Homemade s'mores!

This weekend, I took a class at a local wholesale bakery, Bakelab, to learn how to make marshmallows and graham crackers, and put them together to make homemade s'mores!  The bakery is just down the street from where I live and sells their products online (and to local retailers).  Kristin Feuer is the head baker and was our teacher.

When we arrived at the bakery, in a little industrial area, Kristin had little cookie samplers out waiting for us, along with some cold milk.  Her cookies are amazing!  Chocolate chip is my favourite, but the lemon sugar and the ginger molasses were really good as well.  Kristin does a cookie demo class, I may have to go to that!

The first part of the class was a demo, with Kristin showing us how to make marshmallows and how to make graham cracker dough.  The marshmallows were kind of amazing.  She took a sugar syrup, mixed with some softened gelatin, and whipped it in a stand mixer on high speed.  As the mixture comes together, it turns frothy, then white, then super glossy white and sticky.  The white goop is quickly poured into a prepared sheet pan covered in a cornstarch/powdered sugar mixture (to prevent sticking).  Kristin uses gloves to pat the stuff down into the pan very quickly, because it sets so fast.  By the time she had the stuff pushed into all four corners, it was pretty much set and not going anywhere.  You could tell during class that Kristin is a very meticulous person, and probably why she's such a good baker.  She trimmed up the edges (for nice straight sides) and cut up the marshmallow sheet into squares, which would sit a day to dry out before you use them.  The graham crackers were also pretty easy, with bread flour and molasses coming together with cold butter.  Kristin rolls out the dough very very thinly before poking holes in it (she has a special docking device for this) and baking.  The taste of the marshmallows was, as expected, so superior to the bagged kind!  The taste is similar but just so fresh and pure, it's hard to describe.  I was surprised by how good the graham crackers were, as I'm not a huge fan of the boxed kind.  The real thing oozes deep rich molasses flavour in a crispy crunch.

The second part of the class was hands on, with Kristin providing pre-made marshmallows, graham crackers and melted chocolate so we could assemble. We used corn syrup glue on the cracker squares to stick the sandwich together.  Each assembled sandwich is dunked in melted coating chocolate, the extra chocolate is left to drip off a bit, then the chocolatey square is set on a parchment lined sheet pan.  Kristen taught us to drag each square on the paper a bit, to prevent a little chocolate 'foot' from forming underneath.  Neat trick!  She also taught us little 'marking' tricks for the tops of each square, like using the side of the offset spatula to form raised lines, or dragging the line a bit to form a little triangle, or drizzling a stream of chocolate across the top of each square to form squiggles or other patterns.  These are the same marking tricks you see on store-bought Godiva chocolates.

By the end of class, we all had a box of 12 s'mores to take home and a very detailed recipe sheet so we could recreate these.

This was a really fun class, and I'm looking forward to taking some more classes from her.  In addition to the cookie demo, she also does classes on caramel, custards and cheesecakes!

Performance day

Today is the performance.  We have a short warm up class and then run throughs for our variations and repertory piece before a quick lunch and then prep for the performance.  The performance starts with the pas de deux.  Each group is dancing to the same music, Cinderella's Act 2 pas de deux, but with slightly different choreography (harder for the upper levels).  Some of the level 4s are doing this amazing slide into fouette thing that looks really hard.  I have a lot of fun in our partnering dancing with David.  He is with the Richmond Ballet, so I'm going to watch for him.  The variations are next and our group does quite well with the timing.  It's a really fun piece, from Raymonda's wedding scene.  The repertory that the level 4s do is amazing!  They were so together and coordinated it was like they had worked together for months.  Our repertory turned out really well, and Kathy seemed pleased (we'll see how it looks on the video). 

After the performance, we get ready for the dinner at Europa.  It's always fun to see everyone with their hair done and normal clothes.  I'm pretty tired though so we all call it a night early.  Tomorrow is a half day and since our flight leaves fairly late, we actually can take the full half day of classes.  I can't believe how fast this week has gone.  I wish I could dance more, but frankly, one full week of this is about as much as my body can take!  I definitely need to give it a rest.

Day before the performance

Dance camp week always flies by.  Tomorrow is the performance.  The day started out with Scott Putman teaching technique class.  It was an amazing class.  First of all, he spent a lot of time at barre giving us corrections and helping us improve our body mechanics.  We didn't have to do a lot in center, but this was perfect.  We are all pretty fried and this felt really good for our bodies.  Pedro taught pirouettes and jumps and rather than have a set class, he let us ask questions and helped us with issues that various students were interested in.  One person wanted help on pirouettes from 5th position.  I asked about petit allegro.  One of the guys asked about ballone.  Pedro really helped us to break down each issue.  Danile did pointe for us again, and I love how she teaches bourrees, again, breaking it down for us.  Today is also the second day of partnering.  Ty was back this year!  He was so great to dance with a couple of years ago.  We practiced supported pirouettes and pas de chats (so much fun doing jumps with a partner).  We also practiced more of our performance piece.  I am dancing with David, which is great, he's a wonderful partner.  He really helped me with the waltz step.  I found out that Nathan is a still in high school and was in the summer intensive here at Richmond.  Ben is going to Tucson to work at a small company there.  Ty has been working for a small company in Charlottesville. 

We had another session of repertory and Kathy set the final pose (as always, it looks great!) and then I hung around to wait for the others hoping to get a chance to practice the variation with them.  In the meantime, a huge thunderstorm started!  There was a tornado warning and we all had to go into the basement.  It took about 15 minutes for the warning to pass.  After that, it was still pouring with thunder and lightening so we hung around the studio a bit waiting for it to let up.  By the time we got back to the hotel, it was late, so after a bit of dinner dilemma, we decided to head back to the Thai place for a quick dinner. 

Long day

Today is always a really hard day.  We ended with partnering though, which is usually tons of fun.  But the day didn't end until 6:30p and it always feels like there is so much work still to do on the performance pieces and not enough time.  We had some great young guys for partnering, including some who were very experienced at it and could help us improve.  We are doing the Act 2 pas de deux from Cinderella this year, so yet more beautiful music.  We went back to the Thai restaurant for dinner (the food is really good but not heavy, the service is wonderful and they have delicious desserts).  After dinner, we came back to the hotel and reviewed the timing for the variation but everyone is pretty trashed.  I've always experienced waking up on Thursday feeling great, so I'm hoping that holds this year as well.

Pedro, Arabesques and ports de bras

Today we had Pedro for technique class.  He is a crack up, but his combinations are kind of complicated.  I don't know if it was because it was morning, but I kept messing up.  He gives a really hard class.  For the battement combination at the barre, he threw in pirouettes in between!  After lunch we had another go at the repertory piece and it's starting to come together.  We're almost done marking the whole piece, and then Kathy can fine tune.  We then had a lecture on arabesques, the different variations of them (Ceccheti, Vaganova, etc) and how to do them properly.  My final class of the day was a semi-private class with Danile.  I wanted to review ports de bras, but we did it by going over our variation, which has a lot of more complicated ports de bras.  It was a great review session.

Dinner tonight is at Beauregard's Thai Room, which is just in the next block from our hotel.  It's got a lovely patio and the food is inexpensive, light and really tasty.  I treated myself to some flan, which was creamy and delicious. 

Variation and Repertory

Today is the day we learn what we are performing on Friday.  Our variation is from Raymonda and we're working with Danile.  It's a really beautiful piece of music (by Glazunov) and a really neat piece with a lot of ports de bras to work on.  It's quite long too, so it'll be challenging to learn.  The repertory piece is the Act 2 waltz from Swan Lake!  Another beautiful piece of music and Kathy is teaching this, so we're guaranteed to have an amazing complicated pattern to remember.  The afternoon also offered jazz with Willie.  This is the third year he's taught jazz and it's always so much fun.  He has a great energy and great attitude.  He does start class with a bajillion sit ups, though.  As he's moving us through isolations of various body parts, he keeps reminding us that we are supposed to be dancing, even in a studio, we're not just saving it for a stage!  I did bow out of class early though, because I don't want to overtax myself.  Tonight is the trip to the dance store and I bought myself yet another leotard (which I really don't need).  We had dinner at Amici's, next to the store, and had wonderful pastas and salads. 

First day

Today we meet everyone at camp.  There's a lot of familiar faces, and many of them are people I'm following on Facebook, which is great because I feel like I have a small sense of them as people outside of dance.  There are some new folks too, including a girl from Sweden who takes class with Lars (who is not here, unfortunately), and one from London.  There aren't a lot of men this year, but one is a guy who rode his bicycle all the way from Colorado, taking ballet classes all the way over!!  I'm staying with level 3A since my calf strain prevented me from training fully prior to camp.  I'll also do beginning pointe for the same reason.  Kathy gives a great technical class, which is perfect for helping me get stronger.  After pointe, we have a body alignment class with Scott Putman.  I remember his technique class from last year was wonderful and he is showing us his Elemental Body Alignment system, which is meant to retrain our bodies to work better for all kinds of movement (he teaches golfers as well as dancers).  It's an amazing class and at the end of it my body feels totally pulled up and yet relaxed.  We have modern after, which is always so much fun!  Jill takes us through a few combinations that include contractions, falls and freer movements than we do in ballet.  Since she does both, she can help us understand how we need to alter our body to accommodate modern when it's so used to doing ballet. 

After class and showers, Patsy and I go with Sondra for a grocery run (you can never have enough water at dance camp).  We stop by and say hi to the others who headed to Urban Farmhouse for dinner with Kitty Felde.  It's about to close when we arrive, so we went to City Dog.  I had a Cincinnati chili dog and onion rings.  Excellent meaty food here, and totally hits the spot, plus TVs with shark week on and friendly service.  This is a nice, inexpensive find for us!

We have an early call tomorrow and it's our first full day.