Our Own Little Hogwarts
Author Annie B. Milostan ’25 is a Baking and Pastry Arts major.
I am in my fourth semester here at the Culinary Institute of America and this is my first time competing in the Tri-Wizard event here on campus and I am super excited. When thinking about how to prepare for this event I asked one of my chefs how he would suggest I practice. He told me and my friend to come in every day at lunch to practice with him and get feedback.
Round one is gel piping a spell, peeling and dicing an apple 1/8 of an inch, and evenly cutting a cake into three layers, sounds easy enough, right? Not for me, my piping work is not the best and I struggle with cutting even layers in a cake. My chef and I talked about where I knew I would struggle so at lunch I would temper chocolate, and I practiced piping the whole first day at lunchtime. On the second day, I made some improvements, so I moved on to dicing an apple. I worked on a few different sizes, and I felt pretty good about that part of the competition. Then cake cutting the following day, oh boy was this hard for me, but by the last cake I finally got it right! For the rest of the afternoon, I went back to piping different spells from Harry Potter—just to get familiar with them.
The day of the competition my best friend and I got in line at 6:30 a.m. for check in, where we got our numbers and were told where to wait. At 8, we lined up for the baking and pastry portion of round one—there were roughly 30 students to go through the three tasks in three minutes or less. My friend was six people ahead of me in line and it was truly special to cheer her on during her turn. During my turn, I looked up at the balcony where students, family, and friends lit up the room with their cheers! It filled my heart that they showed up to support us at 8:30 in the morning when we don’t have class.
Once we finished our rounds, we went back to cheer on the culinary students who were still competing. After a few hours and everyone was done, we waited for what felt like forever. Then came time for the sorting of the houses, you patiently waited for your name to be called into one of the three houses. Round two consists of 30 baking and pastry students and 60 culinary students.
Unfortunately, I didn’t make it, but my best friend came third out of all of the baking and pastry students and I couldn’t be happier. Being a part of this school tradition was unmatched in so many ways!
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