Going Pro: Our Food Editor Gets a Taste of What It's Like to Be a Chef

Summary

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CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- "I'm starting to think that being a pastry chef is all about covering your mistakes," confided Debbie Moose, a North Carolina cookbook author and newspaper columnist.

She and I were cooking together in a culinary-school crash course of sorts at Johnson & Wales University. We were putting the finishing touches to our Banoffi Pie-- a sweet-tart crust layered with caramel, bananas, pastry cream and topped with coffee-flavored whipped cream.

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Extract

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Going Pro: Our Food Editor Gets a Taste of What It's Like to Be a Chef

It's easy to see how Moose got that impression. Our instructor, John Maas, had helped us glue together a broken piece of pastry with a dab of caramel, telling us, "No one will see it."

When my banana halves weren't curved perfectly into the tart pan, everyone reassured me it was no problem; we soon buried them in pastry cream. And when we got a little carried away while piping the whipped cream, we camouflaged that with a liberal sprinkling of chocolate curls....

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