Say hello to my pretty loaf of cinnamon raisin bread. This loaf is one of several loaves that I personally made at the bakery last week and was so proud to bring home and paparazzi for you. It's nice eye candy, yes? Just wait until you see what's waiting inside.
It's impossible to eat just one slice, so I cut three to save some time. Don't you wish it was scratch and sniff?
This cinnamon raisin bread is great as is, but in case you're wondering what it might look like as French toast on lazy Sunday morning...
Syrup is optional. Scrabble is not. It's a Sunday tradition at our house.
Last Saturday's class was insanely busy, but I was really happy with how our cakes turned out. We baked two large sheet pan cakes, whipped up three different fillings to spread on them and rolled together a batch of puff pastry dough to slice up and bake off this coming weekend. The downside to this story is that all of said items are in the freezer until this weekend when we'll finish them up for presentation. Aka, I don't have much in the way of pictures. But I did snap one of our work chilling in the freezer before the door shut.
I promise there will be many pictures of my finished petit fours next week. Sorry to hold you in suspense. I recommend getting to know cinnamon and raisin in the meantime.
The bad news: cake was on the syllabus yet again in class on Saturday. The good news: this cake had a new twist. We made a European torte called a havana cake and it was very different from the wedding and seasonal cakes we've made over the last few weeks. It started with hazelnut and chocolate hazelnut batters that were piped in alternate layers into cake pans before baking. After they cooled, I made a mocha buttercream to spread in between and on top of the cake. Chocolate glacage covered the entire cake and ground hazelnuts were placed around the bottom edge. As a fan of hazelnuts, chocolate and mocha, the end results were delicious.
We also tempered a bit of chocolate for some final decorations. Here is the final product that Greg and I easily devoured most of during the week.
Can you really blame us? Look at this.
I also helped Chef Pierre fill and decorate some mini fruit tarts for a party he was working at on Saturday evening. It was quite fun chopping up the fruit and making little pieces of art on pastry cream. The goal is to make it seem like there is a ton of fruit on top, even if there is not. Are you fooled?
For another twist on the weekend, I decided to make soft pretzels Sunday for dinner. The recipe I have produces twelve pretzels, so I split it in half. This turned out to be a good decision because we most likely would have eaten all twelve of them. These pretzels give Auntie Anne's and Wetzel's Pretzels a run for their money. Or cheese dip. And they were fun to make. The dough only has to sit for 30 minutes and then you get to roll them out, twist them up, douse them in boiling water with baking soda, sprinkle them with salt and bake them for eight minutes. Easy, right?
Greg helped me twist them into shape so we ended up with a few different twist variations. All were delicious.
The pretzels were gone within fifteen minutes. I have a feeling pretzels are going to become a new staple on my baking list.
This Saturday begins my last five weeks in the school kitchen. We are reminiscing days past by baking items we've learned about over the last year and a half. Iced petit fours are up first and I'm up to the challenge.
This week, in between rolling out baguettes at the bakery, I literally took cake with me everywhere I went. Some might say that my cakes "took the cake" as well, but that's not for me to say. We made seasonal cakes in class on Saturday and I used rolled fondant for the first time. The cake says it all.
Using the fondant wasn't as hard as I thought it would be and while I'll admit that it looks nice, I still think it tastes gross and prefer buttercream icing. But I didn't almost lose my mind smoothing this out like I did with the buttercream icing last week. Just look at how nice and smooth this is.
This cake was taken to Fort Wayne for Easter on Sunday. Guess what was also taken along as a surprise anniversary treat?
This cake. It was wrapped up tight in our fridge for a week and then packed in the car ever so carefully to make the two hour car ride. The surprise was a success, plus the cake still tasted good, so it was a win-win. Happy Anniversary, Aunt Linda and Uncle Jack! The Easter cake was delicious as well and some of my family even enjoyed the chewy fondant. The Easter cake was chocolate with vanilla buttercream and some white chocolate shavings in the middle.
Speaking of variety, there was not much of this in my Aunt Patty and Uncle Jim's refrigerator. If you thought stocking up on cream cheese was wild, wait until you see what I found in the refrigerator on Easter.
You're looking at no less than 38 tubs of Cool Whip. This may be necessary if I was bringing one giant pumpkin pie for dessert and everyone would need their own tub. I did not, however, bring pumpkin pie for dessert. My Uncle Jim just really, really likes Cool Whip. And apparently they got a good deal for them at the store last week. Even better news - I got an awesome blog post out of it and now feel the need to start a competition of who can store the most of one item in their fridge at a time. Please call me if you have more than 38 of something in your refrigerator. Let's take pictures.
And now back to cake week. I had cupcake baking to do on Monday evening. I decided to make two varieties of cupcakes for my friend/co-worker's baby shower on Tuesday. She requested a fruit flavor, so I found a great recipe for a vanilla cupcake filled with strawberry jam and topped with strawberry buttercream icing. These were to die for and I managed to eat three of them in 24 hours. To put this in perspective, there were only 12 total. Right. I also made a chocolate chip cupcake with chocolate buttercream because I knew chocolate would be in demand at the shower. And I was correct. Both cupcakes were a hit and I enjoyed making them way more than the cakes.
Also, I thought about making fondant shaped babies for toppers, but figured sprinkles were more appetizing. Plus I had this impressive new cupcake holder to show off and the fondant babies would have stolen all of the attention away. Here it is stacked up and ready to take to work.
Thanks go out to my parents for the nifty cupcake holder. I guarantee it will see a lot of use in the future. Just not in the near future because I am tired of cakes for now. Let me rephrase that - I am tired of making cakes for now. But eating them really takes the cake.
Is it possible to have too much cake in one week? I don't even really like cake all that much and my answer is still no. But if there were a "cake-off" occurring and your kitchen had two cakes on the counter waiting to be devoured, which one would you choose? The wedding cake that you slaved several hours over, made detailed flowers for and poured your sweat and tears into? Or the pound cake that you easily mixed up, flavored half-orange and half-chocolate, poured into a bundt pan and spent less than an hour worrying about?
Here's the winner of my cake-off.
The orange-chocolate pound cake wins it...by a pound. I don't know what it is about pound cakes, but I always thoroughly enjoy a big slice of it - especially when it contains my favorite flavor combination. Neither flavor was overpowering, but this is a nice dense cake that looks really cool when you slice it up. Check it out.
Who's with me on Team Pound Cake?
In case you despise orange and chocolate (should you really be reading my blog?), I will now introduce you to our other contender. It was a labor of love. And there were many minutes of frustration. But the end result is a cake that I am proud of and was happy to take home. Because of the height of my cakes, I ended up with a two-tier version instead of three, but don't worry - it didn't go to waste. This is a cake that I would have been happy to serve at my own wedding.
Of course it's decorated in orange. Did you really expect anything else? I made the calla lilies out of gum paste and they were my favorite part of the process. Here's a closer look.
After a careful paranoid chef-in-the-making escort home on the floor of my backseat, Greg and I cut a few slices and inhaled all of the cake we weren't able to eat at our wedding. Here's one piece that survived.
The cake-off has taught me that I can make a quality wedding-esque style cake if I really want to tackle the challenge. The cake itself was delicious. The tediousness of spreading the icing on perfectly was enough to make this cake lose my support in the cake-off. It nearly made me lose my mind. Pound cake, anyone?
