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.

Fondant and Unleavened Bread

I was happy to be in class today but I felt really worn out for most of the day.  I had a terrible headache, plus we had a piping quiz - these two things do not equal happiness, trust me.  I feel okay about the piping practical, but not great.  My rose was good and so were my borders, but my writing needs a lot of work.  I suppose it's just one of those things that requires repetitive practice, but there are only so many times that you can practice writing, "Happy Birthday" in icing before you go insane.

Tomorrow we're using fondant for the first time and then it's on to our first stacked cake.  I've been searching online for ideas for the next few cakes (Hello Mr. Fondant...) and thought - hey, I should ask you!

So, dear blog readers - do you have any fun, funny and/or interesting ideas for a cake theme?  Just remember - keep it clean. I don't want to get kicked out of pastry school ;)

In other news, tonight is the first night of Passover - the feast of unleavened bread.  Otherwise known as the worst time in the world for me to be suddenly immersed in the production and eating of baked goods.  Dave and I had a small dinner at home tonight and tomorrow we'll be joining the Erich clan at our friend Josh's apartment for the second night seder.  I'm hoping that Josh will have a crown for whoever finds the afikomen first...afikomen - you are mine!

At least Dave will finally have the right holiday when he asks if we need to open the door for Elijah