A day in the life...

Life has been busy. I realize that is everyone's excuse - and I feel that for each one of us, it is true. Sometimes we have be honest with ourselves and think how we are going to use our time wisely, effectively and efficiently. With that in mind, school work, training for my upcoming marathon and being in the midst of the busy season at work has monopolized my time - to the point that I feel lucky if I maintain 5-6 hours of sleep a week. By health standards, I am lacking. By my family's standards of regular sleep, I'm getting more than enough. :)

It got me thinking, however, that nobody knows what my regular day at work consists of. It can seem fairly mundane and regular when I am doing the same thing without pursuing any other projects because it is so busy, but you... the reader of this blog... may not have an idea of what goes on in my pastry shop... or any pastry shop, for that matter. So, the other week, I took some pictures of what my regular day looks like to give you all a visual of what a day in the life is like for me while I'm at work.

My main tasks include making breakfast pastries and breads for all the outlets for the following morning - the hotel's coffee shop, the restaurant, all banquet events and, if necessary, components for other kitchens (for instance, if they need croissants to make breakfast sandwiches or if our pastry kitchen needs extra pastries to make our bread pudding - things of that nature...) Since my shift starts at 9:00 p.m. and ends at 6:00 a.m., I ensure all of the product is as fresh as possible and am still there when the other employees come to pick up their various breakfast goods in the morning. In that way, I make sure that everything is taken care of for all the functions and am still there in case there are any issues.

My day usually begins with putting the croissants and danishes needed in the proof box and to get the rising going. To make things a little more productive, a few of us employees have broken up the tasks of making the dough, laminating it (putting butter in the dough, folding, resting the dough, folding again - to create the flaky, buttery layers that croissants and danishes are used for), then rolling it and cutting it. My task is to proof the danishes and croissants, fill the danishes with a variety of fillings, egg wash, bake, glaze and ice with icing. The entire process would just be too much in one night, so luckily, we have it all figured out to make it fairly seamless.

This is a picture of the pre-made croissants and danishes - when I come in, I look at all of the orders and take what I need from this stock to use for bake off.

After proofing, I egg wash the croissants and bake them off. Here is a picture of them coming out of the oven:

The danishes are similar - I usually lay all the trays I need out (usually full sheet pans which fit 24 danishes), then I divide each tray to have 4 flavors, 6 each. The flavors usually depend on the season - to keep the idea of seasonality and freshness - so recently the flavors have included raspberry, apple-cinnamon, cream cheese, and lemon. The raspberry and apple-cinnamon filling are shipped in to the hotel, though the cream cheese filling and the lemon curd I make from scratch every few days.

The day I took these pictures, it was a particularly busy day - I used every rack of our oven to bake off the danishes, meaning we had orders for nearly 500 danishes the next morning.

Here is a closer view of the baking...

After all the danishes are baked off, I lay all of the trays out on the tables and glaze them with an apricot glaze to give them a delicious looking shine. It adds a subtle sweetness, though this is certainly more of an aesthetic quality.

Here is a view of nearly all of the trays laid out. After the glaze has set after a few minutes, I ice each of the danishes with a basic icing (literally just powdered sugar, water and vanilla extract) Luckily, we made a tool for the bake-shop that makes this process tremendously quicker:

After I fill this tool up with icing, I can go over all of the danishes in a matter of minutes - while maintaining an attractive appearance. Here are a few pictures of the final product:

Another aspect of my day includes muffins - not only for all the outlets I mentioned already, but we also do other orders for another hotel nearby. As with the fillings for the danishes, the flavors generally depend on the season, though we have blueberry muffins and bran muffins as regulars.

Similar to the danishes, I usually lay out all of the muffin pans that I need and line them with the paper cups. I do a personal assembly line and take each task step by step - first I fill the muffin cups with whatever mix is needed with a scoop, (the kind that most people would use for ice cream) to keep things uniform in size, then top it with an appropriate topping (in these pictures, bran gets oats, blueberry gets crumble, chocolate chip gets mini chocolate chips and banana gets chopped pecans)

The muffins that get ordered out by another hotel are my personal hell - they order a chocolate marble muffins - the process involves one medium scoop of chocolate mix, one medium scoop of basic mix, then a small scoop of chocolate mix again... and then I need to swirl each one. It may not seem like such a bad task until you consider an order for 150 of these muffins means I have scooped 450 times, then spend additional time swirling each one. They are delicious, but take up some serious time.

After all of the muffins are baked off and cooled, I pop each of them out on the table and finish them off, if needed. The blueberry muffins and chocolate chip muffins usually get dusted with powdered sugar - so I line them all up and dust them at one time.

After all of the baking is done, I usually separate the orders. Everyday, I usually separate my entire bake-off onto carts - for room service, the restaurant, and for various banquet events. If an order says that they need 50 croissants, 100 danishes and a variety of muffins, I pull that from my bake-off and place it on the appropriate cart. Here's a picture of what a standard order may look like on a cart:

After they are all organized and wrapped, I am able to move on to other tasks. Some of which include piping all the butter rosettes for the banquet dinners. This task isn't so bad - though this past week, I had to do about 3,500 for the week. It can certainly be a bit rough at times on the hands...

Also, I usually need to make all of my mixes and fillings for the next few days. Since I work in a hotel, I usually make large amounts of each of the items I need on a regular basis. For instance, the basic muffin mix I make requires an 80 quart bowl - and I need to make two batches for what I need in a given week. I can usually store all of the mix in a giant bin (pictured below).

Most all of items are stored in similar ways - though not in such large quantities. I usually only have to make anywhere from 8 -20 quarts of the danish fillings and 16-40 quarts of the other muffin mixes.
You'd be surprised how fast the night goes with how much needs to be done on a regular basis. Add that to the fact that there are specialty orders (sticky buns, filled croissants, specific muffin flavors, mini items, etc.) on any given night.

October and November is certainly the busiest months, though it seems like this summer has been insane as well. Add that to the fact that I've been in school and marathon training, it hasn't given me much time to sit down, let alone sit down and write this blog. Hopefully this gave you a glimpse of what it's like in a day - let me know if you have any questions about how things are done or other things you might be curious about. (Since this is all so common for me, I may have missed out on some essential details that I forgot to mention!)

Until next time!