Field Trip

I really wish I had field trips like this in grade school - I always ended up at some power plant or the zoo or some nerdy math competition (I really was in a math competition which is further evidence of what a dork I truly am).  No one every took me to a bakery and if they had, I might have chosen a different career path... Technically, I now have no career path since I stopped working last week in preparation for the big move.  Retirement rocks!

I went to the Bouchon Bakery people!  A few weeks ago, I took a trip to NYC to celebrate a friend's 30th birthday because I'm way older than all my friends but in addition to celebrating, I forced everyone to accompany me to the Bouchon Bakery in Rockefeller Center so I could gorge on the treats I've been making for over a year now and see how mine stacked up.

This wouldn't have been so much torture if it hadn't been sleet/snowing and I didn't make them all stand outside for 10 minutes while CA tried to figure out how to get our camera off of the "Food" setting and onto a setting that takes decent pictures of humans.

The biggest problem I had during my visit was to decide what to eat.  I only had 3 other people with me so I tried not to go TOO crazy ordering things and I was fairly conservative during my first trip through the line.

It was all so pretty and shiny and well lit that I had a hard time deciding what to get.  Plus, we'd just spent a few hours at Eataly eating lunch and browsing food products so we weren't exactly starving.

We started off with a Cream Puff, Bouchon, TKO, Chocolate Croissant and a couple of Macarons.  I wanted to get a good cross section of the different chapters of the cookbook which I think I did pretty well.

I wasted no time digging in!

The Cream Puff was awesome and had the added bonus of a little bit of caramel inside in addition to the pastry cream. 

The TKO was very dark chocolatey, just as I remember but the filling was far more successful than the runny mess I made.

The Bouchon was a yummy little brownie bite, exactly what I expected.

The Chocolate Croissant was also very tasty and perfectly delicate and flaky.

The Macarons were hit or miss.  The vanilla one was excellent but the other flavors tasted pretty stale which was quite disappointing.

When we devoured those treats, I went back for a few more...  A Better Nutter and even more Macarons.

The rest of the Macarons were stale too which was even more disappointing.

However, the Better Nutter was my absolutely favorite thing I ate at the bakery.  It was rich and sweet and a little bit salty.  Super yummy!  If I hadn't been on the verge of getting sick, I would have finished it off.

My favorite thing about going to the bakery was the validation that I'm doing a pretty good job executing these recipes.  They haven't all been perfect, but I'd give myself a solid "Pass".  I wonder if I can convince Thomas Keller to let me run one of these in Korea.

Enjoy!
Julie