Back at the beginning of March I made two beautiful masterpieces for a dinner party from Dessert FourPlay and then disappeared without a trace for the next month and a half. Now, at long last, I return, bearing no photos or recipes. I’m back, but for the moment I’m completely empty-handed.

So, what do I have to say for myself?

My devoted readers may recall, three months ago, I began working as an intern in the pastry kitchen of a big, fancy, highly-acclaimed Manhattan restaurant. For a while I sucessfully balanced my internship with class at the French Culinary Institute, some freelance projects, planning my wedding, and even some (paid!!!) shifts back at my beloved Brooklyn restaurant. Then, all of a sudden, I just couldn’t get it all done. The fun ingredient scavenger hunts became a drain, heck, standing on my two feet for one minute longer than necessary became a drain, and soon, I stopped cooking at home all together. Making fancy desserts at home was probably the last thing I wanted to be doing, given that I was spending most of my waking hours working in other peoples’ kitchens doing just that.

Now I’m back, baby!

I just finished my internship at the fancy Manhattan restaurant and I’m taking a week, or maybe two, to reflect on where I want to go next. I’m using my free time to get back into my own kitchen to work on some exciting projects, one of which is the resurrection of the Dessert FourPlay project.

We may have missed blogging through the best days of the citrus season, but I saw rhubarb at the Union Square Greenmarket last Saturday, a sign of good things soon to come. Making its debut in the spring, rhubarb is the gateway drug of our local produce, an amazing dessert component in and of itself, and a sign that soon enough we’ll be enjoying berries and stone fruits from farms upstate. Chef Johnny Iuzzini has it all covered, and I hope that you won’t miss a moment of the bounty.

Next up: Key Lime Parfait ~ Graham Cracker Sable

So I scored that internship at the fancy Manhattan restaurant (thank you to readers for your kind words via comments and email), and tomorrow I’ll be working my last shift in the Brooklyn kitchen where I’ve come to feel at home. The next three months will be filled with some very serious schooling that I hope will help me take my cooking to another level and expose me to techniques that I’ll never learn in school. As excited as I am about all of this, lately I’ve been feeling a bit glum about leaving Brooklyn behind, for two reasons: I’m going to miss the company of the chefs and cooks who gently mentored me and made work fun, and, most of all, I’ll miss the satisfaction that comes from creating something from start to finish. You see, for a pastry cook (or intern), the biggest difference between working at a high-quality, rustic style restaurant and working in high pressure, fine dining is that at the former you are involved in the entire plate – the cake, the ganache, the swoop of sauce, and the candied garnish that goes on top. In fine dining, where one plate may have 20 components, multiplied by the number of items on the menu, I may have my hands in a few tiny pieces of the finished product, but I’ll never be able to look at something and say “yeah, I made that.”

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