First Day AKA: The Biscuit Blunder

Today was the first day of class. I'm taking five weeks of baking and then six weeks of pastry. I was a nervous wreck in class today. There are about 20 of us and only 5 of us are on the Baking and Pastry track. The rest are culinary kids. And they are kids! I don't even remember being 18, so I can't really relate to them, but I'm sure things will be just fine.

There was about 4 hours of lectures by my chef instructor and then he put into 4 groups of four. Our task was to make biscuits. For some reason, I was at a station where everyone was using our scale to measure out the ingredients. It seemed to take my partner and I forever to measure and then mix the ingredients together. Once we had everything mixed, I rolled out the biscuit dough and cut them into rounds to bake.

Here are disastrous results:

They may look like normal biscuits, but they did not rise as much as they should have. In fact, they were about half the size of the rest of the class. They were delicious, but they did not look as appealing.

I know what I did wrong. We added too much milk and then I over-worked the dough and rolled it way too thin. Too much gluten was created and therefore didn't make such a great biscuit. Chef went over this with us at the end of the class, which was good. 

I didn't get  home until 11:00. I don't know how I'm going to be able to handle this. I have to go to bed ASAP and get up at 6 for work tomorrow. Then I go right back to class and do it all over again. 

Tomorrow should be good, though. We are making muffins.