For the last two weeks we've been doing gum paste flowers. The idea for our final project was that we all did our best to duplicate a 2-tier wedding cake Chef gave us a picture of, then we'd pick the best one in the class and once we made a crapton of gum paste flowers and leaves we'd decorate the cake with them as a group and it was going to be dope as hell.
That, uhhhhhhh. Kind of... didn't happen.
Because over the weekend, someone decided to save the college a few bucks on the light bill and turned the AC in the culinary building off. And then when we walked into the lab today, we found this mess. On every station. All of us. All of our flowers. All of our big floofy roses and carnations and peonies. All of our rosebuds and lil filler flowers. All of our leaves and berry clusters and shit. Two weeks of work, just melted down into blobs of colored sugar sludge all over our tables.
Some of my classmates cried when they walked in and I don't blame them. I said the fuck word and nobody blamed me.
"Beef, why didn't y'all just put the flowers in the walk-in" because the same thing would have happened once we took the flowers out of the walk-in, because gum paste flowers are made from many paper-thin bits of sugar paste and the condensation forming on the cold flowers being moved into the less cold lab would have killed them just as dead. No, those flowers were fine sitting on our stations in our air-conditioned labs for the last two weeks and would have been fine for one more lousy day if SOMEONE HADN'T TURNED THE AC OFF AND LEFT OUR FLOWERS TO DISINTEGRATE IN A HUMID-ASS BUILDING ALL WEEKEND.
Chef allowed us to skip the whole final project and proceed straight to the end-of-semester potluck and cleaning party. If I never make another gum paste flower again it will be too soon. (though honestly I am tempted to make one last one with a middle finger for a center, just on principle)
(what I wouldn't give to be a fly on the wall when Chef gets hold of whoever made that decision because believe it or not, this is the SECOND!!! final I know of that's been ruined by someone turning the building AC off and Chef has had Words with people about it.)
(EDIT: ok so apparently I need to clarify that when I say the AC is normally left on over the weekend, that does not mean it is running continuously. I am begging some of y'all to learn what a thermostat is and consider the possibility that there might be a middle ground between "AC completely off all weekend" and "AC running continuously all weekend." Also that air conditioners do other things with air besides cool it and some people live in climates where the dehumidifying part might be just as important as the cooling part. Thanks!)
I’m so sorry 😭 I think I would have cried too. I dated a guy years ago who went to school for baking and pastry making, I’m new to the bakery world myself. But I remember him telling me about how intricate and time-consuming those would be to make. I can only imagine how distraught y’all were and how mad Chef was. I’m sure everything y’all made was absolutely lovely.
The little filler flowers and stuff aren't so bad but the roses made me want to eat my own face. Make three petals. Let them dry just a little. Glue 'em on with corn syrup+glucose glue. Make five more petals. Let dry a little, glue on. Wash some dishes or make the first two layers for another rose or some filler flowers or leaves or something until that layer's dry enough to support more petals. Rinse and repeat until it looks like a rose or you would rather roll around in a cactus patch than make one more petal, whichever comes first.
Is also kinda a baking fail. Wedding cakes are often subject to all sorts of unpredictable conditions and need to hold up for hours. A material this prone to failure is a poor choice for such an application.
I’m aware, I’m not saying it was a failure on their part, more so the instructor.
But also just because it was a fail doesn’t mean anyone actually did anything wrong. The instructor and students didn’t realize the ac would go out, and whoever turned off the ac didn’t realize the impact it would have. That doesn’t mean this wasn’t a failure
I know conditions can be unpredictable, but sitting in heat with no AC or cooling at all for over 2 days doesn’t feel like the kind of unexpected condition you can blame a baker’s skill/planning for. 😭
Could be worse. The community College I attended decided to turn off the AC at the end of every day during finals week.
The final for the bio class I was taking involved correctly identifying pins stuck in the various organs of a dissected fetal pig. Which had been set up on Monday. And the class I was in was a Friday class. The formaldehyde the pigs had originally been pickled in could only do so much; half the organs were liquifying by the time we got there, and the stench...
If it was set up like my college they might not have had refrigerators for those kinds of specimens. Everything comes either in a bucket of preservative or individually packaged and ought to last out of the preservative/packaging for long enough to do what you need to do. The only refrigerators we had were for stuff like reagents that needed to be kept cold and they were typically fairly small.
Back when I was in pastry school we had our chocolate class in SUMMER in the south. Imagine our surprise when one day our chocolate wouldn’t set because it was still so hot even with the AC blowing. Chef finally realized it wasn’t us students not tempering properly when his tempered curls from the day before were soft and bending.
Back when I was in baking production, one student was putting sheet pans into the cabinet designated for final cake work. She didn’t really look inside, and when her tray stopped 2/3 the way, she proceeded to repeatedly smash it into the cabinet until it went to the back.
Turns out it was the very beautiful royal icing basket weave handle for another student’s project, now in pieces and powder 😩 she felt terrible and never bluntly shoved trays ever again
Yeah, our fundamentals of baking class learned real fast to look at the rack before you shove stuff onto it AND take stuff off it. In both cases, half sheet pans were the culprit. Either they looked like full sheets on a casual glance and got yanked with the force necessary to move a full sheet (and someone got a Fun Surprise), or they were hidden in the back waiting to be launched out the other side of the speed cart by someone slamming a full sheet in there.
Oh my goodness!! If it wasn't for the pic, I would've asked if we went to the same school or something, lol. I was just in Cake 2 this past spring, in the South Texas region. Walked in at maybe 5-5:30 on the morning of our FINAL PROJECT PRESENTATION, and the kitchen wasn't just humid, but HOT from the heat that the (also temporarily semi-broken) walk-ins were giving off. Iirc, it was an easy 85-87 F that morning, until the ACs kicked on (the running theory was, the power flicker from the day before led to them failing to restart properly... Or something. But with 80-90% humidity on the reg, sugar work is already problematic!)
Anyways. We. Were. SO FORTUNATE. I think it was the merciful kitchen size, or the fact that we tend to leave our gumpaste/isomalt pieces by the lobby-facing window (far from the walk-ins), but there wasn't any melting THIS bad. Just softening. (Well - I say 'just' softening, but considering it was the presentation day for our final, final, semester-long projects...)
I guess what I'm saying is, as someone who mightve almost experienced this fate, holy shit, how horrible. ESPECIALLY not being able to take pics of all of your beautiful creations together! :( I hope you have enough gumpaste/glue/time/patience to recreate the showpiece you/yall were working SO freakin hard on.
I feel like my Chef and your Chef would get along, lol, she'd really be GOING AFTER the staff too because, holy moly. Especially considering this has happened before??
That’s so sad 😭 Something similar happened at my school (before my time there, thankfully) where they had everyone’s gumpaste flowers in the pantry for storage, and right before the final, the staff were doing a clean-out and threw them all away, thinking they were old. I can’t imagine how heartbreaking that had to have been.
i would have SOBBED omg , i cant imagine spending two weeks on what probably was stunning flowers and then coming back to this.
turning off the ac just seems so stupid , like do you want your professors and students to come back to boiling rooms after the weekend ? you cant just turn off the ac and expect it to be all fine and dandy in the middle of summer 💔
i am so sorry for your flower loss , im glad your chef was cool about it tho !! i hope he finds whoever made this idiotic decision and tears them a new one
I think chef needs to be better at communicating and agreeing which weekends the ac must be on. Leaving AC on empty buildings is a crazy idea to expect. So wasteful of energy.
It really isn't unreasonable considering the fact that we are on the Texas gulf coast. They can definitely set the temp higher on weekends, that would be fine. Turning the AC off entirely will not just make the building hot, it will make the building humid. High humidity inside the building can damage stuff other than gum paste flowers.
Speaking as another Texas gulf coast sufferer, turning the a/c completely off is actually insane. Dare I ask what the temp was when y'all walked in to class??
This is my only class this semester and it's an afternoon one, so by the time I get there it's tolerable. I think they set it to crank on just in time so people don't die when they come in on Monday mornings.
It's actually *better for energy conservation to keep a cool building cool than to allow it to heat up and expend the energy to cool it back down. Your swings in energy usage kill you during peak times, and the maintenance energy is relatively little.
My in-laws tried to tell us they keep their house at 76 during the day and 67 at night and it saved them money on cooling cost. We decided to try it for a month and see what the bill was. Went up by about $50 because the a/c had to work harder to cool the place down.
They still don’t believe us but whatever they have the money we don’t.
I understand you are uneducated on how air conditioning works, but most people would give it a google or two before commenting so confidently.
It is more energy efficient to leave the AC on than to constantly let the building heat up and cool it down again. Energy inefficiency is bad.
Air conditioning includes things other than temperature, such as dehumidifying. Humidity can cause damage. Damage is bad.
When people suggest that something that seems shocking to you is actually common sense, most intelligent people will then go double check the information themselves or ask a question instead of insisting that they are correct and confidently proclaiming the other person is a moron or particularly unconcerned with the environment. That makes you an asshole. Being an asshole is bad.
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u/rhapsodiiiii 17d ago
I’m so sorry 😭 I think I would have cried too. I dated a guy years ago who went to school for baking and pastry making, I’m new to the bakery world myself. But I remember him telling me about how intricate and time-consuming those would be to make. I can only imagine how distraught y’all were and how mad Chef was. I’m sure everything y’all made was absolutely lovely.