almond irish coffee bites and job training

this past week i've been training for work, and it's just been busy busy busy lately. it's hard to imagine how busy and rushed we'll all be once the restaurant actually opens! there are quite a few things i learned from training, though. for one thing, a lot of times prep cook = slave. okay, maybe that was a slight over exaggeration. but you know how slaves do the same menial tasks over and over again? that's kinda what i was hinting at. okay, maybe it's not really AS BAD as slavery, because we get two days off a week, we don't get physically harmed or anything, and at some point we'll start getting paid for doing this! so i take that last statement back, because i like money! and i also enjoy not wasting away at home all day hahaha.

so let's move on. another thing i learned from training: always, ALWAYS wash the vegetables! ESPECIALLY if it's organic! no joke, dude. because some of the things i saw in there are just NOT pretty.

one more thing i learned: quality over quantity (or at least while it's still training time)! i learned this after making tray after tray of shitty-looking ravioli. i don't know why the HELL i thought i had to rush, it's not like they told me to make a certain amount or anything. once i finally slowed down and put more care into each ravioli, they actually started to look pretty decent :)

anyway, onto this week's dessert! it was actually a result of two ruined sheet pans of biscuit jaconde (siiighhh). basically they just decided that they did not want to separate from the paper, so after scraping piece after piece of the cake off and deciding i didn't want to waste any of it, i crumbled it all and combined it with some irish coffee buttercream that i whipped up, compressed them into a large square, and cut them into cubes. it's basically the same principal behind cake balls, but i just got tired of making them round.

i know i know, they look like rice krispy squares. well they're not, so cut it out!!

my original plan was to dip them in white chocolate ganache so that you couldn't see the sides and then just decorate the top. well, as you can see here, that didn't work, as my ganache turned out to be too runny. well, EFF YOU, white chocolate. why do you always have to eff things up for me?!! pfft. what i ended up doing was just brushing the tops with some thick, glossy dark chocolate sauce that i had left over, which was also thick enough to pipe a little design on top too. see that, white chocolate? dark chocolate will ALWAYS be better than you. don't even think you're better, you supremacist jerk!


things i learned from this experiment:
1. i officially HATE white chocolate. YOU'RE NOT EVEN REAL CHOCOLATE! what percentage of cacao do you have? that's right, zero! get out of here, FAKER!!
2. apparently coffee and chocolate are a winning combination for my dad, who seemed to enjoy these more than some of my other experiments...
3. i found an egg with 2 yolks in it! okay, maybe i didn't learn anything from that, but it's still cool in my book! they're like twins!!! :D