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We all converged on the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont the first warm day after classes ended.

Shuqing brought laminated pastries from the French Bastards, and Janice brought coconut madeleines. Gana brought taralli and chorizo butter biscuits, and Marie brought two bottles of chilled white wine. I brought an overstuffed box of financiers from Eric Kayser, makeshift picnic blankets, and “Joyeux Anniversaire!” paper cups and napkins—the only ones available at Monoprix.

Our time as Ferrandi boulangerie students was coming to an end; we were celebrating by stuffing our faces together one last time, watching ducks and their ducklings skim lazily across the water’s surface, and basking in perfect weather alongside exactly the right ratio of picnickers to tulips.

The following day delivered a true high/low experience: five hours of scrubbing the accumulated grime off our lab from floor to ceiling, trailed closely by a Michelin-starred lunch at L’Astrance (capped off by a kitchen tour with chef Pascal Barbot). Afterwards, tipsy off the wine pairings, we walked toward the nearby Trocadéro Metro station, where our jaws were nudged toward the sidewalk by the city’s best full-length view of the Eiffel Tower.

The next morning, Marie and I went on our last run together—one that, fittingly, ended at La Fête du Pain, a celebration of bread—before my second workout: dragging my overstuffed suitcases to Charles de Gaulle Airport.

Happily, I’ll be seeing my Ferrandi friends (and Paris) again soon! I’ve secured return airfare and a “convention de stage en enterprise”—aka my internship contract—which means I’ll be Europe-bound in a few short weeks.

When I first arrived in Paris, my first bakery visit was to Mamiche, a place I’d heard described in breathless superlatives. I sampled their brioche doughnut stuffed with chocolate-hazelnut cream, their transcendent choux vanille and orange blossom brioche, a roulé jambon fromage sprinkled with fresh thyme, and an individual-sized loaf of caramelized “pain perdu,” all in the name of boulangerie student research.

When I return to Paris next month, Mamiche will be my first stop again. Except this time, it’ll be as an intern—a stagiaire—rather than a customer!

Frankly, I was nervous to throw my hat in the ring at such a beloved institution. Apparently, even after 38 years on this planet, I still hadn’t figured out the secret of kicking impostor syndrome to the curb. (If you figure it out, let me know?) But I was inspired by my younger classmates, all of whom burst forth to shoot their shot at every well-regarded spot in town.

Lo and behold, after some painstakingly translated emails and a rainy-day interview with Mamiche’s sweet, dedicated staff, my efforts paid off. And then we sealed the deal in true French fashion: with a flurry of paperwork.

My stateside summer, meanwhile, has flown by.

I’ve successfully adjusted to life in New Mexico, where my boyfriend moved just before my baking school adventure began. (For those wondering: yes, of course we built a second catio here.)

Each weekday morning, I drive to work at Mille’s production kitchen in Santa Fe, through the high desert landscape that earned this place the nickname “Land of Enchantment.” Alongside the rest of a kind, funny, and talented crew, I laminate croissant dough, braid brioche, pipe and decorate eclairs...and wash lots and lots of dishes, which is as much a part of the job as anything else.

On the weekends, I’ve been baking loaf after loaf of high-altitude sourdough bread—Toto, we’re not at sea level anymore!—trying my hand at homemade salsa, hiking the Jemez Mountains, and sampling new-to-me local pleasures like soaking at Ten Thousand Waves.

In the afternoons, more often than not, monsoon season fills the skies with thunderclouds and sheets of rain: the perfect excuse to slow down, finally, and watch the storm roll through.

Between the long commute, workdays spent laboring on my feet, and off-hours exploring my new surroundings, you might have noticed it’s been a quieter-than-usual summer for me on the writing front.

As expected, balancing my commitment to writing with my new baking career has come with a learning curve—one that’s about to become even steeper, since it’ll be conducted in a foreign language!

To honor that learning curve, I’ll be taking a temporary break from Breakfast Club during my bakery internship. Starting on August 10, all paid subscriptions will be put on pause; current paid subscribers won’t be billed during this pause, and each paid subscription “clock” will remain paused, too. (Free subscribers who want to read my Weekend in Paris series: that means now’s the time to upgrade!)

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Fortunately, there’s plenty to read—and watch—while I’m away. For those who missed it, here’s a week-by-week recap of my entire baking school adventure, complete with daily vlogs:

After my time abroad wraps up later this year, I’ll be back with plenty of new stories and adventures—ones that, despite not having happened yet, I already know I can’t wait to share with you.

Until then,
Maddie

Breakfast Club is a newsletter about pastries with a side of personal growth, from an ex-financial planner turned baker. If you savored this edition, click the ❤️ (or share with a friend!) to help new readers discover it—and subscribe to get each letter fresh from the oven.

Subscribe now

My heart sank as I peered into the oven and saw it: a melted, smoking, unmitigated disaster.

With just one hour before the judges would evaluate my work, the contents of my stomach lurched into a spin cycle. How could I possibly come back from this?

In my last letter to you, I wrote about my final, bittersweet week of baking school classes and alluded to the evaluation that followed. Today, I’d like to walk you through the emotional rollercoaster of exam prep and exam day itself.

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On to today’s letter!

As early as the first week of class, we knew exactly what our final exam would entail.

We’d be tasked with creating two original recipes: one sweet, one savory. One recipe needed to have crispy, flaky croissant dough as its base; the other had to feature soft, rich brioche dough.

The fillings, toppings, and decorations were all up to us; it was referred to as a “creativity exam” for a reason! And the more we could weave in the flavors and textures of our home countries (including personal memories and experiences), the better.

In short, our assignment underscored the notion that the two foundational doughs we’d been making each week weren’t finished works of art. They were blank canvases upon which we could paint anything we wanted.

The only limits were our mastery of technique…and our imagination.

INGREDIENTS: Our chef would order all the raw ingredients we requested. Nothing could be prepared outside of exam hours, but we were free to seek any raw ingredients he couldn’t find by putting our Metro cards to good use and visiting any one of Paris’s specialty food stores.

TIMING: As far as “exam hours” went, we’d have an hour and a half the evening before exam day to mix both doughs, followed by six consecutive hours on exam day to work. When the clock struck one p.m., we’d have to tote our creations over to a panel of four judges, present our creations with—record scratch—a one-minute speech in French, then wait for their tasting and feedback.

Fortunately, exam day wouldn’t be the first time we attempted this feat. We’d have two exam trial days to work out the kinks, and try new ideas if our initial ones flopped.

It took me a couple of months to settle on the form factor of my sweet pastry, but the inspiration for its flavor profile arrived quickly and without much effort: a Thanksgiving pie I’d made a few years before.

It featured toasted pecans, a glug of maple syrup, and a dash of Kentucky bourbon, which together formed a quintessentially American combination.

And that begged the question: what’s more American than deep-frying things?

So after batting around a few different prototypes for this pastry, that rhetorical question helped me settle on its final format: a brioche doughnut filled with bourbon pastry cream, and topped with maple caramel and toasted pecans.

Savory inspiration was slower to find me, but I kept coming back to a memory of the surprisingly craveable nduja honey bun I’d tried at fabulous Edinburgh bakery Lannan last fall. It was lip-tingly spicy from the sausage paste worked into the flaky croissant dough, but the fermented honey brushed on top kept it from being anything remotely close to one-note.

Out of sheer curiosity about the technique, I wanted to try a spin on it, but it felt important to find a way of making it my own. I sat with this question as weeks turned to months, and it finally struck me: I’d make a kahvaltı croissant.

As I’ve mentioned before, I studied Turkish for a year in college and spent a memorable three weeks in the country with my dad, where I was first introduced to the concept of Turkish breakfast (the aforementioned kahvaltı). The meal includes a spread of delicious things, from cheese and olives to bread and a veggie-forward scrambled egg dish called menemen.

I decided to let nduja paste sub in for sucuk—a spicy sausage featured at Turkish breakfast tables—by blending it into my butter block and folding that into croissant dough, then topping the resulting pastry with a soft whipped cheese, a dollop of homemade sour cherry jam, mint leaves, and a sprinkle of the sumac powder that’s ubiquitous in Turkish cuisine.

Turns out, it's quite the task to turn even the most specific concept into a step-by-step recipe. So I resorted to an old trick that had always worked for me in college, and in studying for my financial planning exam.

I changed the scenery.

I got more focused recipe-writing work done in one hour at the jaw-droppingly beautiful Bibliothèque Nationale de France Richelieu than I had in weeks in my apartment.

And when I learned that my chef was having trouble sourcing sour cherries, I had an excuse to visit Picard for the first time (a frozen-food chain that is oddly popular among Parisians).

Heading into the first trial, I had two goals:

1. Determine if I needed to make major adjustments to my recipes (because of issues with taste, quantity, or technique), and

2. Determine if I could reasonably complete both recipes, start to finish, in the allotted time.

I told myself ahead of time that if my presentation wasn’t beautiful or complex enough, that was OK for the first trial. I still had another dry run to make things fancier.

But when the countdown started, I found myself getting psyched out almost immediately.

Until this point, my classmates and I had all been pulling in the exact same direction every day. Today, even though we weren’t competing with each other, it felt impossible not to play the comparison game.

Marie’s flavors seemed so much more complex and interesting than mine, Janice’s intricate presentation seemed to put my own to shame, and Chaeyoun was done (and helping with dishes!) far sooner than I was.

The more my eyes strayed, the harder it was to keep my emotions in check; a simple snafu with my maple caramel threatened to bring me to tears. And once that emotional rollercoaster had dipped, I became susceptible to making other needless mistakes, like scorching a batch of pastry cream.

During a low moment that morning, a conversation with my classmate Gana lifted my spirits. Tick tick tick: up went the emotional rollercoaster. As we chatted about our respective projects, she helped me brainstorm a few new ideas I might try with my unphotogenic candied pecans, and some interesting flavor combinations to boot.

And just like that—with a nod to Carrie Bradshaw—I was reminded of the myriad benefits of being surrounded by bright and talented people. Sure, you run the risk of feeling outclassed and intimidated sometimes, but being challenged and inspired to rise to the level of those around you is a very good thing, indeed.

Another upswing didn’t occur until the final minutes—when I actually tasted my final products, having finished each prescribed step within the allotted time—that I realized…huh! They tasted pretty damn good.

I’d folded just the right amount of spicy nduja paste into the savory croissant’s butter block, and my decision to turn maple syrup into caramel sauce was sure to earn me plaudits from the entire state of Vermont.

Sure, my shaping and presentation needed work, but the second trial was still ahead.

By the time our second trial rolled around, I’d made adjustments: I brought down some of my overzealous ingredient quantities, simplified processes, and rearranged timetables.

I was ready to focus on the day’s real goal: style.

I rolled out spheres of brioche dough before twisting them together into a blooming rose in pastry form. I baked some and fried others, trying to find out which looked the best on the plate (happily, frying won the day). I tried dipping the doughnuts in maple caramel and candied pecans, as well as piping the caramel into the folds of each doughnut “petal.”

For my savory croissant, I twisted them into circular buns, then sampled different-sized molds to see which ones worked the best. I tried a few different approaches to create space for the whipped ricotta they’d be topped with once cool.

By the end of my six hours, I’d found a definitive path forward for the big day…and I hadn’t burned any pastry cream in the process.

On exam day, everything unfolded exactly as planned—and yes, I had planned the minutes like an exquisitely-choreographed ballet.

I beat nduja paste into my laminating butter, then folded it between layers of croissant dough. I toasted pecans, whipped ricotta with garlic and salt and olive oil, and cooked sour cherry jam to the perfect consistency. My brioche and croissant doughs proofed exactly on schedule.

And then, of course, I made a critical error—one that would make all the difference.

Like many of my classmates, I was baking my savory pastries in a circular mold. Because our school didn’t have molds that were tall enough, most of us stacked two molds on top of each other, then wrapped them together with cling wrap to ensure they stayed put. And because we only had two rolls of cling wrap to go around, on the morning of the exam, I decided it would be a good idea to bring some from home.

Until I peered in the oven and saw melted plastic dripping all over my otherwise-perfect croissant dough, it never crossed my mind that the heat-safe cling wrap we used in class was any different from the cheap, flimsy stuff I’d bought at Monoprix.

As I stood there painstakingly scraping melted plastic off my pastries, I tried to ward off panic as a practiced meditator might: every time a primal scream welled in my throat, I returned my focus to my breath, to every crucial movement of my paring knife, and to my sense of gratitude for the Past Self who’d built a margin of 30 minutes into the schedule. You know, for surprises.

One solitary savory pastry had miraculously remained plastic-free, so I could guiltlessly present that to the judges for taste-testing. With 20 pastries to sample, they’d only be eating bites anyway.

We were called to the judges’ panel alphabetically by last name, which meant I was up first. Given the calamity that had just unfolded, I was just as happy to get this over with.

I selected the four most beautiful brioche doughnuts, one edible savory croissant, and three savory croissants that our chef—bless him—would guard against human consumption.

I placed everything on a tray and followed Chef out the door, through the school’s courtyard, and into a nearby lab. I tried to avoid grazing my shoulders on door frames along the way, terrified that I’d jostle or drop the precious cargo I’d spent hours perfecting (and painstakingly removing cling wrap from).

As I walked into the room, I faced an imposing panel of four French chefs sitting behind a long table—or, more accurately, three French chefs and a Texan chef who’d lived in France for the last 17 years. (The Texan would be the one to tell me, mere hours later, that my French accent during the presentation was Emily-in-Paris-level “hilariously bad”: tough, but fair.)

As the chefs tasted a quarter of each sweet and savory pastry, I held my breath, responding with a tight “Merci, Chef” to each comment, complimentary or constructive. Blessedly, there were fewer of the latter than I’d feared.

I wasn’t surprised to hear that the presentation of my savory croissant could use some work, given that I’d spent what felt like eons manhandling each delicate Saran-wrapped tragedy, hacking desperately at their sides with the tip of a paring knife. And as my chef had foreseen—“Ze French,” he had told me, “zey are all alcoholics”—everyone loved the fact that the bourbon pastry cream was approaching 80 proof.

In addition to the judges’ feedback, I took a few other lessons from this experience.

Mistakes are inevitable. How you react to them informs whether or not the experience is a failure…or a valuable learning experience.

After my cling-wrap nightmare, that’s what I’m telling myself, at least!

Recipe development demands more repetition than you might imagine.

Make that a lot more.

During our celebration, the Texan chef held up a glass of punch and told our class: “You should be proud of yourselves. You had, what, three trials to create these recipes? In the real world, you’d go through three hundred.” I may have a long mental list of details I’d change about my recipes, but when I step back, it’s obvious I have a lot to feel great about.

Turns out, I love crafting original recipes.

Up until this point, I’d been a rule-follower in life, and a recipe-follower when it came to cooking.

This assignment taught me to break free of my self-imposed constraints, creating space to stop being dutiful and start being playful. After all: it’s just food! What’s the worst that could happen?

Next time we chat, I’ll share more details from the end of my baking school adventure. I’ll talk about what the summer and fall hold for my work life and professional development. And I’ll finish with an organized roundup of all the writing (and vlogging!) I produced during my time in Paris.

The past few months have ushered in the life-changing experience I imagined this would be long before I clicked “purchase” on the Air France website.

From the bottom of my heart: thank you for cheering me on along the way, through your myriad comments, DMs, emails, texts and voice memos‚ even when I was egregiously delayed in responding. Your support as readers—and friends—has meant the world to me!

Until next time,
Maddie

Breakfast Club is a newsletter about pastries with a side of personal growth, from an ex-financial planner turned baker. If you savored this edition, click the ❤️ (or share with a friend!) to help new readers discover it—and subscribe to get each letter fresh from the oven.

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Well, it’s finally happening: my three-month boulangerie program is coming to an end. Cue the waterworks!

Writing these weekly dispatches, as well as filming and editing each daily vlog, has been a true labor of love. It’s required a lot of time and energy, both of which were in short supply after long shifts in the lab, but these newsletters and videos are the permanent record of one of the most special seasons in my professional and personal life. I truly hope you’ve enjoyed following along, and that you learned a thing or two along the way.

Today’s recap includes my final stretch of regular classes. For those keeping track at home, that’s weeks 12 and 13. (This was followed by our final exam—a test of both skill and creativity—which I’ll cover next time.)

Below, you’ll find:

• 🥐 Mouthwatering details about everything I baked,

• 🇫🇷 The highs, lows, and takeaways from class, and

• 🎬 My last batch of daily video updates for the full play-by-play.

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On to today’s letter!

All the sourdough. Week 12 culminated in a two-day sourdough demonstration with a rep from Moulins Bourgeois, Ferrandi’s flour mill. We tackled a long list of different types of sourdough bread together, with Day 1 focused on mixing doughs and Day 2 focused on baking them. Because these days were led by a mill employee, it was only fitting that his recipes included a bunch of new-to-us flours (chestnut, hemp, Rouge de Bourdeaux…) and lots of special ancient grains. We made madeleines, too—my namesake pastry—just for good measure.

All the other breads. We prepped for our sourdough demo by making semolina-dusted breadsticks, spelt baguettes, pompe à l'huile, and a gluten-free loaf made with rice and buckwheat flours.

Kouign-amann. In some ways, this was the moment I’d been waiting for, as kouign-amann is my all-time favorite pastry. (That fact has been documented in this newsletter.) This caramelized treat is laminated with butter and sugar, and because sugar is a magnet for moisture, our dough became wet and sticky within minutes of folding in the sugar…even though there wasn’t a drop of water in sight.

Panettone. Much like Week 12 featured a two-day sourdough marathon, Week 13 featured a panettone marathon. Panettone is an Italian sweet bread stuffed with candied fruit, and because it’s made with a very fragile milk sourdough—one that requires multiple feedings and lots of pH readings along the way—it was the single most time- and labor-intensive product we tackled during class, hence its position as the capstone of our program. We babysat our panettone over the course of 24 classroom hours spread out over two days.

Pizza, kugelhopf, stollen, einkorn loaves, and galettes des rois. What does this arbitrary list of baked goods have in common? Almost nothing, except for the fact that we made all of them while killing time on our twelve-hour panettone days. When you’re waiting around for multiple hours while your panettone proofs, why not whip up a batch of inverse puff pastry, fill it with almond cream, and score the top of the resulting masterpiece in fabulous, painstaking detail?

If this week’s bakes sound appealing, check out the videos below! They offer a look into each step of the process—including the finished product. Plus, they offer extra context, like how we structured our mixing, rolling, shaping, and baking schedules each day for maximum efficiency.

The great stuff

• Special baking opportunities. Outside of our classroom setting, I can’t imagine having the opportunity to work with so many specialty flours or make panettone, and certainly not within the span of one week. Neither of these things would be impossible to achieve at home (or within the context of a full-time baking job), but it’s an uncommon experience that I’m wildly grateful for.

• The relationships. ❤️ Long school days + the impending end of our program = our tight-knit group of classmates having way more fun together than usual. (Fortunately, our chef was lenient about the peals of laughter that carried through the lab.) We did impressions of each other, shared the latest iterations of inside jokes, and enjoyed a lengthy, impromptu English-pronunciation lesson with a classmate from South Korea. I’ll never be able to hear the words “tomato” or “tornado” again without thinking of these bittersweet final days together.

The hard stuff

• Balancing the end of our program with its attendant wrap-up logistics. Our school days were longer than usual, and we had to juggle a lot more than attending class: we had to adjust our final-exam recipes, run around the city to source hard-to-find ingredients, send emails (in French!) related to our internships, prep for the resulting interviews, secure our internship paperwork—a document called a convention de stage—and find housing in the appropriate arrondissement for our next chapter. And that’s not even an exhaustive list. Honestly, I’m tired just typing it out!

Lessons learned

• Play big. As I’ve mentioned before, this three-month program can be followed by an optional bakery internship of up to three months. As I considered my internship possibilities, my initial instinct was to play small, by which I mean “applying to bakeries that don’t intimidate me.” But when I saw my talented, ambitious classmates shooting for the stars, I was inspired to ask myself where I’d apply if I weren’t letting fear drive the bus. That question nudged me to aim higher, leading to an outcome that I couldn’t be more excited about. (I’ll share those details soon!)

• Class may be over, but this isn’t the finish line; it’s the starting line. Yes, I learned a ton in school. Yes, it was an invaluable investment in my new career. But I don’t see this program as the culmination of my education; rather, it will serve as the foundation for a lifetime of self-directed learning. Baking school may have introduced me to a wide variety of doughs, fillings, techniques, and best practices, but now it’s my job to go deeper on anything and everything that piqued my interest. Let’s go!

Every school day, I’ve been posting a video recap as a Note on the Substack app.

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Here’s a roundup of my final baking school vlogs:

And with classes finished, it’s on to our final exam! If you’re curious what that entails, stay tuned for the next dispatch…it’s going to be a fun one.

Warmly,
Maddie

Breakfast Club is a newsletter about pastries with a side of personal growth, from an ex-financial planner turned baker. If you savored this edition, click the ❤️ (or share with a friend!) to help new readers discover it—and subscribe to get each letter fresh from the oven.

Subscribe now

As I’ve mentioned before, my friend has spent considerable time in Paris and also happens to have exquisite taste. So whenever I’m in the mood for an over-the-top experience at the Venn-diagram intersection of “opulence” and “luxury,” I refer back to her list of recommendations.

One of those moments has been a long time coming, mostly because it’s fabulous (and exclusive) enough to have been booked out several months in advance, even though I arrived in the decidedly off-season month of February.

Jenovia had urged me to try the creations of François Perret, who’s at the very top of the international pastry game. You can buy his delicacies “over the counter” at the Ritz Paris Le Comptoir—named the world’s best pastry shop by La Liste in 2024—but I decided to sit down in the Ritz’s Salon Proust for the full experience of champagne, tea, and sweets.

I mean: when in Paris, right?

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Our chef’s favorite saying—“no fat, no fun”—applied this week in spades.

When we talk about rich breakfast pastries, the croissant is usually the first item that pops into mind. And while that’s true (croissant dough is, after all, wrapped around a solid block of butter), the dough itself doesn’t contain a ridiculous amount of fat.

So this week, we upped the ante.

We took ultra-rich brioche dough laden with all the good stuff—eggs, sugar, butter—and wrapped it around a butter block, resulting in a fabulously decadent creation called laminated brioche. I genuinely believe that the term “melt in your mouth” was invented to describe this stuff.

Below, you’ll find:

• 🥐 Mouthwatering details about everything I baked this week,

• 🇫🇷 The highs, lows, and takeaways from this week’s classes, and

• 🎬 Daily video updates for the full play-by-play.

On Sunday, paid subscribers will get a bonus letter called Weekend in Paris about my off-duty adventures abroad. This week, that includes a recap of my high tea (with pastries by Chef François Perret!) at the Ritz’s Salon Proust. 🥂

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On to today’s letter!

Like I said: Laminated! Brioche! We made plain and chocolate versions of this glorious dough, turning into braided knots and swirled loaves. To gild the lily, we filled each iteration with things like white chocolate and lime ganache, caramel, praliné and gianduja sticks studded with toasted hazelnuts.

Croissants and pain au chocolat…with a less-than-pleasant twist. This week, someone accidentally put salt in multiple sugar bins; the first batch of our croissant dough was a casualty. On the bright side, we learned a lot about bakery detective work. (More on that later.)

Lots of filled pastries. We filled triangles of croissant dough with apple compote and topped them with streusel, following that up with baked ganache and hazelnut nougatine, then pear custard cream with chocolate nougatine.

Restaurant breads. To be honest, I don’t love making millions of small-format breads, but you can’t argue with the tastiness of the results. We made pain de campagne au levain, “fingers” olives-herbes de Provence, pains aux algues (seaweed), pains aux champignons (pan-fried mushrooms with shallots, garlic, and parsley), fusettes de tradition française, fougasses provençales, torsades lardons-échalottes (twists with creamy shallots and bacon), vegan brioche (the secret ingredient: pumpkin purée), and a rich, savory spin on kugelhopf that included dried tomatoes, sliced olives, Comté, chorizo, and lardo di Colonnata.

The first trial run for our final projects. As the culmination of our program, our final exam will involve making two original recipes using brioche and croissant dough. This Friday was the first trial run of our creativity projects; I hope to share a more in-depth look at this process in a separate, future post!

If this week’s bakes sound appealing, check out the videos below! They offer a look into each step of the process—including the finished product. Plus, they offer extra context, like how we structured our mixing, rolling, shaping, and baking schedules each day for maximum efficiency.

The great stuff

• Behind the scenes at a boulangerie. Our language teacher was kind enough to take us on a field trip to Bulle Boulangerie, a gorgeous spot in the 19th owned by former students of hers. We had a long, informative Q&A session with co-owner Jules, toured the back of house, and snagged a ton of treats to sample afterwards.

• Taking the first baby steps toward my internship. After our program ends, we all have the option to pursue a two- or three-month internship—called a stagiaire, or stage for short—at a bakery in Paris. I’ve been tasting my way through the city’s boulangeries trying to identify my dream workplace, and this week, I heard back from them! I’m keeping those details under wraps (don’t want to jinx anything, of course), but I’m looking forward to my in-person meet-and-greet next week.

The hard stuff

• Enter: Murphy’s law. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong, right? This week, it felt like Mercury was in retrograde. On the day that we laminated more books of dough than ever before, the pastry class borrowed one of our two dough sheeters, so we had to roll out almost everything by hand. (To add insult to injury, they took our coffeemaker that day, too! They’re lucky we like them all so much.) Many of our classmates were out sick at various points. Classes ran late…and a tad chaotic. Our group got behind when the gluten never formed in our croissant dough. Immediately afterwards, someone else spat out her salty coffee—turns out there was salt in the sugar bin! The next day, when we realized that not all the salty sugar had been thrown out, a second crisis was averted…but narrowly.

Lessons learned

• There’s no substitute for tasting. We tried to figure out why our dough wasn’t coming together by talking through the many options, but it wasn’t until someone tasted the raw dough that we came to the obvious conclusion: our dough had way too much salt in it. Sometimes, the most obvious path to diagnosis is the easiest one to overlook.

• How to make apples more apple-y. One of my tasks this week was babysitting a particularly glorious apple compote made with caramelized sugar, plus a secret ingredient—Calvados—that took it from good to great. May I never get over the magic of using Ingredient B to make Ingredient A taste more like itself…and may I also never get over the magic of setting Calvados on fire.

Every school day, I’ve been posting a video recap as a Note on the Substack app.

Get more from Maddie Burton in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Here’s a roundup of this week’s baking school vlogs from Monday through Thursday (or, more accurately, du lundi au jeudi!).

And with that, it’s on to le weekend!

Warmly,
Maddie

Breakfast Club is a newsletter about pastries with a side of personal growth, from an ex-financial planner turned baker. If you savored this edition, click the ❤️ (or share with a friend!) to help new readers discover it—and subscribe to get each letter fresh from the oven.

Subscribe now

I spent the first, then the second anniversary of my mom’s passing gazing upon the life’s work of French impressionist painters.

So when her sister—my fabulous aunt!—arrived in town, it seemed like a natural moment to visit Monet’s home and gardens together. Especially because she’s an art history buff, and a talented artist herself.

Today’s letter is a dispatch from our day trip to Giverny with plenty of photos of the grounds in full bloom.

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This week, each of us got up in front of the class and presented our ideas for the final exam: a creativity project that will require us to develop two unique recipes (one savory, one sweet), bake them, and then present them to a panel of judges. Next week, we’ll actually test these recipes out for the first time.

This is all to say: things are getting real around here.

Below, you’ll find:

• 🥐 Mouthwatering details about everything I baked this week,

• 🇫🇷 The highs, lows, and takeaways from this week’s classes, and

• 🎬 Daily video updates for the full play-by-play.

On Sunday, paid subscribers will get a bonus letter called Weekend in Paris about my off-duty adventures abroad. This week, that includes a dispatch from Monet’s home and gardens in Giverny. 🪷

Subscribe now

On to today’s letter!

Rye tourte. This twice-kneaded dough was almost impossible to work with—there was so little gluten that you couldn’t even look at it without it falling apart. At least it was as tasty as it was infuriating to handle!

Pain de mie au levain. This bread, made with milk sourdough, had an extremely pleasant and subtle tang.

Pain blanc au levain liquide. We compared a batch of dough that was shaped on the first day with a batch that got an overnight rest before shaping. No contest: extra time equalled extra flavor here.

Pain polka. So named because of the polka (cross-hatch) scoring.

Chocolate-hazelnut babka! Cinnamon rolls! Cardamom buns! Simply the best.

Tropeziennes. We filled these brioche rounds with all kinds of incredible toppings and fillings. There was cocoa, orange, and coffee syrup; streusel, cocoa crumbles, rock sugar, and chocolate craquelin; mascarpone chantilly, homemade praliné, coffee-infused crème diplomate and hazelnut crème mousseline. Basically, everything was over the top in the very best way.

If this week’s bakes sound appealing, check out the videos below! They offer a look into each step of the process—including the finished product. Plus, they offer extra context, like how we structured our mixing, rolling, shaping, and baking schedules each day for maximum efficiency.

The great stuff

• Making nostalgic treats. Filling and twisting cardamom buns brought me right back to my Friday baking sessions with the folks at Midsommar Bakery. That meant reminiscing about the jokes we told and the music we blasted; it also meant enjoying a little bit of muscle memory for this particular baking task, which was a welcome reprieve after so (!) many (!!) weeks (!!!) of feeling like a beginner at making French baked goods.

• Thinking about our future selves. On Tuesday, we had extra time on our hands, so a classmate suggested that we start on the next day’s tasks. We were much less rushed on Wednesday, and all because someone took the initiative to think about Future Us.

The hard stuff

• Low blood sugar. I eat a full breakfast before heading to class each morning. Still, on the rare day when we haven’t baked something to snack on, I’m starving by the time that lab ends—and it affects my energy for the rest of the day, even after I inhale lunch. It took me a while to understand that standing up all day and doing physical work had greatly increased my caloric needs…even though my body had been sending me signals (read: mid-morning hunger pangs) all along.

• Realizing what we’d been missing. We switched out our razor blades this week, and learned that we weren’t so bad at scoring after all! We’d just been using dull blades. We also realized other, less positive things that we were missing: cocoa powder in our chocolate craquelin (whoops) and yeast in our chocolate brioche dough (double whoops).

Lessons learned

• How to adapt our recipes. When we return to our home countries, we won’t have access to the beautiful French flours we use each day in class. So this week, we got a few helpful hints about adapting our class recipes using the flours we’ll find at home, based on their protein levels and ash content. We’ll still have quite a bit of experimentation ahead of us, of course, but now we can make more educated guesses about the starting points.

• The power of observation. I asked a classmate to walk me through a coil fold—a skill I’d been struggling with for weeks. I also asked our chef to walk me through the process of making praliné, taking lots of videos and detailed notes along the way. Feel like a beginner all the time is starting to wear on me, but when I stop to appreciate how much talent I’m surrounded by, it shifts my focus from overwhelm (and intimidation) to gratitude.

Every school day, I’ve been posting a video recap as a Note on the Substack app.

Get more from Maddie Burton in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Here’s a roundup of this week’s baking school vlogs from Monday through Thursday (or, more accurately, du lundi au jeudi!).

And with that, it’s on to le weekend!

Warmly,
Maddie

Breakfast Club is a newsletter about pastries with a side of personal growth, from an ex-financial planner turned baker. If you savored this edition, click the ❤️ (or share with a friend!) to help new readers discover it—and subscribe to get each letter fresh from the oven.

Subscribe now

Shopping isn’t high on my list of hobbies, but after two months of living near the iconic department store Le Bon Marché, I figured it was time to step inside.

For the past few weeks, the store’s exterior had been plastered with the words “JE T’AIME COMME UN CHIEN”—I love you like a dog, which is to say unconditionally and without reservation—as well as a gigantic photo of an Australian shepherd. It was time to figure out why!

Inside, I found that the escalators had been transformed into enormous dog bones; across the atrium, dog-shaped cardboard cutouts watched the bones with rapt attention (and swayed in unison like adorable metronomes). A special section of the store sold all kinds of design-forward products that featured or were meant for dogs.

Apparently, the splashy display was for an excellent cause: an organization called Gamelles Pleines, which helps homeless and isolated citizens care for their pets.

I’ve lived here for eight weeks now, but I’ve still barely scratched the surface of lovely surprises like this one. And in today’s letter, you’ll find two other hidden gems I discovered this weekend:

• 🌸 An urban oasis for peaceful reflection, and

• 📚 The city’s most awe-inspiring reading room.

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Man cannot live on bread alone, I’ve been told. And that, my friends, is why my classmates and I made seventeen kinds of sandwiches this week! (Yes, literally.)

Below, you’ll find:

• 🥐 Mouthwatering details about everything I baked this week,

• 🇫🇷 The highs, lows, and takeaways from this week’s classes, and

• 🎬 Daily video updates for the full play-by-play.

On Sunday, paid subscribers will get a bonus letter called Weekend in Paris about my off-duty adventures abroad. This week, that includes:

• 🌸 An urban oasis for peaceful reflection amidst spring’s cherry blossoms, and

• 📚 The city’s most awe-inspiring reading room.

Subscribe now

On to today’s letter!

Sandwich prep. From Monday through Wednesday, we prepared for our end-of-week sandwich-making extravaganza. That meant baking (and par-baking, then freezing) a variety of different sandwich bookends. On Thursday and Friday, we’d finish the baking process…and have fresh, hot bread at our disposal.

This first stretch of the week saw us making some “international” bread varieties we hadn’t tackled before: bagels and pretzels, wraps, ciabatta and focaccia, and something called polar bread (this was new to most of us).

We also made pain de mie in loaf, breadstick, and burger bun formats—the last version got mixed with a charcoal-and-cream slurry to turn it inky black—as well as croissants, pain de moule, and demi-baguettes.

The sandwiches themselves. Thursday and Friday served as the main event: wild mornings of mise en place and cooking our sandwich fixings, then putting everything together for a 1pm lunch spread (to which we invited other programs’ students, as well as their chefs). On Friday afternoon, we even popped a few bottles of champagne!

I won’t list all seventeen sandwich varieties here lest your eyes glaze over, but they included everything from figs, prosciutto, and goat cheese on ciabatta to a truly mouthwatering duck banh mi.

If this week’s bakes sound appealing, check out the videos below! They offer a look into each step of the process—including the finished product. Plus, they offer extra context, like how we structured our mixing, rolling, shaping, and baking schedules each day for maximum efficiency.

The great stuff

• The little things that felt like big things. One of our chefs arriving extra-early to feed our sourdough starters and make us coffee—two tasks usually reserved for students. Giggling with one of my classmates while we pan-cooked what felt like a trillion sandwich wraps. Feeling, at various points throughout the week, like our class was moving as a unit instead of as a dozen individuals.

• Getting a taste of the cuisine program. This week, even though bread was our canvas, our tasks required skills from the cooking world. So I learned a million tips and tricks from my classmates who’d been through various French cuisine programs: how to properly caramelize onions and make mayonnaise, how to hold limes against a Microplane for maximum zesting efficiency, and—of course!—all the knife skills.

The hard stuff

• Being left wanting more. Making a slate of “international breads” this week left me realizing how many amazing things we wouldn’t be tackling, from injera to roti. There’s a big world of bread out there, and I want to explore the diversity of options! But with a limited amount of class time, baking school isn’t about building the entire house; it’s about pouring concrete for the foundation.

• Recovering from the time change. I’ve heard the annual tradition of “springing forward”—ugh—described as a hate crime against bakers, and whoever said that…is not wrong. (Also, here’s a fun fact: the French daylight savings shift happened three weeks later than the one in the States.) I was recovering more slowly from workouts, was more affected by stress, and required extra quiet time each evening.

Lessons learned

• Recognizing, diagnosing, and fixing defects in bread. In one of this week’s theory classes, we identified problems by looking at photos of baguettes, boules, and croissants—from improper scoring to lack of volume to a dull crust—then told our chef what might be done to solve each issue. All without ever eating the bread in question, or seeing it IRL!

• Disorder, meet order. On Thursday morning, a gigantic food order arrived for nine of our sandwich recipes. Immediately, one of my classmates took out nine trays and labeled each one with a different recipe name, which helped us sort the incoming ingredients with ease. In life, you can’t always organize your way out of chaos…but in a bakery, sometimes you can.

Every school day, I’ve been posting a video recap as a Note on the Substack app.

Get more from Maddie Burton in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Here’s a roundup of this week’s baking school vlogs from Monday through Friday (or, more accurately, du lundi au vendredi!).

And with that, it’s on to le weekend!

Warmly,
Maddie

Breakfast Club is a newsletter about pastries with a side of personal growth, from an ex-financial planner turned baker. If you savored this edition, click the ❤️ (or share with a friend!) to help new readers discover it—and subscribe to get each letter fresh from the oven.

Subscribe now

The scent of mandarin orange and passion fruit confit filled the air.

Whipped white chocolate ganache circled the bowl of a stand mixer.

Apple compote burbled away in a bath of deep brown caramel.

Our first baking school demo—a two-day affair with a esteemed visiting guest chef—had arrived!

Below, you’ll find:

• 🥐 Mouthwatering details about everything I baked this week,

• 🇫🇷 The highs, lows, and takeaways from this week’s classes, and

• 🎬 Daily video updates for the full play-by-play.

On to today’s letter!

Einkorn loaves. In the first half of the week—before our guest chef arrived—we focused on the world of bread, including loaves made with einkorn (a low-gluten, heritage wheat variety) that we baked in Pullman loaf pans to lend structure.

Pain de moule au levain. We made two versions of this sourdough bread: one refrigerated before shaping, the other refrigerated after shaping. It’s always fun to compare and contrast the results of these side-by-side tests—and to see the many creative ways you can structure a baking workflow.

Pain blanc sur levain liquide. This recipe was identical to our usual one for baguettes, with one major twist: it used zero commercial yeast. And with this sourdough-only version, we learned the necessity of being much more gentle with our shaping skills. Nobody wants a flat baguette!

Viennoiserie with our guest chef. Day one of our two-day stint with Chef Maxence Lelait was hands-on; day two was a demo day in which we watched and learned.

Chef Maxence is a master of flavor pairings, jaw-droppingly beautiful viennoiserie, and creative shaping techniques. All told, between Chef Maxence’s handiwork and our own efforts, here’s a sampling of the treats we made:

• Cross-laminated bow ties,

• Cinnamon-tinted bicolor croissants,

• Long, thin pain au chocolat stuffed with eight (!) chocolate batons,

• Maritozzi (Italian brioche buns stuffed with cream), and

• Tarte au sucre with fruit confit and lime zest.

If this week’s bakes sound appealing, check out the videos below! They offer a look into each step of the process—including the finished product. Plus, they offer extra context, like how we structured our mixing, rolling, shaping, and baking schedules each day for maximum efficiency.

The great stuff

• Polishing my elevator pitch. We switched up our schedule this week, and one morning—instead of our usual 7am lab—we arrived for a career prep session to help us with our upcoming internship interviews. We got lots of helpful hints, including cultural tips about interviewing in France specifically, and prepped and presented our own elevator pitches for constructive feedback.

• Making photoshoot-ready pastries…literally. There’s a reason we busted out the white tablecloth and a million iPhone cameras for the final day of our demo with Chef Maxence. Everything looked too pretty to eat! (Though, obviously, we ate it.)

The hard stuff

• Schedule shifts. By now, I’m used to my early-to-rise, early-to-work baking school schedule. But this week brought later start times—and with that, later end times. If I’m being honest, this just about broke me! Coming home close to bedtime was a nightmare for my sleep hygiene, and by the time Friday rolled around, I was flattened (and my apartment was a mess). This weekend’s agenda? Rest, recovery, and life admin.

• The weight of my commitments. We’re eight weeks into the program, and my to-do list has expanded in volume like it’s an active sourdough starter. French lessons! My internship CV and motivation letter! Prep for my final exam! Please send thoughts, prayers, and another pound kilo of coffee.

Lessons learned

• There are never too many cooks in the kitchen. At least in one sense: every time we work with a new chef, we learn lots of tips and tricks to apply to our own work. Finding our own personal style as bakers, it seems, will most likely happen by picking and choosing between all our chefs’ idiosyncrasies and preferences.

• Even the pros have to readjust. Inviting a guest chef into our space meant asking him to work with different ingredients and equipment. On day one, our croissants had less volume than he would’ve liked, so he tweaked the recipe for day two—and voilà, they were perfect. Even a well-tested recipe behaves differently when you use different inputs! It was fascinating to watch a professional approach this troubleshooting work.

Every school day, I’ve been posting a video recap as a Note on the Substack app.

Get more from Maddie Burton in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Here’s a roundup of this week’s baking school vlogs from Tuesday through Friday (or, more accurately, du mardi au vendredi!).

And with that, it’s on to le weekend!

Warmly,
Maddie

Breakfast Club is a newsletter about pastries with a side of personal growth, from an ex-financial planner turned baker. If you savored this edition, click the ❤️ (or share with a friend!) to help new readers discover it—and subscribe to get each letter fresh from the oven.

Subscribe now

From time to time, there’s an unexplained three-day weekend that graces our school calendar. Rather than question the random Monday off, my philosophy is to seize the day instead…and that’s exactly why I booked myself an Easyjet flight to Denmark.

In today’s letter, you’ll find:

• 🥐 A report on Copenhagen’s extremely sophisticated pastry scene,

• 🩰 My evening at the ballet, and

• 🍺 My first brush with homesickness, brought on by barbecue and craft beer.

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Yes, we baked many new kinds of bread this week, as we do every week. And yes, each loaf was unquestionably tasty.

But given the number of new frontiers we explored in the viennoiserie world—from playful lamination techniques to new fillings to novel shapes—it’s only natural that our pastry adventures made up the bulk of this week’s highlight reel.

Below, you’ll find:

• 🥐 Mouthwatering details about everything I baked this week,

• 🇫🇷 The highs, lows, and takeaways from this week’s classes, and

• 🎬 Daily video updates for the full play-by-play.

On Sunday, paid subscribers will get a bonus letter called Weekend in Paris Copenhagen about my off-duty time abroad. This week, that includes—you guessed it!—my dispatch from a whirlwind trip to Denmark:

• 🥐 A report on the city’s extremely sophisticated pastry scene,

• 🩰 My evening at the Copenhagen ballet, and

• 🍺 My first brush with homesickness, brought on by barbecue and craft beer.

Subscribe now

On to today’s letter!

Baguettes gratinée. After mixing, shaping, and baking another round of baguettes, we sliced them open (and got evaluated on the results!) before turning them into fabulous toasted sandwiches.

We made an herby tomato sauce, a batch of béchamel, a pan of leeks sautéed with butter and cream, and a shallot-parsley butter, then layered each base with various prepared ingredients from artichoke hearts to lox to pesto.

Pain complet sur levain. From the looks of it, I thought our first whole-wheat loaf might be too dense for my liking…but then I couldn’t stop eating the results. I’m always happy to be proven wrong!

Pain à la bière. We mixed golden ale into this triangle-shaped sourdough bread, though it would’ve been even better with Guinness.

Fougasse. This rustic flatbread is shaped like a ladder with seven rungs. We had fun mixing our very first olive-oil bassinage into the dough along with olives, tomatoes, and fresh thyme.

Diplomate pudding. A delicious way to use extra viennoiserie, we baked this mixture of leftover croissants and custard in a rectangular mold, sliced off the crusts, then served it cold in squares.

Cross-laminated pain suisse with semolina pastry cream. Cross-lamination is a technique in which you create a book of laminated dough, slice half of it into strips, then lay the strips on their sides (thereby “exposing” the beautiful layers) before placing them on top of your remaining book of dough…and rolling the whole thing out.

The end result provides a gorgeous striped effect on top of your pastries, at least in theory: it’ll take a lot more practice before my own results are as lovely as they can be!

Other pastries (and fillings!) galore. We made three books of croissant dough, brownie batter, chocolate ganache, a honey-almond cream, strawberry jam, and coconut filling. Oh: and chocolate, vanilla, and pistachio pastry creams, too.

Along with some apricot halves, hazelnuts, pears, pineapple, and fresh berries, we turned all of this into four trays of cruffins, danishes, and “New York rolls”...all stuffed and topped with every delicious combination imaginable.

If this week’s bakes sound appealing, check out the videos below! They offer a look into each step of the process—including the finished product. Plus, they offer extra context, like how we structured our mixing, rolling, shaping, and baking schedules each day for maximum efficiency.

The great stuff

• Internalizing one of week three’s major lessons. That is, the directive to “be less timid.” One afternoon, I found myself moving bread in and out of the deck ovens without trepidation, organizing my workflow efficiently without instruction, and anticipating others’ needs before they cropped up. I’m not this confident or capable every day, mind you, but it felt great to get my first taste of the feeling.

• Our mid-term reviews. We had one-on-one meetings with our chef and the head of the international program to discuss our progress in the course, plus our internship plans once class wraps up. Knowing that we’ve passed the halfway point is bittersweet; on the other hand, the next steps are all pretty exciting.

The hard stuff

• Navigating chaos. On the day we made fougasse, every tray went into the oven at the same time—so they all came out at the same time, too. Since each flatbread needed to be brushed with olive oil, that meant a million hot trays were flying around our cramped oven room, battling for limited counter space while we were all trying to avoid being hit by the long handle of the oven peel. The upside: nobody got burned or lost an eye! I’d call that a success.

• Cross-lamination broke my brain. Spatial reasoning isn’t my strong suit, and that became apparent when we learned the complex technique I described above. I can’t wait to practice it again so I can start developing a bit of muscle memory.

Lessons learned

• Some “failures” can be salvaged. On the day we made cruffins, our proofer was stuffed to the brim, and a few trays—mine included—looked to be smooshed beyond repair by the time they headed toward the oven. Once baked, however, dusting them with sugar hid most of their battle scars. Sometimes, it pays to reserve judgment and push through your (mistaken) belief that all is lost.

Every school day, I’ve been posting a video recap as a Note on the Substack app.

Get more from Maddie Burton in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Here’s a roundup of this week’s baking school vlogs from Monday through Friday (or, more accurately, du lundi au vendredi!).

And with that, it’s on to le weekend!

Warmly,
Maddie

Breakfast Club is a newsletter about pastries with a side of personal growth, from an ex-financial planner turned baker. If you savored this edition, click the ❤️ (or share with a friend!) to help new readers discover it—and subscribe to get each letter fresh from the oven.

Subscribe now

After a gorgeous “false spring” here in Paris, it suddenly got chilly again. (I know, cue the tiny violins.) So when a friend arrived from out of town this weekend, I knew just where to take her to warm up.

In today’s letter, you’ll find:

• 🍫 A tale of dueling hot chocolates,

• 💎 Visiting a jewel box of an artist’s cooperative, and

• 🥐 My order at a pint-sized French-Taiwanese boulangerie.

Read more

When I woke up with a cold last Saturday morning, my heart sank. At least it was the perfect moment to get sick, if I had to get sick—my entire weekend could be focused on recovering.

Still, I knew I’d be returning to school before I returned to baseline.

Even a week later, I have a mug of tea close by to help ease my congestion. But while I was worried about being on my feet all day (during a stretch when I would’ve rather been in bed!), that didn’t stop me from having a fun and successful week.

Below, you’ll find:

• 🥐 Mouthwatering details about everything I baked this week,

• 🇫🇷 The highs, lows, and takeaways from this week’s classes, and

• 🎬 Daily video updates for the full play-by-play.

On Sunday, paid subscribers will get a bonus letter called Weekend in Paris about my off-duty adventures abroad. This week, that includes:

• 🍫 A tale of dueling hot chocolates,

• 💎 Visiting a jewel box of an artist’s cooperative, and

• 🥐 My order at a pint-sized French-Taiwanese boulangerie.

Subscribe now

On to today’s letter!

Pain perdu. They don’t call it “French toast” in France, but that’s exactly what this is. We took leftover brioche and made two versions of this brunch treat: one with caramel sauce and vanilla whipped cream, the other with fresh orange juice, a splash of Cointreau, and blood orange supremes.

Tiger effect burger buns. We painted a rye flour-beer slurry onto an enriched dough base, dusted the buns heavily with flour, and watched the top open into a beautiful series of crackles while baking.

Flavored butter blocks for our laminated doughs. We flavored one butter block with parsley and another with blue cheese, so that after laminating them into the dough, the results were bursting with flavor—and some color, too.

We made a gorgeous “wreath” with the green dough and a stunning laminated blue cheese loaf, which was scored deep down the center to reveal each layer inside.

Bi-color croissants and bi-color pain au chocolat (plus some mini viennoiserie, just for kicks). We affixed a thin, colorful square of dough onto one of our croissant books, then proceeded to roll and shape it as usual—with eye-popping results. The fact that we included handmade chocolate-hazelnut batons in each pastry didn’t hurt, either.

Pain de mie three ways. Instead of making plain white sandwich bread, we infused portions of dough with cocoa, turmeric, and charcoal, then used creative shaping techniques to make the insides resemble a leopard, a zebra, and a hypnotic swirl.

Pain rustique redux. We took one of my favorite bakes from a previous week and made it again, this time with stiff sourdough starter—and served it with lots of French butter and wild blueberry jam.

Flavored baguettes. We took our standard baguette dough and divided it into three portions, mixing the first with turmeric, the second with mustard seeds, and the third with cocoa powder and chocolate discs. Heaven on a plate!

If this week’s bakes sound appealing, check out the videos below! They offer a look into each step of the process—including the finished product. Plus, they offer extra context, like how we structured our mixing, rolling, shaping, and baking schedules each day for maximum efficiency.

The great stuff

• Feeling cared for by my classmates. When I was gone, everyone came through with notes, explanations of what I missed, and portions of dough upon my return.

• Realizing that complicated-looking bakes aren’t always as they seem. I love the “a-ha!” moment when finding out how straightforward it is to make something as showstopping as zebra-striped bread.

• Getting the skinny on our internships. The head of Ferrandi’s international program (who also happens to be the beloved former chef of the boulangerie program) gave our class a presentation about our post-program internships. Next week, we’ll meet 1-on-1 to discuss our plans once class ends. It’s all getting real!

The hard stuff

• Running on empty. I don’t miss much about my old desk jobs, but not being able to work remotely when you’re sick (or, you know, not work at all) is one thing I pine for. I was definitely in “surviving, not thriving” mode this week.

• Miniature pain au chocolat woes. It was my third time making these treats, and my third time missing the memo on shaping them correctly—many of them unfurled after proofing. The silver lining: our chef promised to give me a personal (remedial) lesson next time we tackle them. Fourth time’s the charm, I hope?

• Communication breakdowns. Another downside of not feeling 100%? Having a shorter fuse. There were moments this week when, try as I might, I didn’t hear instructions from our chef, or missed chatter within my team about what we were supposed to be doing. But that served as a reminder to address communication problems calmly and directly, rather than letting them fester.

Lessons learned

• Don’t panic; clarity is on the way. After missing a day of class, I was completely lost upon my return, even with the help of classmates. Instead of spiraling, I decided to keep moving through the day, even if I was confused—no need to spend my precious energy worrying or fretting, right? And sure enough, within a handful of hours, everything started clicking again.

• The skill-building process is a magical thing. I couldn’t have wrapped my head around making bi-color croissant dough at the beginning of my baking journey. Now, it’s almost—dare I say—easy, and that’s all because I’ve gotten used to trying incrementally harder things in class each day. One foot in front of the other, my friends.

• There are no stupid questions in baking. With those aforementioned bi-color croissants, it really does make a difference whether or not you score the colored dough right up to the edge, and whether you score it with a shallow or deep stroke of the razor blade. I’ve adopted the habit of asking every possible follow-up question that enters my mind, no matter how detailed, and it’s been paying off.

Every school day, I’ve been posting a video recap as a Note on the Substack app.

Get more from Maddie Burton in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Here’s a roundup of this week’s baking school vlogs from Tuesday through Friday (or, more accurately, du mardi au vendredi!).

And with that, it’s on to le weekend!

Warmly,
Maddie

Breakfast Club is a newsletter about pastries with a side of personal growth, from an ex-financial planner turned baker. If you savored this edition, click the ❤️ (or share with a friend!) to help new readers discover it—and subscribe to get each letter fresh from the oven.

Subscribe now

What goes up must come down! After a fabulous week at school, I woke up on Saturday feeling under the weather.

I cleared my schedule for the day: no long run, no indulgent apéro with classmates. My biggest accomplishment would have to be trudging two blocks to pick up takeout pad Thai from The Crying Tiger.

By Sunday, I was feeling well enough to leave my flat for longer periods of time, first grabbing some replacement Kleenex from Monoprix, then restocking my fridge at the open-air Marché Raspail. So I decided to go one step further and try a more fun outing, one I’d bought tickets for a few weeks earlier.

In today’s letter, you’ll find:

• 🥐 Some tasty research for my class’s final “creativity project,” and

• 👗 A jaw-dropping display of fashion as art.

Read more

This week, I hit my stride…and it felt good.

My sunny mood is partly thanks to the fact that we baked the tastiest breads of our curriculum so far, but also because I rose to the challenge (no, that’s not a yeast pun) at a moment when it counted the most.

For the past few weeks, my workstation has neighbored our chef’s—so when he’s busy with another task, I’m the closest person to ask for help. Usually, that means something as easy as setting a timer; other times, it’s something more intimidating.

One day this week, he asked me to turn out a gigantic tubful of very sticky seeded baguette dough and perform a series of stretches and folds, then return the dough cleanly to its tub. (Someday, this will become a basic, no-brainer request. But right now? Most of us haven’t handled this much sticky dough all at once.)

The rest of the class came over to watch me, and there was a bit of ribbing as I started, which made me flustered. But by the time I finished the task with something approaching grace, the jokes had turned into cheers. Success!

Below, you’ll find:

• 🥐 Mouthwatering details about everything I baked this week,

• 🇫🇷 The highs, lows, and takeaways from this week’s classes, and

• 🎬 Daily video updates for the full play-by-play.

On Sunday, paid subscribers will get a bonus letter called Weekend in Paris about my off-duty adventures abroad. This week, that includes:

• 🥐 Some tasty research for my class’s final “creativity project,” and

• 👗 A jaw-dropping display of fashion as art.

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On to today’s letter!

Pain aux graines. This was the bread I stretched and folded as my classmates watched! We started by making an autolyse, which involves mixing flour and water together before adding the rest of the ingredients, then turned this seeded bread dough into baguettes.

Pain rustique. We mixed this rustic bread dough by hand on our countertops, much like you’d mix a homemade pasta dough: as a mound of flour with a well in the center where the wet ingredients get placed, then gradually incorporated. It was a very fragile dough that we shaped into a twist—and it baked up as my favorite of the week.

Demi-baguettes stuffed with cheesy goodness. We mixed up a pain au tradition with a 4-hour poolish—more pre-fermentation techniques this week!—and shaped some plain baguettes, then folded the following ingredient combos into the rest:

• Goat cheese and figs,

• Emmental and lardons,

• Cheddar and hazelnuts, and

• Blue cheese and walnuts.

Pain de campagne. A country-style bread, some left plain, some with walnuts.

Croissants and pain au chocolat. My croissant-shaping skills improved mightily this week! My pain au chocolat skills could still use some work.

Tricolor seeded burger buns made with milk sourdough. After our chef mentioned something called “levain de lait”—a sourdough starter made with milk, rather than water—we asked so many questions about it that he (graciously) offered to add this recipe to our agenda.

After mixing up a dough with the levain de lait and a buckwheat tangzhong—a mixture of flour and liquid cooked on the stovetop—we made yellow, red, and black burger buns by mixing in slurries of cream and three other ingredients: curry, paprika, and activated charcoal.

Brioche. This dough was so soft I couldn’t imagine how we’d shape it. Thanks to the magic of refrigeration, we were able to make:

• Small and large versions of brioche à tête,

• Brioche à partager topped with a hazelnut-almond macaronade, slivered almonds, and powdered sugar,

• Navettes with marzipan and almond pralinette,

• A braid topped with dry macaronade, and

• Brioche dough folded with chocolate chips and, separately, pink pralines.

If this week’s bakes sound appealing, check out the videos below! They offer a look into each step of the process—including the finished product. Plus, they offer extra context, like how we structured our mixing, rolling, shaping, and baking schedules each day for maximum efficiency.

The great stuff

• Leaving my flat each morning excited for the day ahead. I may be waking up before the rest of the world, but I’m jazzed about the work ahead of me, and my short walk to school is perfection: no more chill in the air! Birdsong! The smell of bread as I pass the closest boulangerie!

• Baguette breakthroughs. After some recent disappointments, my shaping and scoring abilities have improved! I enjoyed a great moment of analysis with Chef Vincent where I presented him with a sliced-open baguette and he…didn’t have many bad things to say about it. Victory!

• Allll the nerdy viennoiserie details. From using liquid sourdough starter in our croissant dough (which really helped with extensibility) and learning new techniques for keeping our laminated dough rectangular, I was here for all of it.

The hard stuff

• Feeling like bread “just isn’t for me” on Monday. But then of course, by Tuesday, I was daydreaming about finding a job or internship where I could continue to make bread each and every day, because the emotional rollercoaster is real.

• Prioritizing sleep, fitness, and self-care. This is a physical job that requires waking up early—usually very early. So, more than any other job I’ve had, it also requires you to put your energy on a pedestal. That means there’s very little room for error when it comes to sleep hygiene, hydration, fitness…and general sanity. Still, all these things are healthy self-care forcing functions, especially as a recovering people-pleaser who’s now getting a crash course in saying “no.”

Lessons learned

• “Don’t flour like a Dalmatian.” I’m still working on my flouring-the-bench technique more than a month in! One of our chefs said this to me on Thursday, and while I couldn’t help but laugh, I knew he was right. Imagining Cruella de Vil when I dust with flour will (hopefully) help me correct the error of my ways.

• Bakery life is a juggling act. As we incorporate more pre-fermentation techniques into our recipes, and more recipes into each day, that makes our entire workflow much more complex, too. So far, I’m thriving on that complexity—but I also recognize how much help we’ve had from our chef in managing that in a school setting. In the real world, it’ll all be on us.

• The fridge (and, in certain cases, the freezer) is your friend. We learned about “methods of organization” in bakeries this week, in which some degree of chilling is used at various points along the baked-good timeline to make bakers’ lives easier. (Although here’s a fun fact: in France, freezing your products is verboten for any boulangerie or pâtisserie that wants to keep calling itself artisanale.)

Every school day, I’ve been posting a video recap as a Note on the Substack app.

Get more from Maddie Burton in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Here’s a roundup of this week’s baking school vlogs from Monday through Friday (or, more accurately, du lundi au vendredi!).

And with that, it’s on to le weekend!

Warmly,
Maddie

Breakfast Club is a newsletter about pastries with a side of personal growth, from an ex-financial planner turned baker. If you savored this edition, click the ❤️ (or share with a friend!) to help new readers discover it—and subscribe to get each letter fresh from the oven.

Subscribe now

My weekend started in the chilly darkness at 6:45 on Friday morning, when all three of Ferrandi Paris’s international programs boarded a coach bus bound for the countryside. As a balm for the early-morning start, we got to experience a French highway rest stop on the way out of town—and I can assure you that it was far classier than its American cousins. (No surprise there!)

The three-day weekend means this letter is particularly packed with fun. Today, you’ll read about:

• 🍾 Our champagne-fueled road trip,

• 🎼 My opulent morning at the opera, and

• 🤤 A little slice of babka heaven!

Read more

Our chef tells us there’s a saying among bakers in France: “Hard dough, security dough.”

The subtext is that working with lower-hydration bread doughs (that is, ones with a lower ratio of liquid to dry ingredients) is easier for the baker. The downside? The result is often less satisfying for the person eating the bread.

In the first weeks of our program, we started by making “security” breads in order to learn basic dough-handling skills. But no more! This week marked a turning point into the world of higher-hydration bread doughs, and we were all ready for it.

Below, you’ll find:

• 🥐 Mouthwatering details about everything I baked this week,

• 🇫🇷 The highs, lows, and takeaways from this week’s classes, and

• 🎬 Daily video updates for the full play-by-play.

On Sunday, paid subscribers will get a bonus letter called Weekend in Paris about my off-duty adventures abroad. Because our weekend started early—with a school trip on Friday—Sunday’s letter will dish about:

• 🍾 Our class’s champagne-fueled road trip,

• 🎼 My opulent Saturday morning at the opera, and

• 🤤 A little slice of babka heaven.

Subscribe now

On to today’s letter!

Croissants. Yes, I’ve been in France for a month, but this was our first time slicing croissant dough into triangles to roll them up into the most classic of breakfast pastries. Next, we learned how to give them a second life by whipping up a batch of béchamel, then layering the sliced-open pastry with sauce, ham, and cheese.

Pain brioché. Even softer and richer than last week’s pain au lait! We took half of this beautiful enriched dough and shaped it into mini-boules, teeny baguettes, and a braid, which all got egg-washed and topped with rock sugar. The other half got rolled out, placed in tins, and topped with:

• Almond cream, sliced pears, and almonds,

• Candied pink apricot kernels and cream, and

• Coconut-lime-rum cream, rum-soaked raisins (this was rolled up and sliced into a monkey bread format) and topped with a lychee syrup after baking.

Baguettes and dinner rolls…with a twist. We used a sponge pre-ferment and an autolyse to reduce our kneading time, and upped the dough’s hydration. The higher-hydration dough was harder to work with, but the results were impressive! I’ll take that tradeoff any day of the week.

Rye bread three ways. Because rye is low in gluten, we gave this recipe a boost with pre-fermented dough that used French “tradition” flour.

We left one part of the dough plain, then shaped it into perfectly scored mini-baguettes. The second part was doctored with lemon zest and juice, then baked as tiny boules. Finally, we stuffed pistachios and cranberries into the last part and sliced it up into rectangles.

Schwarzbrot. We made our version of this German black bread with a mix of rye and whole grain flours, sourdough starter, and a bevy of dried fruits and nuts: apricots, raisins, cranberries, pistachios, hazelnuts, and almonds. We coated Pullman loaf pans with rolled oats, and topped the loaves with oats after their final proof.

If this week’s bakes sound appealing, check out the videos below! They offer a look into each step of the process—including the finished product. Plus, they offer extra context, like how we structured our mixing, rolling, shaping, and baking schedules each day for maximum efficiency.

The great stuff

• The pastry class delivered at snacktime. Our neighbors sent us gateau basque, madeleines, a marbled chocolate cake, and a lemon loaf cake this week. (Yes, we paid them back in bread.)

• My real uniform arrived. Because my uniforms had been ordered two sizes too big, I wound up wearing a chef’s coat emblazoned with the name “Andrew Barnes” during the first month of class. Now I (finally) get to be Madeleine Burton! It’s the little things, folks.

• Learning that the best egg-wash brush is made in Korea. It’s feather-soft and absolutely perfect for working with fragile proofed croissants. We’re all enlisting our Korean classmates to put in a bulk order!

The hard stuff

• Setting aside my perfectionism…strategically. After I was the last one to finish shaping my monkey bread, I resolved to move faster and stop overthinking. There are times when it pays to be deliberate and cement a new skill, but I also need to practice what real life will feel like on a bakery production line.

• Seeing how the smallest imperfection on a croissant becomes exaggerated during proofing, then again during baking. I’ll take “tiny mistakes that get magnified” for $500, Alex.

• Baguette problems. We made our new baguette recipe twice, and both times I made mistakes in pre-shaping (too tight), shaping (not enough flour on the bench), scoring (too angled and not overlapping enough), and transferring into the oven (just…ugh). But each time I made different mistakes, and that’s what matters!

Lessons learned

• Dough-rolling tricks. To turn a ball of dough into a flat rectangle, use a rolling pin to flatten the center of the sphere only—leaving the top and bottom third completely round—then flip it 90 degrees, and roll out normally. Voilà!

• One base, countless iterations. With a couple of easy substitutions, we made almond cream and coconut-lime-rum cream from the same base recipe. It’s tricks like this that enable endless variety at the bakery counter.

• Pre-ferments are magical! We learned about sponges, poolish, and pre-fermented dough in our theory class—what they are, how and why you might use them—and then got to put that learning into action the very next day.

Every school day, I’ve been posting a video recap as a Note on the Substack app.

Get more from Maddie Burton in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Here’s a roundup of this week’s baking school vlogs from Monday through Thursday (or, more accurately, du lundi au jeudi!).

And with that, it’s on to le weekend!

Warmly,
Maddie

Breakfast Club is a newsletter about pastries with a side of personal growth, from an ex-financial planner turned baker. If you savored this edition, click the ❤️ (or share with a friend!) to help new readers discover it—and subscribe to get each letter fresh from the oven.

Subscribe now

If I had to pick one word to describe the theme of this weekend, it would be “indulgence”—both gustatory and aesthetic! In today’s letter, you’ll find:

• 🍴 Melt-in-your-mouth boeuf bourguignon and elevated rice pudding,

• 💐 Stained glass and tulip heaven on an island in the Seine, and

• 🥖 A full-on boulangerie crawl featuring five women, five bakeries, five bread options…and (gulp) twelve pastries.

Read more

We had an inexplicable day off on Monday, which seems to be par for the course in France. But if you think that’s a complaint, you’d be wrong: the pace of life here is something I could most certainly get used to!

Still, even though this was a short week, we packed a whiplash-inducing amount of learning into it. Below, you’ll find:

• 🥐 Mouthwatering details about everything I baked this week,

• 🇫🇷 The highs, lows, and takeaways from this week’s classes, and

• 🎬 Daily video updates for the full play-by-play.

On Sunday, paid subscribers will get a bonus letter called Weekend in Paris about my off-duty adventures abroad. This week, that includes:

• 🍴 Melt-in-your-mouth boeuf bourguignon and elevated rice pudding,

• 💐 Stained glass and tulip heaven on an island in the Seine, and

• 🥖 A full-on boulangerie crawl featuring five women, five bakeries, five bread options…and (gulp) twelve pastries.

Subscribe now

On to today’s letter!

Poppy seed and rolled oat baguettes. We used the same baguette dough we’ve been using, but brushed the shaped baguettes with water, rolled them in various toppings, then sliced them up using our bench scraper and a pair of scissors into edible works of art.

Tarte flambée, also known as flammekueche. We took spheres of baguette dough, rolled them out into very thin rounds, then topped them with crème fraîche, buttery sautéed shallots, and lardons. We had them for lunch together as a class, snipped apart with scissors and devoured greedily at our workstations. (It brought me straight back to my year of pizza!)

Pain au chocolat. For two days this week, we worked with a new chef who had especially exacting standards when it came to viennoiserie. Those exacting standards paid off deliciously, both in our V1 pain au chocolat, but also when we gave them their second life by whipping up a batch of almond cream, dousing our sliced pastries in syrup, filling them with almond cream, topping them with slivered almonds, and baking them again.

Twisted pain suisse with hazelnut pastry cream, toasted hazelnuts, and chocolate chips. These treats—which we decorated with hazelnut powder and confectioner’s sugar once they’d cooled—were so self-explanatorily fabulous that all I need is to point you to the ingredient list above.

Pain au lait. I loved this dough, which was enriched with milk and butter, even though it was a bit fussy (we had to keep it very cold to keep it from getting super-sticky).

The shaping was actually the best part, as we made a showstopping crown, braids, little buns and baguettes, and a flat disk dotted with butter and sugar called tarte sucre. Everything got egg-washed twice, snipped with scissors for visual interest, and most got topped with rock sugar as well—you know, to gild the lily.

More baguettes and dinner rolls—a lot of them. You’ll notice that this will be a theme in the coming weeks (and probably months). After all, we’ve got to practice our shaping and scoring!

“Mistake” baguettes. This is one of my favorite aspects of baking school. Instead of taking assertions like “don’t under- or over-knead” at face value, we actually run experiments with under-and over-kneaded dough. And since all of our extra bread and pastries get donated to charity, everybody wins!

If this week’s bakes sound appealing, check out the videos below! They offer a look into each step of the process—including the finished product. Plus, they offer extra context, like how we structured our mixing, rolling, shaping, and baking schedules each day for maximum efficiency.

The great stuff

• Learning how to use a dough sheeter. After the large-format stand mixer, this was next on my list of “commercial baking equipment I want to get comfortable using.” And while I can’t say I’m comfortable yet, I finally got to use one this week! A dough sheeter (or laminator) rolls out large quantities of dough with ease, allowing bakers to skip the rolling pin. There’s definitely a learning curve, though—and I’ll need lots more practice to attain mastery.

• Using the deck ovens all by ourselves. One day this week, Chef Vincent told us that we were on our own with the baking process. That meant we’d need to position our bread onto each deck oven’s canvas before maneuvering its loading system into place, then retrieve our loaves once they were done. We’d done this many times with supervision; still, going it alone was nerve-wracking. (And, of course, ultimately empowering!)

• Dissecting croissants for theory class. For one of our theory classes, our chef baked twelve croissants using four different lamination styles. Laminating dough with butter can be done using two types of “folds”: either a letter fold (single fold), a book fold (double fold), or some combination of both—and each style imparts a different number of layers, which results in different characteristics. This particular class let us do a side-by-side comparison to discover how different lamination decisions affect the final look and taste of a croissant.

  

The hard stuff

• Skinning hazelnuts. These little $*&%ers are lucky they’re so tasty, because removing their skins after toasting is not for the faint of heart.

• Getting flustered. Our lab sessions are often fast-paced, which means we might be listening to someone give us instructions in a heavy French accent while also doing the thing…so it’s only natural to miss details here and there, even if you’re paying close attention. Unfortunately, missing details can have a detrimental effect on the final product. Plus, the French manner of instruction isn’t the same “everyone gets a trophy” style that Americans are used to. Frankly, that’s a change I appreciate! Still, it’s taking my nervous system a second to catch up. In those moments when I’m the last to finish something, struggling with a new skill, or when I’ve missed an important detail, I’m retraining myself to not get flustered in response. If there were a perfect moment to get over my perfectionism, this is it!

Lessons learned

• Tasting your creations gives you buckets of energy. One of my fellow classmates was looking for a running buddy, and this week, I accepted the challenge. Neither of us is in great running shape, but as we set out for a chill three-miler that turned into a snappy five-miler, we both realized that our inadvertent carbo-loading was having fabulous effects on our athletic performance. More of this, please!

• High standards are fantastic…and draining. As I mentioned earlier, working with our second chef was great for the quality of everyone’s viennoiserie. When it comes to rolling out a perfect rectangle of laminated dough, his attention to detail is on point—meaning we had to up our game, too. At the end of that session, I was surprised by how tired I was! It wasn’t physically demanding, but my mental wheels hadn’t stopped turning all day. The only solution: extra time to recuperate, which is a directive I’m honoring.

• Don’t be so timid. A chef from another program came in to visit this week. In one memorable moment, he prodded my baguette dough and told me in a kind but matter-of-fact manner that my shaping was “timid.” And he was right! From then on, I started noticing timidity in all its other forms—like when my classmates and I responded to a directive quietly or meekly. Of course, timidity is understandable (and often appropriate) for beginners; still, I’ve resolved to shed some of mine by the time I leave Paris. Wish me luck!

Every school day, I’ve been posting a video recap as a Note on the Substack app.

Get more from Maddie Burton in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Here’s a roundup of this week’s baking school vlogs from Tuesday through Friday (or, more accurately, du mardi au vendredi!).

And with that, it’s on to le weekend!

Warmly,
Maddie

Breakfast Club is a newsletter about pastries with a side of personal growth, from an ex-financial planner turned baker. If you savored this edition, click the ❤️ (or share with a friend!) to help new readers discover it—and subscribe to get each letter fresh from the oven.

Subscribe now