Beautiful Vegetables

In recent weeks, my knitting group and I have moved our venue from Panera to Whole Foods.  They have a pretty decent buffet style area, as well as a custom fresh pasta or slice of pizza area.  Anyway, this is not why I post.  I just love walking through their produce section. The colours are so beautiful and the arrangement is lovely.

I took a picture last night of the carrots (arranged in a towering circle) and the rainbow myriad of peppers.

Specialty Cakes: Grand Finale

Today was the pastry student's practical exam: One four-tiered wedding cake with decoration, and one anniversary cake with a bouquet of gumpaste flowers. Here is the wedding cake that Chef made as an example:

So, fondant, with more fondant roses and ribbons between the layers, and royal icing piped all over. We were allowed to pick our own design for the top tier, ribbon shapes, and colors, but everything else had to be like what's in the picture. This one is mine:


I was actually in a minority of students who chose to make their cakes white! But that's not too surprising, given how coloring your fondant makes it easier to cover any dark spots on your cake that are left after crumb icing it. Here is a feast of colorful cakes made by my classmates below...

Note especially:
1. The green cake with white roses. This girl did an amazing job keeping her fondant smooth and decorating her ribbons between layers, and the realistically-dark leaves look lovely against the minty background.
2. The pink and green cake with orange roses. Nobody thought it would end up looking nice, but I think it was the best in the class - and just look at that piping on the top tier!
3. Blue roses. Now, don't get me wrong - I HATE blue roses. They're unnatural abominations that will never befoul any cake of mine... or so I would have said until I saw this cake. It's a rare baker that can make blue roses look good, and this one did it. Incredible.
4. The last cake. I just love the multicolored roses on this one, and the tiny heart design on the top tier is soooo adorable!

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!

Remember those gumpaste flowers and anniversary cakes I mentioned waaaay up at the top? Only one tier, but much harder - because a) gumpaste is a bear to work with, and b) writing in royal icing. A few of us got it pretty well, though:



The first one is mine. Unlike the wedding cakes, which were put on display in the hall, these were packed up to send to a homeless shelter. We were allowed to keep our flowers, though - so I drew in some new ones, so whoever gets my cake has something prettier than a big blank space at the side.



So that's cakes. See you later, when I start my Plated Desserts class!

Modeling chocolate is kind of cool

More from the pastry student. This is the product of Friday's class. It's a Lutetia torte - so, a sponge cake with walnuts in it, filled with chocolate mousse and whipped cream.

Anyway, that rose on top is modeling chocolate, which is chocolate mixed with corn syrup until it takes on the consistency of a tootsie roll - very easy to make, but annoying to work with! There is a very narrow temperature range in which you can make a rose out of this stuff... too cold, and it cracks; too warm, and it's so sticky you'll tear the petals just by touching them.



At some point, I will take a series of photos documenting how to make a rose out of pastes like this, but I will have to remember to do it...

Enter the pastry student

Well, hi. First thing's first: I am not Jupe. I am Jupe's internet video game friend who happens to also be a foodie, and whom she has invited here to share the things I do in my labs at culinary school.

Here are the cakes I have made over the past couple of days.



That's what my chef called a crispy mocha torte - the cake itself is a pretty ordinary yellow sponge cake, but it's covered with mocha buttercream and has a crunchy layer of Japonaise (kind of like meringue, but with hazelnuts!) in between the two cake layers. The top is marzipan... someday I will make a post about marzipan, because that stuff is fun as hell once you get the hang of it! I ended today wishing I had the time and energy to just play with the stuff and see how many kinds of flowers I could make, but it was a busy class period.

There's more...


Flourless hazelnut torte! This was delicious, but I couldn't eat a whole slice - that praline glaze coating it is SWEET! I think if I make it again, there will be less mocha buttercream inside it and more dark chocolate ganache. With coffee. Damn. I wish I could have done that in class, it would have been amazing.

Anyway, there's the young upstart's introduction. Seeya folks.

Wintertime Chili

I must admit, when I first received this Wintertime Chili for Christmas last year, I was pretty skeptical.  Today, however, after having it in my cupboard for 11 months, I decided to gather the ingredients and make it.

Boy, am I ever glad. It was super duper tasty.

The recipe is ridiculously easy to make. All you need to know is how to chop an onion, cut up a pepper, chop a couple cloves of garlic, and brown some ground beef.

Oh, and how to turn your stove on and off and not use it at maximum.  You'd be surprised how many people can't do that.

I added extra chili powder, extra cayenne pepper, and some red chili pepper flakes because I used 19oz cans of beans instead of 15. The flavours were all there! Definitely a good meal.

I sliced up some flour tortillas to eat with the chili. Perfection.

Here's a picture:

Raisin Bread French Toast

This was a good idea, in theory.

In fact, this would have been an amazing idea in practice if I hadn't ruined my loaf of raisin bread.  I think my breadmaker hates me;  it over-rises white bread and under-rises raisin bread. 

It wasn't raisin bread; it was raisin cube that weighs 2 lbs.

But, being the trooper I am, I decided to try, anyway.

French toast mix recipe:

• 2 eggs
• 2/3 cup milk
• 1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 
• 6 slices raisin bread

The flavour was there but the consistency was like... spackle. Too bad.  If the bread was fluffy and had properly risen, then it would definitely have been delicious.  Here are some pictures:

Adventures in Cake Pops

I love to bake. I love to bake new things. I love cake. I love baking cake. I do not really like making cake pops, but they are -delicious-.

I bought a package of Wilton's orange candy melts with intent to make pumpkin cake pops to give to the kids around the neighbourhood that I know.  Sadly, I melted the candy at too high a temperature, and had no more orange chocolate.  Sadness.

So, Halloween came and Halloween went and in my freezer sat 50-some lonely, naked, freezing cake pops just begging to be dipped in delicious warm chocolate. What better way to end quickly?

I had a spare package of light cocoa candy melts in my drawer so I decided I'd give it a go again today.

This time, I used the stovetop instead of the microwave.  I heated it slowly, gradually. The chocolate was never too hot to touch.  When it was melted, I still found it too thick, so I added a bit of vegetable oil, a bit at a time, until it was the right consistency -- dippable.

Then, so began the dipping. We had a few casualties of war:

Poor bastards. I'll give them a good home, later.

But all in all, I finished a good solid, (but seriously fugly), chocolate cakepops.

They don't look like much, but they certainly are tasty.


Oh, and for those who are curious as to what I might've done with my ruined melted orange chocolate?

Chocolate flowers.  Hey, the Behemoth loves them.


Cake pops: let it be known! With time, I shall conquor you!