The scheduling (also called workflow chart), is the very first step of the practical CAP pastry exam. It lasts a maximum of 30 minutes and is designed to validate your organizational capacity. It's a sort of planning of your day. Depending on the examination center, you may be allowed to leave before the 30 minutes are up or not. Some people find it super easy and others never quite get the hang of it (a matter of personality I suppose). I propose to help you understand how to create a scheduling.

What is a scheduling?

Let's start with a little analogy, if you have children this should resonate with you. Let's say you had to pick up the youngest from daycare at 4pm, take them to the nanny and pick up the oldest at 5pm to be at 6pm at drinks with girlfriends. Impossible to pick everyone up, be on time everywhere and plus do your yoga session…

Unless you approach the problem differently and look at things that can be broken down into pieces. For example you can fit the meditation session in the car while waiting for the oldest and the poses at home just before meeting up with the girlfriends. And boom, it all fits! Simple right?

Scheduling is the art of breaking down preparations to intelligently interleave them to optimize your time (and you'll see, everything fits, really!). You will be graded on your ability to evaluate the time of each preparation, your organization and the cleanliness of your work. Use your ruler for lines, avoid scratching out and submit a document that is as readable as possible. It's an opportunity to score points right from the start of the exam and to make a good impression.

How to create a scheduling?

There is no right answer, you could have a completely different organization from your neighbor and you would both be right. What matters is having a coherent organization.

Here are some principles that can help you organize yourself. First of all, know for example that very good students generally manage to schedule all the preparations before lunch and reserve the afternoon for assembly, finishing touches and decoration. It's not necessarily a goal in itself, it's better to plan a little wide and stay on schedule rather than wanting to go too fast. But it's good to know for comparison.

Presentation of the scheduling: starting your exam right!

Remember that creating a scheduling is not just a document to submit to be graded, it's mainly a personal plan for organizing your day. It must frame your exam, give you time reference points and prove to the jury that you know what you're doing (by anticipating cooking times, setting times, resting times… and not just improvising).

Basically, it's the best way to efficiently start the exam and condition your success (the first 3 hours are decisive for what follows). And between us, scheduling is so practical for organizing that I always do one at home when I have big family celebrations to prepare.

Take exam conditions into account

Two other points I'd like to clarify before we get into the heart of the matter. You will take your exam in a professional lab. That means you will lose all your bearings and will therefore take more time to… everything really! Finding equipment, ingredients, knowing which room the oven is in, the blast chiller…

But it also means you'll have access to professional equipment that will save you time. The proofer for example will make your pain au chocolat and croissants rise in an hour and the blast chiller will allow you to cool pastry cream in 5 minutes and an entremet in 1 hour… Amazing right? However overall, it seems to me we lose more time than we gain. Also be careful not to be fooled by the blast chiller which freezes very, very quickly (risk of ending up with a brick where you simply wanted to cool things down a bit).

My scheduling organization tips

You probably know it, at the exam you will have 4 preparations of this type to produce:

Tart – Entremet – Choux pastry or puff pastry – Leavened dough (sometimes there is no puff pastry but it's very rare)

To begin, you need to analyze each preparation to see what points will require time: is there a need for proofing time? cooling? fairly long assembly? cream that needs to rest? Just like I mentioned in the article on how to read a recipe sheet properly, you need to take a step back to read between the lines and not go in headfirst (and end up hitting a wall).

Schedule first these preparations that require proofing time: brioche or laminated puff pastry. They require a bit of time at the beginning but once started there's not much more to do besides wait (which will allow you to work on something else). Next I advise you to focus on choux pastry or puff pastry.

Choux pastry is a bit delicate and it's better to get it done fairly quickly (and possibly have time to redo it. Plus the cooking is quite "touchy" (35-40 minutes) and it mustn't collapse during the meal. In fact in some centers, the baking time for choux pastry is mandatory. It's a bit constraining but it has the merit of preventing another student from opening the oven while your choux are cooking to put something else in.

Puff pastry requires attention occasionally but regularly during lamination. So you really need to make them top priority (but not before the proofing because it's still quicker). Of course it's not about making brioche first and then puff pastry but breaking down recipes into steps and interleaving them.

The tart is in my opinion the most flexible preparation (since it doesn't require proofing and needs little cooling). I would use it to fill all the little half-hour gaps in my schedule. The entremet (depending on the type) will require many small preparations at the beginning but especially a lot of assembly work at the end (which is perfect when your brioche and chocolate croissants are baked). Save it for late morning at best (early afternoon if not possible).

Also note, you must not have any cooking in progress during the meal. Ideally all your cooking should be finished before. Be careful, the time slot after the meal goes very, VERY quickly.

Again, this is my way of proceeding and you will find other organizations elsewhere that will be just as correct. They are simply tips to guide you if you have no idea where to start. Feel free to share your tricks in the comments by the way.

And so concretely we're going to give you the following blank document to fill in.

The scheduling legend

You will need to start by writing the legend in a corner (neatly!). We use 4 colors that correspond to 4 types of steps

• preparation
• cooling
• proofing (apparently always plural as it groups bench rest + final proof)
• cooking

This avoids having to specify what it's about at each step, so don't put it on the schedule. Simply indicate which part of the preparation it is if necessary.

Traditionally preparation is indicated in black, cooling in blue, proofing in green and cooking in red (I don't know if it's a convention or just a habit). We put arrows on the steps that indicate a duration: cooling, proofing and cooking (and not preparation since it's a set of steps and not a step that takes time).

To start, we write the time taken to create the scheduling, the time that corresponds to each time slot (in the left column) and the meal time (mentioned by the jury). We don't indicate the 2 question sessions of 15 minutes that will be asked of you (as the timing is at the jury's discretion).

Then, after analyzing the recipe sheet, we report the terms of each preparation following the advice I gave you above. Be careful not to overlap two "preparation" steps (in theory you only have two hands). However, no problem overlapping "cooling" "proofing" or "cooking" as these are steps that don't require your intervention. Make sure you don't leave any downtime (there's always something to do!) and that you don't forget any steps.

I took a random subject (number 1 from 2016). It's not the most representative of the exam because it's rare that there's neither PF nor PLF (which explains why I managed to schedule everything before the lunch break) but it will give you a good overview:

Don't hesitate to post your questions or remarks in the comments!