Holy crap is it ever hot! I left ten minutes late for school this morning because I didn’t want to move from in front of my fan. It registered at 34 degrees at lunchtime, a whopping 93 to you and me. The air conditioning at school, as well as most places in Paris, is pretty much non-existent. The temperature of the kitchen during pastry today was 38, or 100 to you and me, and we had no burners or oven on. I would love it to be 85 tomorrow. 85 would be wonderful.

So as a kind of artistic preparation for the upcoming chocolate and sugar sculptures, we made marzipan animals. They’re pretty dumb looking, and I was in no mood to work on them this afternoon, but we actually had a lot of fun. We were like a bunch of little kids, adding detail and accessories to our chicks and frogs. I can only hope that chocolate sculpture is this entertaining.