The great Parisian bake-off

Two original recipes, a four-judge panel, and one full recap of my baking school final exam.

The Baking School Diaries is a series about my three months as a student in the Intensive Professional Program in Bread Baking & Viennoiseries at Ferrandi Paris. Bienvenue!

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?

A sampling of my classmates’ perfect final projects!

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.

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.

Some results of my second trial experiments

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.”

Brioche doughnut shaping process

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.

Savory croissant shaping experiments

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.

The building blocks of whipped ricotta and maple caramel

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.

🎶 If I could turn back time… 🎶

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).

Don’t squint too hard at the image on the right!

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.

Lesson #1: don’t forget to celebrate your accomplishments!

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.