries, assembled my cake...it all looked perfect. With 5 minutes left on the clock, the chef shouting 'you're almost out of time, lets go, lets go' to all of us, I still had to pipe 'Fraisier' in white royal icing.  In all the comotion I cut my piping bag too much and was left with a rather wide piping tip. 'There is no time to transfer to another piping bag', I said to myself, 'it will be fine, just keep going'. Well if you looked at my cake you probably can tell that it was not fine. The icing came out all thick and gloopy. I also haven't written in cursive in about 100 years, so I couldn't remember how to pipe the capital F...I improvised with lots of curly lines hoping chef would not notice. He did. Beside the fact that my rose was a little 'rough around the edges' literally and my piping 'was much too thick' the assembly was beautiful and my marzipan leaves were 'actually quite good', so there's something to write home to the parents about. The Fraisier cake is sweet, but left a little bitter taste in my mouth. 

gloopy: adj. any messy sticky fluid or substance [of uncertain origin] 

Dear Royal Icing,

It is on! 

Sincerely,

Chef S

You're such a fruit cake!

While this phrase has negative connotations for most of us when in the school yard as a young child, the mighty fruit cake is frighteningly durable and packed full of yummy fruits soaked in rum, orange and lemon juices. The fruit cake is a traditional English dish and usually makes up the top layer of a wedding cake. The top layer is suppose to be eaten at the christening of your first child. If anyone is keeping count thats a cake that can withstand at least 9 months sitting in a tin on the counter. I hope everyone is making their 'eww gross face' right now, because I am just typing this description out. "Chef", one of the students in my class shouted in my demonstrations class, "how long could a fruit cake last all-in-all?", chef responded with, "if it is wrapped properly then just sitting on the counter it should last about 2-3 years"...'uhhhhhh, ewww, yuck!' my class said in unison. It seems that all that would be left after a world disaster are the cockroaches and the fruitcakes. Needless to say I was not super excited to wake up at the crack of dawn this morning to make this timeless dessert. I finally peeled myself out of bed, threw on my chef whites and Ugg boots, then I was off to catch the bus for class with the Arctic breeze piercing against my face. Once I got into class we had to measure out all of our dried fruits, fruit zest, juice, spices, and rum...lots of rum...did I mention there was rum? We put all of it into a pot and cooked it slowly so that all the fruit would absorb the fruit juice and rum, just imagine the vapors coming off of 9 pots of that stuff. Just one step into the boulangerie this morning and you would have been feeling quite good for 8:00am. Our room smelled like a rum raisin cocktail and a strong one at that. One of the girls in my class compared it to being in a steam room with vodka instead of water...I'm going to take her word for it, seeing as that is something I have never experienced.

Meanwhile we also made the Savarin aux Fruits avec Creme Chantilly, a donut shaped cake filled with creme and cut fruits in the center. Oh, and guess what?! Its also soaked in R-U-M, infused with lemon and orange zest, cardamom pods, and bay leaves. I was just praying not to set anything on fire today with so much alcohol being around our gas burners.

The cooking of everything went beautifully, except I forgot to alternate adding my eggs and flour to my fruit cake. It turned out fine though. The cutting of my fruit was "lovely and the arrangement of my fruits had great movement". With a highly critical chef critiquing your every move, I was quite happy with the results of my day.

They are a little hard to see, but if you look closely you can see the two strawberries on top that I cut to look like little swans. 

Now for the fun part! Once our fruit cakes finish baking (which takes a majority of the day by the way) I have to go in to school every other day for the next 8-10 weeks to soak the cake in...can you guess?...more rum. It is suppose to be delicious, but I have my doubts. I know that everyone will be just hanging off the edge of their seats for the next two months to see how it turns out. In fact since it last so long some of you might even get to try it for yourself.

Fun facts to know and tell...

Until culinary school I never thought twice about the history of bakery items such as the St. Honore cake and truth be told, I didn't really care. However, when you have food historians come in and give lectures on the history of cheese or a lecture on the different methods of making wine throughout history, you cant help but become interested in this under discussed topic and start asking the question 'where does it come from?', 'where did it get it's shape?' every time you pass a patisserie.

Fellow food lovers let me tell you the story of the croissant...once upon a time in town called Vienna there lived a hard working baker named Peter. Now Peter would wake up in the small hours of the morning to start baking his lovely breads, until one morning he heard unusual sounds coming from below his bakery. Turns out the Turkish army was planning an attack on Vienna and were tunneling under the city. Peter gave the alarm and the Turkish army had not choice but to retreat, leaving Peter a hero. The Viennese bakers decided to make a bread to honor this day in history, so they made the crescent shaped croissant to represent the moon on the Turkish flag. The croissant has developed since 1683 and has come to be the flakey, butter, French croissant that we know today. This story has been deemed 'myth' by many food historians; however, no one has ever been able to disprove this theory. To keep the magic alive, I am going to say that I believe this story is true.

"Good Morning Chefs! Its bread making day!"

Is there anything better than baking fresh bread, danishes, and croissants in the morning. NO, is the answer to that question. What did I carry in my bread basket through the streets of London on Friday you might ask? Croissants, pain au chocolate, pear danish, apricot danish, brioche, walnut bread, chocolate croissant, chocolate brioche, OH MY! I received many a 'come hither' look from passers by and passengers on the tube. Giada De Laurentiis once said in an interview, "I gained 30 lbs while in culinary school, because they send you home with a big box of croissants and I had no problem eating each and everyone of those croissants". Needless to say, I can relate. Although I have not gained anything yet, the increasing volume of butter that I am introduced to each day is inevitably going to catch up to me or friends, who have been benefiting from this culinary adventure of mine. 

I must have given my brioche dough enough "passion" on Thursday, because it turned out "lovely". In the afternoon we had a class on candy making...can you get more fat and sugar into one day? One of our English chefs taught this class and his grandmother was a chocolatier, a very well known one I might add. It blows my mind sometimes that I am getting to learn from these great talents in the culinary arts world. I hear things so casually (not arrogant at all) like "oh yeah when I was cooking for Madonna" or "the Queen Mother's cake was covered in my hand-painted chocolate paintings of all the castles" or "yeah I make desserts for some very high-end clients, but I have very strict contracts with them, so I can't divulge who they are, they like to keep it private"....I always try not to seem like a star struck girl, who just desperately wants to know about the famous person, so I simply nod my head and say something like "oh yeah, wow, that must have been a great experience" or "yeah, I bet celebrities can be pretty demanding sometimes". 

The candy was fabulous. We learned things like nougat with mixed nuts and honey, fluer de sel caramel, and fruit jelly rolled in sugar. What a sweet way to start my weekend!

Hot cross buns, hot cross buns, one ha' penny, two ha' penny...

We have one chef who is more eclectic in nature, but his laid back personality is always a refreshing welcome after getting our usual pounding.  His talent allows him to basically say whatever he wants, because he is so skilled. His explanation style, is somewhat 'for 18+'. As a typical French men the inevitable sexual innuendoes seem to somehow come through while showing us how to bake. "You must treat this dough like your wife, softly and gently, do not treat this dough like your lover". Its hard not to cock your head in a 'did he really just say that way'; however, I must admit that if you think about it, the man makes sense.
Today we learned to make dough for croissants, Devonshire splits, Chelsea buns, hot cross buns, and donuts. This is how we were taught to incorporate butter into the brioche dough, "now you see zis dough iz like getting a woman to fall in love, she iz resistaunt to take zee butter at first, but after she starts to take a little bit of zee butter, she realizes that she doez not have a choice in the matter and zhen she will take the butter happily, but only in small doses ya...zat part iz very importaunt". With a pastry class of 3/4 women, its is pretty bold of him to be making these statements. Funny how these comments also somehow transcend any sort of cultural miscommunication. We have over 52 countries represented at the school and somehow, no matter where we are from, these comments are always understood. As strange as it is, his teaching technique works, we always know when the dough is ready.
Baking today went wonderful and my half of the dough rose and browned perfectly. During our classes chefs walk around and comment on our progress or give us suggestions. Today, while shaping my devonshire splits, I received the comment "you must treat the dough with less love and more passion"...ok?!...more passion, huh, well I took that to mean that I was being too gentle with the dough. That must have been it, because I received high marks today in all the areas of my assembly and baking. Little did I know that in culinary school I would learn so much about love.

Morning: danish making, afternoon: sweet wine tasting...

...its a rough life, but someones gotta do it.  I must admit as fun as it was to learn to make all kinds of danishes, after the 12th type of danish I was a little bored. Its like watching someone do origami with pastry dough: cut, fold, pastry cream, fruit, cut, fold, almond cream, fruit, cut, fold, pastry cream, fruit...on and on it went for 3 hours! I even have a huge power point packet with all the different ways to fold up danishes. Hopefully I will remember them all for my practical on Friday.

Canapes and dessert wine, not too shabby for a Tuesday afternoon. I have to admit I was not looking forward to this wine lecture, even though no one should really be dreading an afternoon where you get to learn all about wines, but my previous exposure to this experience in Basic was less than informative and bordered on ridiculous. 

My 'wine expert' from basic was very passionate about wine...so much so that he cried over one of the wines we tasted in our class. Ok I am all about the impact and revelation that food and spirits can spur, but come on buddy, it was only a $20 bottle of wine...lets not get carried away here.

Much to my surprise our sommelier for the day was actually a girl from my class last year. That was very exciting because, one, she actually had her sommolier certificate, two, I knew she would be able to 'hold down the waterworks' seeing as she had to sit through last years drowning lecture as well. We had the luxury of tasting bottles of wine from the 9.50 pound level all the way up to the 200.00 pound level. Now if anyone has been looking at the exchange rate lately that would equate to about a $30.00 bottle of sweet wine and a $400.00 bottle of sweet wine, according to a much inflated restaurant wine list.

Now let me give you a little history on sweet wine or vin doux as they say in France.  This wine must contain at least 45g per liter of sugar for this spirit to move up in the rankings from wine to a much sought after sweet wine. The 'sweet wines for dummies' version behind this process is essentially removing as much water as you can from the grape, so that all you have left are the sugars from the grape. There are several ways to do this a few of which are: air drying (like raisins), late harvest (essentially letting the grape die on the vine), Noble Rot (the most sought after grapes in the world, this is when the botrytis mould attacks the grapes and quickly removes all the moisture from the grape), ice wine (letting the grapes freeze and then put all the frozen grapes into a grape press and squeezing only the little bits of sugar substance that hasn't frozen yet out...extremely rare and hard to do, there is also a price tag to match), or add alcohol (this usually turns into port or sherry).

Of course we went through the 'checklist of wines': appearance, nose, and palate. Now this is when things got interesting. I am all for smelling the wine and seeing what notes hit your nose first, but some of these descriptions are a little out there to the point where I would smell a wine 10-12 times to try to smell what my apparently much more cultured classmates where smelling. 'Oak...cabbage...eucalyptus and leather....chemical...stewed...green bell pepper...fig and apricot' people would shout at the first inhale of these sought after wines. I am thinking 'seriously! there is no way you smell leather...apricot?, understandable...but leather?!'.  It was quite fun to hear what crazy 'note' these citizens of the world could smell in these wines.

Which was my favorite sweet wine?? Well, lets just say I have good taste. The $400.00 sweet wine was my drink of choice. The wine comes in a small bottle (7mL) and is from Hungary...its name is Royal Tokaji Aszu 5 Puttonyos, a 2005 vintage. I was told that they are selling it at a grocery store here in London for about $90.00...I will be heading out to the store to purchase one of these little babies! The wine was the drink of choice for King Louis XIV of France and he called the wine 'the king of wines'. It is aged in a 13th century cavernous cellar and is very rare. Of course we had this wine last, as it is very special, and after just one taste it is almost hard to believe that a sip of wine can be refreshing, warm, calming, clean, exciting, and leaves your mouth with the feeling that you just stepped into and orange orchard for just a moment. Now I sound like my crazy classmates, but that is truly the sensation this wine gives. What to eat with this luxurious wine you might ask? An apricot or citrus tart, creme brulee, or a buttery pastry. Our sommelier had us taste it with bitter chocolate, which of course chocolate and citrus is always a winning combination, but the chocolate can over power the taste of the wine a bit.  My second favorite and much more affordable $35.00 sweet wine choice has to be the Seifried Sweet Agnes, vintage 2008, paired with an apple tart, tropical fruit dish, or prosciutto and melon.

...so drink-up my dear friends, because in life the rare special moments with the ones you love should always be cherished and sweetly celebrated.

Evil Oven vs. Prize Idiot

Tonight I decided to bake cookies...nothing fancy, just your run of the mill chocolate chip cookies. On second thought, I was using the Nieman Marcus recipe, so I guess they had a little extra fancy to them. Of course I had none of the ingredients, so I headed off to Sainsbury to get all my ingredients and a baking tray. After spending about an hour in the store trying to figure out the difference between 'self rising flour' and 'normal flour' and then trying to find unsalted butter all proved to be a much more challenging task then I was planning on for my calm Saturday night. I never did figure out the difference between the flours, so I just picked the 'normal flour' and hoped for the best. I came back to my flat to realize that I did not have a whisk or a mixer...just a wooden spoon. The first step of the recipe is to 'cream together the butter and sugar', 'well..' I thought to myself while looking at the block of butter and cup of sugar in my much too small plastic bowl 'this should be interesting'. I smashed, folded, and stirred the butter until I was red in the face, so I moved closer to the open window for some cool air. I decided that I could never achieve the 'until fluffy' stage, so I figured 'eh its mixed together at least'. I added the vanilla, eggs, flour, ect to my semi-creamed butter and sugar mixture until I had everything combined. I pre-heated my oven to 150 degrees C without even giving it a second thought and put in my first batch. In less than 10 min they burned into little black blobs...I have NEVER burned anything in my life. I blame the oven! So I turned the dial towards the left, just in case and put in my second batch. These burned in less than 6 min! 'HOW IS THIS HAPPENING?!' I asked my roommate. 'THIS OVEN IS EVIL!' I shouted. Smoke was filling the kitchen I flew open the window and stuck the entire tray of cookies out the window shielding my face with the window pane, with all of Oxford Street looking up at me and my burned cookie tray. It was a shameful moment. 'I have made these a million times, I don't understand...I give up' and into the bin went the rest of my batter.

Does anyone know that in England everything seems to be backwards including their dials...everything is clockwise not counter-clockwise. In the States when you look at your oven dial the smaller numbers are on the left and they get larger as you move to the right...its true go check your oven. Here in London it is the opposite, so I actually set the oven to 260 degrees C or 500 degrees F and when I turned it 'to the left', what I thought was cooler, I actually set it to 560 degrees F. I wish this story was not true, but sadly I have witnesses.  Moral of my sad little story 1. always look at your oven dial carefully, especially in a foreign country, 2. my oven isn't evil, 3. and finally as they say here in London, I was just a prize idiot!

Butter, butter, butter, butter, butter...

I am currently in a butter sugar coma from having a small slice of each of my desserts today, but I dont care they tasted amazing. Moe, my roommate from Japan, and I just sat at our kitchen table eating in silence, except the occasional 'yum', 'its so nice', 'uhhh this is so good!'. My white fondant dried so fast that my chocolate design didn't turn out exactly the way I wanted.

 

There is actually a girl who went to Baylor in my class...what a small world!

The more amazing thing about these confections is that I was able to get my two huge pastry boxes through the tube. It was getting to be lunch time and everyone was looking at me like, 'oh whatever is in those boxes, I want some!'. Peoples reactions to me carrying all of this stuff is pretty funny actually. I usually get the comment 'oh do you have a cake in there?' or 'I don't know whats in there, but it smells lovely'...usually from men or little old ladies. So ladies, if you need a date for this weekend just carry a cake around for a little while. Its fool proof!

Dance of the umbrellas

Its raining today in London, it rained yesterday, and its suppose to rain tomorrow...big shocker. I unfortunately had to join the not so elegant dance of raising, lowering, and tilting my umbrella and I must admit that I am getting quite good. The real test was today when I was getting on and off the tube and had two bags, my binder, and a cake box with my St. Honore in-side.

I woke up before the crack of dawn this morning, and off into the dark hours of the morning I headed to class. The doors open at 7:30 and there is always a mass of anxious cooking students outside the door just waiting for the click of the door to unlock. There is so much to get done in those 30min...change into chef whites (in a room full of lockers and is about the size of my dorm room...add 30 frazzled ladies and you have chaos), climb at least 3 flights of stairs, prepare your station, get out the tools you need, frantically look over the recipe, deep breath...8:00 ALLEZ-Y! This morning was particularly stressful for me, because I was already quite nervous about meeting my class and getting back into the swing of things. We walked into class, there were no introductions, just instructions and a timer with 3 hours set.  "Alright" my chef said "let's go". In my head all I could think was 'oh my gosh what do I do first, my head is completely blank, what do I do, what do I do!?. Bowls and butter! Just grab the bowls and butter!' I knew I would need them at some point. Then in the short time it took me to grab bowls from the sink and butter from the kitchen cart, I 'got my groove back'. Before I knew it, I had my pate choux finished and in a piping bag, my puff pastry had been cut out, and I was ready to make my puff pastry for tomorrow. Leaps ahead of half of my class, my pate choux was piped onto trays and ready to be put in the oven and I was feeling good. Everything turned out beautifully. Now it was time to boil some sugar. Caramel, gosh that stuff gets hot! To the sugar and water you must add pure glucose to the mixture. In case anyone was wondering, yes it is a clear sticky mess, yes it comes out of a big tub, and yes I did get it all over myself. Minus a few burns on my hands from the hot caramel, no major medical disasters in the kitchen today. I guess the heavens were on my side. 

My puff pastry turned out great and the block of butter incorporated into the dough without a hitch. I got very good marks today, but my piping was a little 'sloppy'...Ill take it considering that is the first time I have ever piped with that saintly pastry tip. 

My roommates are amazing and I have gotten great feedback from my two French roommates, so I feel like that should say something right?! We all were off to a slow start this morning due to the fact that the nightclub next door to us was having an event last night. Hundreds of people were lined up under our window and around the corner until about 2am. 

On the menu tomorrow: pithiviers and mille-feuille aux fraises

Ahhh the pithiviers....almond cream baked into fresh buttery puff pastry that looks like a sunflower before you bake it. Ummm, delicious? Is that the word you are looking for? The pithiviers are traditionally served around the holidays and a little plastic crown is hidden inside. Whomever gets the piece with the crown gets to be king for the day. Sounds like a pretty fun tradition to me. 

The mille-feuille is a stacked dessert with layers of puff pastry, creme mousseline, strawberry jam, and topped with icing and chocolate in a herringbone design. Nothing wrong with that! 

Dont let the simplicity of these desserts fool you, they have many technical components. I can only hope that time will be on my side again tomorrow morning. 

Gateau St Honore vs. my arch nemesis the Pate Feuilletee

First of all let me say a quick apology to all of my readers who know that there should be accent marks in the title of this blog…but I couldn’t figure out how to get them on there.

Does anyone know what its like to sleep in Time Square? Well living on the corner of Oxford Street and another street that shall remain nameless is literally like living 2 stories above Time Square in New York. The location is amazing and SO close to school, but at night I do not appreciate the drunken people under my window yelling, the garbage trucks that seem to come around 5 times a night, the 5 busses that stop and go just around the corner on regular 20 minute intervals. On the up side everything is literally just outside my door. I guess my lack of sleep is worth only having to go 2 tube stops instead of 7.

Today was my first day back to class after a much too long break. My binder has gone from a 1inch to a 2 inch binder filled to the brim with recipes, there are pictures above of my binder with a few pages of my cryptic handwriting and drawings of Thursday's daunting tasks. It felt a little strange walking back into the building considering everyone was looking at me and whispering ‘who is that girl? Is she new?’; however, the humor in it all is that no one asked me if I was new. I was definitely tempted to turn around in class 2 or 3 times and say ‘hi my name is Sarah and yes, I am new to this group’, but I resisted. I guess they will all figure it out eventually when we start cooking together on Thursday. Today we learned to make the ever so prestigious Gateau St Honore. This gateau (cake) is a patronage to St. Honore the patron saint of bakers and pastry chefs. The gateau is supposed to show many different levels of skills and boy does it ever. To be honest when I looked at the pictures I thought to myself, ‘this is no big deal! I have made all of these things separately, I just have to put them all together now’…well I think that St. Horore is going to have the last laugh on this one. I can just see him looking down on me and saying ‘bahahahahahaha you thought this would be easy!?’. The gateau is a base of puff pastry (pate feuilletee) then a layer of pate choux (cream puff pastry), crème diplomate (pastry cream folded gently into whipped cream), then crowned with a circle of pate choux buns dipped in caramel with a slivered almond, and towering the entire structure is a nest of spun sugar with candied violets. I am exhausted just typing out the basics of the cake! Oh and did I mention that he also has a pastry tip named after him? One of the more complicated pastry tips that most of us try to avoid whenever possible. St. Honore isn’t going to let us out of this one, when that thing was brought out you could hear the moans and groans throughout the classroom.

The spun sugar is definitely the most amusing part of this towering concoction. You start by boiling sugar to a particular temperature, then you take a tool that looks like you just cut a whisk in half and all you are left with is a handle with a bunch of spokes. You dip the cut off whisk into the boiling sugar and then you flail the ‘wand’ about in the air like a ribbon dancer. All the while you must catch all of the spun sugar flying off of it. The spun sugar ends up looking like golden strands of hair, but before you even have time to absorb the fact that you just flailed boiling sugar about, you must roll up the sugar fast, while its still hot. I am definitely expecting an amusing Thursday.

All the while during any breaks in time you have whilst making this saintly cake, a batch of puff pastry or pate feuilletee must be made for our next practical session. Puff pastry must be made at least 12 hours before you need to use it, due to the fact that you must let the pastry rest to make sure it is not overworked. Now we all know that it took me 3 attempts to get my puff pastry correct in basics, lets just pray that I can get my block of butter pounded out to the correct size and that the butter does not seep out of the pastry during all the rolling and folding that inevitably must occur.

PS- I got stuck with a bottom locker…to all my tall fans out there you know how painful that bottom locker can be.

One last though…my singing and dancing ‘friends’ just walked under my window, they now have now accumulated a tambourine.

Whats 8 months?

What’s 8 months? Well not much except for the fact that my favorite boutique shoe store is no longer on St. Christopher’s Street. Not a huge loss, considering I never dare walk into the store knowing that the result of that act would be a workout for my debit card. The window displays were always lovely. I finally arrived to London last night very late. The flight was long, to say the least and with no more battery life left on any of my entertainment I was left to only start freaking out that I just move to London…again! All I could think in my 34 minute decent into London Heathrow was “Sarah what were you thinking! Sarah what were you thinking! This is crazy! Oh my gosh, I am going to London, what am I doing!…”. That feeling unfortunately went throughout the night, but I did get some sleep thankfully. I woke up this morning and just said to my self “Sarah just take it one day at a time…first shower, then lunch”. After I checked out of my hotel I walked around to find something to eat. Its strange that really nothing had changed and I just walked the center streets of London with confidence. The experience was a little dream-like, everywhere I looked there was a memory of last year. The corner I stood at when I met all of my classmates for the first time, the pub that we all went to after class, and a friend’s old apartment building. I feel as though I have never left, but then again just enough is different to where things don’t feel quite as they did.

I waved for a taxi and went to my flat. I rang the front bell and waited…nothing…I rang the bell and waited…nothing…looked around…rang the front bell and waited…nothing. I had my suitcases and bags; everyone was looking at me as they walked past. I called the number on the front of the door and finally got a hold of someone to let me in after waiting outside the door for 20 min. It gets better, there is no elevator, and so I schlep all of my suitcases 3 flights of stairs and finally get to my flat. To my surprise it’s really nice. I have not met my roommate yet, but she is from Brazil and another from Japan. Why do I get the feeling that I am in for a cultural experience?! Shockingly my room actually has two huge windows, so it gets good light. Light is something I have learned is a rare treasure in this city. I have a kitchen, living area, and a nice big bathroom…with a shower this time! After unpacking, I went across the street to grab a sandwich and much to my surprise I also found these little mango cups with a wedge of lime. Of course I snatched one of the few left on the shelf to try. Crazy as it is, I never thought to squeeze lime on mango, but let me tell you it is a ‘hello, good morning moment’ and the epitome of sweet and sour.

As for my homesick feeling, it is getting much better now that I am unpacked and a little more settled. I guess I forgot how this whole moving away thing works, even if it is a place I know well. I realized that I left a bag of my cooking utensils at my house, so I need to go buy those tomorrow before class starts Monday. I cant wait for reception to open up on Monday, so I can get my internet password…for now I am just using my phone whenever I can get wifi.

On the agenda for tonight is meeting up with old friends at the Royal Opera House for a ballet and dinner to follow. I cant believe it has been 8 months since I saw them last!

_________________________________________________

The Beatrix Potter ballet was wonderful. How could dancing bunnies, frogs, and pigs, not make a person happy…or at least laugh a little. After the ballet we went to an Italian restaurant, delicious as always and just as I remembered it. Around midnight I decided to turn in, because jet lag was hitting me. I am very lucky that my flat is on one of the most central streets in London; however, I now know that on Saturday nights the drunks like to come out and mingle directly under my window. There is also a religious ‘band’ that walks up and down the main street during all hours of the day singing in a language that I don’t understand. I saw them today when I was on my way to the store and almost wanted to stop them and let them know that A. at night people like to sleep in quite B. singing the songs in English would probably benefit their cause seeing as they are in England C. excessive drum playing at 2am will no longer be tolerated by a certain American student. Even though I had the perfect argument I refrained from making more of a scene.

Nothing too much going on today, just getting ready for class tomorrow morning and going to the grocery store. Once I saw the size of the kitchen in my new flat (that I am sharing with 4 other people by the way) I instantly called my friend Kelsey and told her that I would be at her flat cooking quite often. We have two mini fridges between all 5 of us and the oven is so small! No joke the opening is the size of my computer screen…ok it’s a little bigger than that, but you can imagine how difficult it will be to fit a cake pan inside of that thing. My roommate and I had a good laugh about that one. She joked that I would have to make my cupcakes individually because the oven is so small! My roommate and I tried to figure out the washing machine today with the help of our other roommate from France, who is learning to speak English. The fact that I am trying to speak my VERY limited French in England is one of the many quirks of my living situation and a sign of many adventures to come. Well that’s student housing for you I guess.

I am very anxious to meet all of my new classmates. I can only pray that they will be as awesome as my last group. Now I am off to Kelsey’s for dinner…why do I get a sneaking suspicion that I will be the one doing the cooking?