Babka Till You Dropka

I'd like to start off by saying that I had no idea, that I still knew the lyrics to this song, but after a classmate of mine (Hi J!) asked if anyone could remember who sang it (Skee-Lo, by the way), I was able to make my way through at least the first two verses.  Oh mid 90's rap...also, did you know that Skee-Lo is from Poughkeepsie, NY?  That just seems illogical to me.

Unfortunately, due to crazy storm activity this past weekend, Julie got stuck in Maryland an extra night and had to miss class on Monday.  Breads is actually not a terrible time to have to work alone because it's a lot of "hurry up and wait".  Hurry up to get the dough together, and then wait to let it rise, etc, so I did okay.  This is why I love my classmates though - they look out for you!  All day long on Monday, people kept checking in with me to see if I needed any help, if I was still mise en placing while they were already mixing, they'd offer to get my dough started for me.  Let's face it, I'm a lucky girl to go to school with such awesome people.  On a funnier note, Chef Katie was demoing (showing us how to shape/prep each bread) with my doughs all day (since I had extra with Julie not being there), and she was telling us about one of the doughs when all of the sudden I felt someone hit me square on the back and instinctively I yelled out in the otherwise quiet kitchen.  Apparently there was a giant bug on my back, and one of my classmates decided to kill it/swat it away without giving me a heads up because A. she didn't want to interrupt the lesson and B. she didn't think I'd yell, lol.  Highly amusing - she's still tell me that she saved my life, lucky me (haha).

Sun-dried tomato on the left, Garlic-herb on the right

Awesome bakers carry their breads in LionBrand Yarn Bags

We also made delicious foccacia bread.  The recipe was actually for olive foccacia bread, but since I was alone that day and neither Dave or I are olive fans, Chef Katie said that I didn't have to add them.  So instead, I soaked a bunch of fresh rosemary in olive oil, and then brushed it across the top before baking.  Delicious!

Today we were working with rich doughs, kugelhopf, babka and stollen.  Kugelhopf (don't hassle the hoff!!) is a ring-shaped bread that's usually attributed to Germany and Austrian origins.  It, like many of the other breads made today, contains raisins (much to Dave's chagrin), and before you put the dough in the pan you brush the entire pan with melted butter and covered sliced almonds.  That way when the dough rises while baking, the entire outside and inside rings, as well as the bottom will be covered with almonds - yum!

Ring, Ring...Hopf phone!

As tasty as babka is - I'm going to admit it, I hated making the sweet dough that's used to make babka and stollen today.  It was highly frustrating, and it took us all day to make 2 breads!!  That's just crazy-talk. We made a traditional Eastern-European Jewish version of the babka - a few raisins, but mostly chocolate filling.  We brushed the dough with butter, sprinkled it with the chocolate, cinnamon-sugar and then streusel.  Then, we rolled up the dough and shaped it into rings, brushed with more butter (yum!) and streusel.  Like I said, they're a pain, but sooooo worth it.

Deliciousness

Then we made stollen, which just seems like a weird bread to me.  It's a traditional German Christmas cake that's generously filled with raisins and glaceed fruit.  It just keeps reminding me of my Mom making 5 bajillion fruitcakes every winter, all the while insisting that her fruitcakes are awesome, unlike all the others.  I'm sure she's reading this now, saying, "but they are great!" (Love you Mom!)  I just can't get into the glaceed fruit, it just keeps making me think of Jim Gaffigan's stance on fruitcake.  Fruit = good, Cake = great, fruitcake = nasty crap (skip ahead to minute 4:18).  The way it's shaped and panned also looks kind of funny to me - doesn't it kind of look like a mouth to you?  Crazy stollen...

At least the day is over.  This weekend was fun though, Dave and I had our friends Josh and Rachel over this past Sunday for a super-tasty, homemade brunch.  We were going to go out, but then I realized, "Hey, I have tons of stuff that I made in class, why go out when we can eat, drink and play ridiculous games at home?"  Why indeed!  We had some insanely delicious pecan sticky buns, that I reheated in the oven and drizzled a little flat icing over

pre-icing

Then I made a really tasty quiche with gruyere cheese and carmelized onions, while Dave made french toast with my leftover cinnamon-raisin bread and grilled up some turkey sausages.  All-in-all, a pretty great way to spend a Sunday. 

Plus, Dave and I found out that, apparently, we're known to Rachel's parents as "team cupcake".  I don't know what's funnier, being known as team cupcake, or seeing Dave's reaction to being called team cupcake.

Goodnight friends!

I Wonder if Danish Dough Has Ever Been Used as a Weapon...

The last couple of days have been interesting.  We had a day of rich doughs (challah, brioche and egg rolls) on Tuesday.  Then, on Wednesday, Chef Katie had to stay home to take care of her sick little boy so we had a substitute instructor.  This is one of the main reasons why things were so crazy on Wednesday, but more on that later.

Challah (holla)!  I love challah so much...it's the only food that's served at dress-up dinners that is acceptable to literally rip apart with your hands...in front of your Grandmother!  That's an awesome food.  It's funny, I don't think I've actually made challah since I was in religious school, so this was still kind of new for me - and a lot of fun.  Julie and I made our tasty-delicious dough, split it in half and braided it up.  As you can see, Julie is a much better at making braids than I am (she's probably better at braiding hair too, sigh).

Unbaked Loves of Challah

So after braiding the loaves and letting them spend a little quality time in the proof box (side note: why don't I have a proof box? Oh right, it's called my apartment in the summer...), we brushed them with an egg wash, stuck them in the oven and let the magic happen.

Don't they look awesome?  I'm savings ours for Friday night so that the ripping apart can take place at the traditional time

While our challah was proofing, we got to work on making our brioche dough.  Brioche is crazy delicious, really rich and buttery bread.  It's usually baked in fluted cups (appropriate called, "brioche molds"), which I actually have a couple of - I'll definitely have to play around with those on y own some time.  Brioche is usually either made in a basic round shape, or you can make what is called a brioche a tete.  The way you make brioche a tete, is by taking some of your dough, roll it into a ball and then make a small well in the middle.  Then you take another small piece of dough, round it, and place it in the well.   Unfortunately, I think we a. used too much dough at one time when making the brioche a tete and b. didn't affix them correctly because we wound up with some pretty deformed looking brioche.

Sad, lopsided brioche head...

Did you know that the phrase uttered by Marie Antoinette was actually "let them eat brioche" and not "let them eat cake?" Qu'ils mangent de la brioche. You learn something new every day...

Now to Wednesday.  As I mentioned previously, Chef Katie had to take the day off, so we had a substitute teacher that has actually subbed for her twice before.  He is a really nice guy, and a talented chef, but his teaching style is drastically different from Chef Katie's.  He's more quiet, and will occasionally walk around and maybe talk to a couple of people without addressing the group as a whole.  On the other hand, Chef Katie is loud, exuberant, demos everything and is easily accessible by yelling, "Chef!" across the kitchen.  Now, yes, it's not really fair because we're used to her and not him, and it's probably hard coming into a kitchen where you don't have a comfort-zone with everyone, but our work day was very difficult.  To start with, 5 people wound up not coming in that day.  I'm sure that most of them have valid reasons, but 5 is a lot when there are only 19 people in the class.  Plus, unfortunately, two of the people out were one whole team - our table partners this week.  Also, Wednesday was pretty much a day of prep work, meaning that we weren't baking much, but making a lot of things for the next day.  Julie and I had just mise en placed (everything in it's place!) our first dough, when I looked at her and said, "What are they going to do tomorrow without any dough??"  That's when we decided to try and make enough dough for both ourselves and them.  It definitely made the day more interesting and a little more stressful (you have to roll out and fold croissant and danish dough several times, resting it for half-an-hour in between each turn), I'm glad that we did it.  There's too much random drama in our kitchen to begin with and it feels really good to do something nice for someone else.  So even though Wednesday was a total cranky-pants day, it was really rewarding to see how relieved our friends were to find out that they had dough to work with today.  Plus, I think they would've done it for us if both Julie and I had been out on the same day.  In Chef Katie's immortal words, "You guys....you know...it's just that people suck...and it's really nice when people don't suck."

Words to live by.

Danish dough wore Mark out so much, he had no choice but to use it as a pillow

So, without further ado - here's the reason why you're really here...pictures of pastry!  As annoying as the dough was to make, I'm really happy with how our croissant and danish turned out.  Brunch at our house is going to rock your socks off!  Everyone's invited:

These are my flaky croissants and chocolate envelope croissants

Pinwheel, Vol-au-vant and Envelope Danishes

Mini Cinnamon-Twist Danishes - since they're tiny and bite-sized, by law can they be considered petit-fours? I'll have to confer with Chef Katie tomorrow...

So that's it...we're doing enriched doughs tomorrow.  I can't wait till next Thursday and Friday when we're making bagels - I may no longer be at the mercy of Brooklyn Bagel!  That'll be the day...

I also have to come up with an international bread recipe to bring to class next week - any suggestions?

Have a good night everyone!

Love and danishes,

Brooke

Bread and Bad Jokes

I am exhausted!!

As much as I enjoy it, it's not easy running around a kitchen for 5 hours and then going to work every day.  I have about half-an-hour between when I get home from school and when I have to leave to walk to work, and every day I say to myself, "Why can't I just stay home and take a nap?!"

Breads are in full-swing right now at school.  Today alone we made loaves of ciabatta, foccacia, fougasse and then each team made a pizza that we shared with the culinary kids for lunch - it's all so good!!  Ciabatta, literally translated from Italian means, "carpet slipper" because that's what it supposedly looks like - a slipper.  It's more of a slack dough, and you actually dust it with extra flour right before sticking it in the oven - weird!  Our foccacia came out fine, if a little flat.  Plus, I think that we wrapped it too soon when leaving class because my half was a little soggy when I unwrapped it at home.  Oh well.

The fougasse is actually pretty cool.  When you break it down - it's basically the same dough that's used to make baguettes, just shaped very differently.  While baguettes are rolled into long loaves with tapered ends, fougasse loaves are much wider and most resemble a cross between an oval and a rectangle.  What makes them really interesting though, is the way you cut them.  Most low-fat breads are scored in some fashion, using a lame (pronounced, "la-may"), to release steam while baking.  However, with the fougasse you actually slice the bread straight through several times, with the classic pattern resembling a stalk of wheat carved into the bread.

Lame's are tricky little buggers.  They're incredibly sharp, and you have to be very careful while taking off the blade protector or you'll slice your finger open - and it will not be pretty.  I'm desperate to avoid being the person to cut themselves with the lame (Brooke Safety!), maybe I should start wearing hockey gloves during the bread module to protect myself.  Sounds like a winning idea to me.

Tomorrow we're going to be working with more rich-doughs, like brioche, butter rolls and challah - holla!  Am I too white to get away with saying that, or just white enough?  I can never tell with these things.  Needless to say, Dave is readying his stomach for challah-goodness.

So while we were in class the other day, Chef Katie mentioned in passing, a "baguette" joke that seems to only be funny to her.  After much cajoling, we got her to share this joke with us.  Now before I share it with you, I have to tell you that this experience reminded me of two people - my friend Monica and my former coworker Meghan.   Monica - because it's such a ridiculous joke, that I could see her telling it.  After all, my favorite Monica joke is, "What do you call Cheese that doesn't belong to you?" Answer? Nacho Cheese!  It's all in the delivery folks.  And it reminds me of Meghan because, while Chef Katie was telling us this joke, she couldn't stop laughing.  Like serious laughing.  Laughing so much that her voice became a whisper and she was shaking and at one point, she started snorting.  Meghan is the queen of the snort-laugh.  We used to always see if we could get her to laugh to the point she would start snorting - definitely breaks up a long day at work (Hi Meg!)

So without further ado, the joke that only my teacher finds hilarious:

So this guy goes to see his doctor, and he says, "Doc, I've been having these really bad stomach pains, what do you think I should do?"  The Doctor tells him that he thinks he has a tapeworm, and that for the next 3 days, every morning he should bend over, and using a hammer to push, stick an avocado and then a baguette up his bum.  The guy seems skeptical, but the Doctor assures him that this is the right course of action to get rid of the tapeworm.  So Every day, for the next 3 days, the man bends over and hammers an avocado and a baguette up his behind.  After the third day, he's so uncomfortable that he calls his doctor saying, "I don't know what to do - this isn't working at all, in fact, I'm in more pain than I was before!"  The doctor listens to this and says, "Okay, tomorrow, instead of using an avocado and a baguette, just use an avocado."  The man agrees to this change and so the following morning, he braces himself and sticks an avocado up there and waits.  About a minute later, the tapeworm pokes itself out and says, "What, no baguette?!"

Baking and Flight of the Conchords - a Mini Entry

I totally forgot to mention that when we were making the baguettes in class on Thursday, that I kept singing this song to myself

Ho ho ho, Baguette!

Cakes, Breads and Test Review, Oh My!

The last couple of days have been action-packed.  We finished our cake practical, sat for our written exam and had our first day of breads.

Tuesday was the second (and supposed to be last) day of our cake practical.  As I mentioned before, after pulling slips of paper out of the magical ramekin of doom, I was assigned to make a happy birthday cake for a woman that had a vanilla high-ratio cake base with french buttercream frosting.

Boo french buttercream!!

I think that we should start responding to the mention of french buttercream the same way that we respond to someone saying the name "Haman" during the story of Purim (booing like there's no tomorrow).  Let's test it out, shall we?

French Buttercream...

Boooooo!!!!!!!!

Good, glad we've sorted that out.

So yes, I set about to finish my cake practical, which I dedicated to my friend Becky, when all of the sudden our instructor came in and asked how many of us didn't think that we'd be able to finish by the end of the day.  I was a little surprised, and even more surprised to see that so many of my classmates were raising their hands.  So, Chef Katie changed things up.  She said that if we couldn't finish by end-of-day Tuesday, that we'd have until 10am Wednesday morning to present our cake to her, and that she was going to do away with having us do another piping skills quiz.  Luckily I was still on schedule to finish on Tuesday, even with some minor setbacks (i.e. some of my pieces of fondant dried out too much and broke during assembly).  In the end I'm glad that everyone was given the chance to finish their cakes properly, and luckily for me, I got an extra hour-and-a-half on Wednesday morning to study for our exam while most of the class was finishing their cakes!

Here is a picture of my final cake:

Birthday Mixtape!

Didn't it come out cute?  My instructor love love loved it too, which of course makes me a very happy girl.  She said that she liked my execution, that I think outside of the box and that I worked well with the french buttercream...

Boooooooooooooooo!!!!

Ahem...so yes.  She really liked it and told me that she really wants to place me in an internship at a cake place - hooray!  This is a picture of one of my classmates' cakes that I really liked as well:

Mr. Met!!

Wednesday morning was spent doing last minute studying and getting mocked incessantly for my notecards.  Not the fact that I had them, but because some of them were so hard, no one knew what the answers were.  In my own defense - I'd made notecards from our test review and from any notes that I had, and then I went through the chapters in our book, and if something looked like it might be important - I wrote it down.  I mean who knows!  Chef Katie could've put a question on the test about the flour-batter mixing method, even though we'd never done a recipe that included it....it never hurts to be prepared my friends.  But anyway, yes, there was a lot of joking around and teasing, but I'm glad that I had some people to do a review with - it definitely helped me out.  Amusingly enough - one of my classmates was so frustrated by some of my notecards that she issued a challenge to our teacher - if she could stump her with any of my notecards, we should get extra credit - and she accepted!  We got to ask her 5 questions, and if she couldn't answer any of them, we'd get extra credit on the test and we actually managed to get 3 1/2 extra points out of that - hooray for my ridiculous notecards!!

After the test we went into the breads lecture and then Thursday we had our first day in the kitchen for breads.  Making bread is such a welcome relief after the madness that was cakes.  Chef Katie told us that bread bakers are pretty weird because they (as a professional hazard) wind up spending most of their nights alone kneading and proofing breads.  Still, I think breads are pretty awesome.  We made French baguettes, a couple round loaves of Italian bread and some smaller batards of whole wheat bread.

Me with a French mustache

Silly Brooke, baguettes are for eating - not for mustaches!

Breads = fun!  And we got some of our grades for the cake module already!  Julie and I got a 92.5 on our wedding cake project and I got a 96 on both my cake practical and the cake exam.  So, even though there are a couple of things still to be factored into our final grade for cakes, I probably won't achieve the 97 I'd been shooting for, I'm still pretty happy.  After all, and A is still an A.

Have a great weekend!

Fondant Hand and Cake Practical Day 1

So I've come up with a new hobby/occupation induced malady - fondant hand.  What is fondant hand you ask?  It's like tennis elbow, but it happens when your hand cramps up after kneading fondant for too long.  It can also occur when the gloves you're wearing (while kneading fondant) get a hole in them, leaving your hand covered in black food coloring, which you don't notice until much later.  *Sigh*  When I have my own bakery, I'll have people to knead the fondant for me, and I'll be able to buy it pre-colored to start off with.  Down with fondant hand!!

So today was day 1 of our 2 day cake practical.  I got a lot of good requests for honorary birthday cake status, but I could only pick one person, and that person is

*drumroll*

Becky Marinoff!

Becky sent me a very convincing 4-point e-mail detailing why she should get a fake birthday cake made for her.  Her e-mail is as follows:

In 3 months (thats 30 days x 3) I am turning 30 so I definitely think I should have the fake birthday cake made in my honor!

Reason #1:This is a big birthday for me, and everyone else having a birthday soon is not turning 30 (except Joel and you'd much rather make a cake for me than for Joel)

Reason #2: I have fun interests and this can all be expressed in cake

Reason #3: I have been all kinds of stressed out lately and this would be a pick me up

Reason #4: Isn't 3 reasons enough?
 
Love,
 
Becky
 
Enough indeed!  I came up with, what I think, is a very fun idea for Becky's early 30th birthday cake - pictures to follow.  Becky, unfortunately I have to go straight to work after class on Tuesday, but if you can wait till Wednesday, I will hand deliver the cake to you after class.

Have a great day everyone!!

Cakes, Cakes and....More Freaking Cakes

What a week!!  This post is going to be very picture heavy - I just want to warn you in advance.  Be prepared to experience uncontrollable feelings of desire for pastry...don't say I didn't warn you...

Each team had 3 days to work on and complete a wedding cake that had to be at least 3 tiers high.  Also, you didn't get to choose your own cake base/icing, you had to pick it out of a ramekin (Chef Katie's project receptacle of choice).  Julie and I wound up with chocolate cake with ganache icing.  Not what I would've picked to work with, but it's good practice.

Day 1, Wednesday, was mostly spent doing a lot of prep work.  We'd already decided to do a 4 tier cake, but wound up with so much batter that we had enough to make an extra cake, thus making us the only team to make a 5 tier cake.  We used a high-ratio chocolate cake recipe that has the benefit of being very tasty as well as making really tall, awesome looking cakes (in baking, just like in life - height is prized...sad little short chef...).  Our tiers were 4, 6, 8, 10 and 12" in diameter.  They don't have 4 or 12" pans, so we wound up baking several layers in half-sheet pans to make the 12" (aka: Big Bessie) and cut down a 6" to make the top tier (aka: Tiny Tim).

We also made a ridiculous amount of chocolate buttercream icing (and by "ridiculous", I of course mean 3.5 batches).  Unfortunately, this also happened to be during the freak heat wave we've been experiencing here in New York.  Do you have any idea how disgusting it is to be in a kitchen with at least 7 ovens on when it's already 95 degrees outside?  I thought I was going to pass out!  I also think that if they don't already, that deodorant manufacturers should test their products in kitchens during the summer time (raise your hand if you're sure!)

On Day 2 (Thursday), we torted and filled our cakes and started making our chocolate ganache.  Thursday was not my friend.  I got really stressed out and started to worry that we'd never finish.  I could tell that my "serious face" was starting to get to Julie too.  Unfortunately I can't really control it, and I try to not let it get in the way of what we're doing, sometimes I just get super-stressed.  I love cakes because I find them so challenging, and this was definitely a challenge.  We managed to cover one of the cakes with the ganache and put the rest of our crumb-coated cakes in the fridge till the next day.

Me modeling the outside cake round from Julie carving down the 4"

cake (p.s. check out my serrated knife, mid torte!)

Isn't it fabulous?  Julie's line of baked jewelry launches this fall!

Final day (Friday)!  Julie proceeded to cover the rest of the cakes with the ganache while I piped out the small and detailed pieces for the front of our cake.  It took awhile and a lot of work, but we finally finished!  It didn't come out exactly the way I wanted it to, but I'm still proud of the work that we did together. 

Julie & I with our finished product

Unfortunately, now when I look at it, all I can think about is that it looks like a cake made for leprechauns.  Maybe I can get a good gig on the Irish wedding circuit ;)

Now I want to share with you some pictures of my fellow classmates work!  They all did such an amazing job, and I'm highly impressed with their creativity and attention to detail.  I was taking pictures of one of their cakes when my friend casually asked me if I was going to post it on my blog - I'm famous! lol

Cherry Blossom Cake!

You should have seen how much time they spent on those flowers - aren't they awesome?

Vegas-themed, topsy-turvy "divorce" cake - I'm still in awe

The other team that had a ganache cake, such a beautiful design, don't you think? (Hi ladies!)

Pretty peach cake with flowers and butterflies

Alice in Wonderland themed cake!  Look at all of the details!

Love love love the cheshire cat!

Who Framed Roger Rabbit Cake - there are no words for how amazing this cake is

Our table partner's beautiful mosaic cake

Look at all of those little tiles!

Cute turquoise, pillow-like fondant cake

Phew!!  We're finally done!!  Today was definitely a day when all I wanted to was have a stiff drink after class, NOT go to work.  Damn you responsibilities!  Monday and Tuesday of next we will have our practical exam for cakes (already!), then will sit for our written exam on Wednesday before going into the introductory lecture for the breads module.  We picked from the ramekin of doom to select the cake we'll have to make for our practical and I wound up with high-ratio cake (yes!), french buttercream (no!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) and the theme, "woman's birthday."  I hate the french buttercream.  It should die a slow, fiery death and then be pushed off of a cliff....and then spat on!  Sorry...that got out of hand....moving on now...if anyone wants to have a fake birthday cake made in their honor - make your case!  I'm looking for someone to base my cake on :)

It wouldn't be a stressful couple of days without some classroom drama.  The funny thing is that most of us get along so well, there's just a couple of people who muck it up!  BB has been getting into situations with someone every single day, it's almost shocking the way that she can't go one day without having someone get frustrated with her.  She refuses to do her weekly clean-up chore at the end of the day and is just generally a trouble-maker.  What's especially interesting, is that after much prompting from the rest of the class, Chef Katie has decided to put ML and BB's partners on a separate team together, which obviously means that now ML and BB will be partners!  This should be interesting to watch...I'm definitely happy for their now former partners, who will finally have the ability to fully participate in class without being terrorized.  Also, I'll be curious to see how ML and BB wind up working together.  They're, unsurprisingly, already class friends, but I wonder how they'll deal with each of them trying to dominate the other...should be interesting.

Oh!  I don't know if you remember my post from March 29th, but we got the results from our piping quiz the other day!  It was a rough quiz, most people didn't even finish it.  Chef Katie told us that the scores were out of 10, that we could all use some work, and that the same quiz would also be part of our practical next which means more practicing.  I feel like my writing still needs a lot of work, but I was very happily surprised to see that I got a 9.5 out of 10!  

I'll be working on my piped writing over the next couple of days and planning out my birthday cake practical - have a great  weekend everyone!!

For the Love of Bread

Reunited and it feels so good
Reunited 'cause we understood
There's one perfect fit and, sugar, this one is it
We both are so excited 'cause we are reunited...

Is it wrong that I started singing this song to my dinner (lasagna, garlic bread & salad) when the delivery guy from Gino's dropped it off?

Oh bread...you are my dark mistress...

So yes, Passover has ended and my separation from leavened products is now behind me.  Just in time too - we made petit fours and macaroons today and we start our wedding cake projects tomorrow!  You know, it's not easy to pick your initial post-Passover meal.  Just ask my classmates, I polled many of them to get their opinion on what I should order for dinner tonight.  I also joked with Dave that when he comes home tonight, he may find me passed out on the couch, hugging a loaf of bread with crumbs everywhere.  Was that creepy?  Too far?  I never can tell these days.

So yes!  Petit fours!  Adorable, tiny cakes that are highly annoying to assemble.  As teams we prepared an almond sponge (the same base that's used to make rainbow cookies), cut it into thirds and stacked the layers with raspberry jam and stuck them in the fridge to be weighted down overnight.  Then this morning, we spread a layer of buttercream on top, followed by a layer of rolled fondant.  Then we had to cut them into 1" squares.  Do you have any idea how small that is?  It's crazy!  After that, we had to ladle poured fondant over the squares to cover them evenly and this is the point where I started to lose my mind.  The petit fours are so small that pouring fondant over them is like an avalanche of snow coming down upon my Mom's cat, Libby(no animals were hurt or attacked with snow during the writing of this blog).  Plus, Julie's and my poured fondant was always too thick or too hot, and just plain difficult to work with.  I now completely understand why they're so expensive - not only are the ingredients pretty costly, but they take a long time to assemble completely.  In the end though, I'm pretty happy with how my petit fours came out, aren't they cute?

Here's a picture of the chocolate macaroons that Julie and I made, they are soooo good.  Unlike the kind of macaroons that I'm used to (hello Manischewitz!), they're not made with coconut; This automatically bumps them up in my book.  These ones were actually made with almond flour, which is essentially finely ground almonds.  Since we flavored ours with cocoa powder, we decided to sandwich them together with a little ganache (as opposed to raspberry/lemon jam or buttercream).  I twisted Dave's arm into trying one when I got home from school today and he said that it was like eating an all chocolate Oreo.  To me, the cookies are much softer than that, but there's no denying that they are super-chocolaty.

One of my classmates made a comment that they weren't exactly lo-cal, but Chef Katie came right back with, "You're never going to see a tombstone that says, 'I shouldn't have eaten that petit four.' It's going to say something like, 'I should've been nicer to my kids', or, 'I shouldn't have made that internet video, even though I was young and needed the money...'"  Ha! Basically - everything in moderation people!!  Pastries are too good not to enjoy every so often, just don't eat them constantly and you'll be fine.

Like I mentioned earlier, our wedding cake project starts tomorrow.  It's kind of a practical-light.  Yes, we're graded on it, but not as critically as we will be on our module practicals next week.  Also, while the design for the cake will be our own, the cake base and icing are assigned to us randomly because we have to get used to having a client who may not have the same cake/icing preferences as you do.  Julie and I got chocolate cake with chocolate ganache.  This is exciting and nerve-wracking at the same time.  Exciting because I really do like the look and taste of a cake with a poured ganache finish, but I'm also pretty nervous, because you have to keep your crumb coat so clean and perfect, otherwise once your pour the ganache on, it'll show every imperfection or jagged edge underneath.  I think we've come up with a pretty cool design, and I'll be sure to post more about it as we work on it over the next 3 days.

Fondant and Passover Cakes, Plus Attack of the Killer Cupcake

Hi Everyone, I'm sorry that I haven't posted sooner, but the past couple of days have been very rough and emotional ones.  I'm not going to get into the why right now, but I'll tell you more about it in the coming week.  Right now I'm just going to try and concentrate on telling you about all of the things that I've wanted to share with you  in the past week, but haven't had the time to blog about.

As I mentioned on Monday, Passover started this week.  This has proven to be an exercise in extraordinary willpower for me, as more than ever before, I am surrounded by bread!  On Tuesday the Culinary students made a brunch buffet and I thought I was going to collapse.  There I was with my matzah, and all around me were bagels, french toast, foccacia, etc.  It was torturous.  It was also a really busy day (there wasn't a lot of time for a lunch break) so Chef Katie told everyone that if they wanted to grab a plate from the other kitchen and keep it under their work table till they could take a break, that they could.  Every time I stuck my head under my table to get something out of my toolbox, I got a big whiff and could barely pull myself back up again - it all smelled so good!  The only upside of this situation is that I had an ironclad excuse for leaving my finished products at the school.  After all, if I took each cake that I made home the only one who could eat them would be Dave, and even he can't eat that much cake.  I've already warned my classmates that if I seem really twitchy on Tuesday, it's because I know that I'm finally getting bread again later that night.

So Tuesday we got to work with fondant for the first time - tricky stuff!!  It's expensive and it dries out quickly, so you have to be very careful with how much you take out at a time, and how you use it.  You also have to smooth it out quickly over the top and sides of your cake or you'll risk wrinkles, folds or cracking.  I decided to try and color my fondant purple, but had a hard time getting it to mix completely.  This wound up being a blessing in disguise because I had this awesome swirl pattern going on.  I also had a lot of extra fondant, so I took my extra and added some more dye to it till I got it to be one uniform color and used it to make some extra decorations for the top of my cake.

Then on Wednesday, we started preparations for our first two-tier cake.  We had already baked off the cakes required earlier in the week, were starting to plan our designs and figuring out what kind of icings and fillings we were going to use.  Since Julie and I already had some leftover Swiss buttercream from the day before, we decided to make a double batch of that so that we would have as much extra icing as possible in case of accidents, mistakes and mishaps.  I have to say - I'm not really a fan of Swiss buttercream, it's too high-fat for me.  This kind of helped to keep me from eating any excess cake, but if it were a cake I was going to partake in, I'd definitely go with either simple or Italian buttercream - no question.

A lot of my classmates wound up going with Easter/spring themes for their cakes, which makes sense because then they could serve them at their celebrations on Easter Sunday.  When I came into class on Wednesday, I honestly wasn't sure what design I was going to use, but then something clicked in my brain and I came up with what, at least I think, is a hilariously ironic cake idea.  It's a Passover-themed cake that nobody who celebrates Passover can eat!  I carved the top layer into a bowl so that I could decorate it to look like a bowl of matzah ball soup, and then I tried to decorate the bottom layer to look like sheets of matzah.  It's far from perfect, but I think it's pretty cute, and it definitely got a lot of attention from my classmates and from the other students in the school.

carrot coins!

My favorite cake, made by one of my friends, was pirate-themed!  She made the bottom tier blue with piped star waves on the sides.  The top tier was kind of a chocolate brown, and then she made a little pirate out of molded fondant and a little spoked ship's wheel for him to steer with!  It was incredibly cute, I'll try and get a picture of it from her so that I can share it with all of you.

While we were working on Wednesday, my teacher came over to me, laughing and clutching a magazine.  She knows how much I love pie, and in the magazine there was an ad for the American Pie Council and the National Pie Championships that are taking place in Orlando, FL later this month.  I told her about how I'd really wanted to go and compete in the championships and she asked me why I wasn't going.  I explained that I didn't want to miss class and she immediately countered that I could miss a day or two to go.  Then I jokingly asked if she would pay to send me to Florida and she laughed saying that if she couldn't afford to go there that she couldn't afford to send me.  It kills me that I won't be able to be there.  I keep torturing myself with the knowledge that there's still time to sign-up to compete, but there's no use.  There's no way I'd be able to afford it, especially now that I'm only working part-time while in school.  I guess I'll just have to wait and then go to compete in the professional division someday.  The competition isn't going anywhere, right? *sigh*


I'm also eager to pick-up this toolkit from Wilton.   I was going to order it on Friday, but I wound up having to spend $100 on a new battery for my laptop (thanks Apple!), so that will have to wait a little bit as well.  But like the competition, that kit isn't going anywhere, and I can always get one in a few weeks.

I'm going to try and leave you on a more amusing note.  One of my classmates, who's a pretty fantastic person, has a drawing on her toolbox that she calls, "the killer cupcake."  She'd been having a rough couple of days, so I decided to surprise her with a little present:

A knitted killer cupcake!!!

Look at those fangs!  The dripping blood!  Honestly, I love it and may wind up making another one for myself.  But mostly I'm just glad that I was able to brighten my friend's day, plus I got one of her patented amazing hugs in return - definitely time well spent.