Croissants, Sunshine, & Champagne
February 22 - March 8, 2026. Sunshine in Paris has meant spending as many of my evenings outside as I can! I’m lucky to be surrounded by good people to share this experience with, from croissant exams to Champagne field trips.
Me & Anya 💜
Sunny evenings mean heading to my friend’s rooftop!
The last couple of weeks have been busy with sunshine days calling me to be out and about, and my brain has been wrestling with what to write about. I’m so happy to be here. I’m so lucky to be here. At the same time, it’s so hard to know what’s happening in the world – the ever-growing list of evidence that the most powerful men in the world are sick, sick, corrupt, pedophilic, mysoginistic creatures. That an elementary school of little girls was just blown up. You already know how long the list could go on. It’s hard to know this is all happening, and then still take the small joys of bread baking and traveling seriously. Every day, my friends and I keep each other grateful by taking a moment to pause and appreciate the amazing situation which we find ourselves in. So those small moments of gratitude are what I’m going to talk about here. But it feels disingenuous to pretend that my mind feels okay, that it isn’t trying hard to shut down with every new headline. But, in an effort to stay positive, and share something happy, here are my happy thoughts:
This past week, we had another exam, this time on Pain au Chocolate and Croissants. Feels so whimsical to say such a thing! This exam was my favorite so far, because each of our mistakes provided some distinct change in product outcome. For example, my friend didn’t laminate the butter properly between the dough. Essentially, when you initially but butter in between your croissant dough, you don’t want the dough to overlap at all without butter in between it. It was initially hard to understand why that mattered so much, but this week, someone made their butter too short, and after three days of prep work, the pain au chocolate came out of the oven and you could see smooth spots across the top where there were no butter layers. For my own croissants and pain au chocolate, my dough came out of the dough-sheeter crooked. This means that when I went to cut the squares and triangles that would eventually become my buttery, crunchy products, the dough wasn’t the right size rectangle to get enough cuts out of it. To solve this, I tugged gently at the corners of the dough to stretch it. Well, it turns out that this creates thin spots in your dough. When my pain au chocolate came out of the oven, some were much, much smaller than the others. I weighed them, and some were only 60 grams while the others were 85 grams! Might sound silly, but that’s a huge difference! Imagine if you went to buy a sweet treat, and one was 30% smaller than another and they tried to sell you the little one for the same price. No way, not having it. Anyways, all that to say, we’re getting to a point now, after completing a month of baking (already?!!! Crazy!), where we can begin to truly understand how different steps of the production process impact the final products. When you combine all this experimentation with the classroom sessions we’ve had on things like flour, fermentation, and kneading techniques, the bakery is no longer feeling like this mysterious wonderland, but instead a place where I can look at something and understand what it took to make all those magical, buttery things.
Outside of class, I’m spending time with amazing people. I feel really blessed that my classmates and I hang out almost every single day. It’s not easy to find people who you’re happy to learn and work with for 8 hours, and then want to hang out even more with after, through dinner, until the sun goes down! And yet, I’ve been so lucky. Paris has shown us her lovely side with day after day of sunshine lately, so we bring our bread from class, along with hunks of butter and cold wine, to the park, or to my friend’s rooftop. From there, we watch the sun go down behind the city and “ooh” and “ahh” as the Eiffel Tower sparkles at the top of every hour in the evening. These are the happy moments where we either forget about the state of the world while we giggle with each other, or we acknowledge how lucky we are to eat hot bread, and spend each day in this glowy city.
Finally, the last highlight from the past two weeks was a fieldtrip to Champagne! All three international programs (bread baking, pastry, and culinary) boarded a double-decker bus at 6:30am on Friday morning to embark on the two hour journey to get to Champagne. There, we learned about the specific rules for the growing and harvesting of grapes that go into Champagne. We toured the factory at Nicolas Feuillate, and enjoyed a five-part Champagne tasting while overlooking the rolling hills covered in grape vines. Another day full of happy questions; “can you believe that we’re in Champagne… drinking Champagne?? How lucky are we?” I brought my speaker for the bus ride home, where we danced, chatted, and shared songs with one another. The French countryside rolled past us and our driver wound through the streets of tiny towns as we made our way home.
Unbelievable, really, that I’m living in France with Anya. I pass my nights with new friends. I get to eat great food, and drink good wine, and see beautiful things every day. I lay my head on a soft pillow at night, and leave Anya with a safe dog sitter every day. My biggest stress (outside of world news) is whether I’m shaping my dough quickly enough, and should I bike to school or walk? The blessings are abundant, and I hope sharing bits of my story helps to take your mind off everything else, even if just for a moment.
