Today's blog will be a catch up of yesterday & today; I did honestly intend to post yesterday, but we went to the pub & by the time I got back I didn't have the energy!

So, yesterday, we went to visit Yorkshire Organic Millers, a small company milling flours from wheat & grain harvested in the local area.  We stopped off in a little town called Pickering, & headed off in search of refreshments.  We found a gorgeous little cafe, Cafe Cocoa (who don't appear to have their own website, but they're well worth a visit if you're ever in the area) & had tea, coffee & cakes!

 

The window display was just beautiful, & I had a lovely raspberry & almond tart & a floral tea.  Just what we needed! =D

We then headed back out & were soon at the millers.  It's run by Joe Coughlan, a really lovely chap, who's still in touch with a number of students from last years course.

He showed us round the mill, & introduced us to Tom, Dick & Harry, his three electric mills! 

The process of milling flour is very similar to that seen at the windmills on Monday, just run with electricity & therefore more efficient. 

We then drove out to visit the smallest bakery I've ever seen!  Roots & Fruits Home Bakery is tiny; the bakery has been built in the shed in the backyard, & they're only open three days a week.  It was really quite refreshing to see that you can actually have a bakery on such a small scale.  I'm not sure how possible it would be to earn your income solely from such a small operation, but it would certainly be worth looking into.

We took a few of the wonderful breads & cakes back to the mill ready for our lunch; soups, breads & cheeses, followed by bread pudding, & some lovely gluten free cakes.  Joe was very informative, & sold us 18 1.5kg bags of flours for a fraction of the price!  So now I've got some lovely Yorkshire white spelt flour to play with!

Today, oh today...

We had our first practical Flour Patisserie today, & we were surrounded by flours, sugars, fruits & nuts all day!  We split into 2 -3's & worked through some of the 10 different recipes we had been given.

First off, brandy snaps!  Clive, our tutor, demonstrated how to put the mixture together first, then we all set to work.  I took charge of the brandy snap mix, Nicola worked on the chocolate wheatmeal (or wholewheat) biscuits & Tory sorted out the Florentine mix.

It got a little confusing, with lots of people trying to get their trays in & out of the deck ovens, & searching for different ingredients for the various recipes, but it all worked out in the end!

We then stopped for lunch, a gorgeous beef & ale stew with mashed potatoes & cabbage =D  Then, back to the training room!  We had a talk & demonstration around how to work with chocolate from a chap from  Callebaut.  Turns out, when all these celebrity chefs talk about tempering chocolate, what they really mean is crystallising chocolate.  Tempering simply means to heat the chocolate to a certain temperature.  The process of melting & cooling chocolate to get that shine, smoothness & snap is all about stabilising the chocolate.

Once we had seen how to do it, we had the opportunity to dip our brandy snaps, Florentines & wheatmeal biscuits in the chocolate!

Then, we moved onto shortbread, yuletide cookies & ginger nut biscuits.  I made up the yuletide cookies & had to work out the quantity of ingredients from the bakers percentage formula, which was a little daunting, but it all worked out nicely!

Above you can see a selection of the goodies our team made today; we came home with loads!  I packed it all into boxes & then into the basket I picked up from Wilko's yesterday, which was strapped to the back of my bike with bungee cords!

Thankfully, everything made it home in one piece, & I've even got some cookie & biscuit dough leftover to make more!

It's been a really great day, & the rest of the course looks fantastic too; lots of meringues, pastries & pies.  Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to eat my brandy snaps!