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?
I am happy to report that I survived wedding cake class round one. I made six (yes six) delicious round cakes, trimmed them in every way possible and crumb iced them with buttercream. Here is one of the six cakes.
Chef P requested a three layer cake with a minimum of 3 inch layers. I definitely delivered on the height. This weekend we're going to spread on a final layer of icing, decorate the sides with some filigree and strategically position a few gum paste flowers on top. Here are my layers waiting to go into the freezer for the week.
I made a different kind of cake last week as well. Two varieties of cupcakes, both topped with a glace icing. It was a double duty endeavor. First, good practice for my co-worker's upcoming baby shower and second, cupcakes for my parent's wedding anniversary.
The cupcake recipes were very simple - almost too simple to be fabulous - and the icing was made of lemon juice and powdered sugar. It was very easy to drizzle on and it set prettily on top of the cupcakes, but the taste was rather tart. I think I'll stick to buttercream icing in the future.
My most exciting news from last week is that I have officially started my pre-internship at a local bakery. I am on bread duty and I love it. I was fairly nervous the first few days, but now I feel like I'm really contributing to the bakery and getting a great experience in return. I have made several types of bread already and my specialty is quickly becoming baguettes. I made one on my second day that I was pretty proud of and was allowed to take home at the end of my shift. Here she is.
I immediately scarfed down three quarters of it when I got home, but Greg did get to sample a few bites. This week I had more good baguettes than slightly inconsistent ones and I'm getting faster every day as well. It's fairly monotonous work that might not make for good blog posts, but I am definitely enjoying myself. And I'll continue to entertain you with projects from class or items from my home kitchen. Like the orange chocolate bundt cake that I'm making tomorrow. Get your eyeballs ready.
During my childhood, I occasionally watched an episode of "This Old House" starring Bob Vila with my dad. Bob Vila always made undertaking huge house projects seem easy. I never saw Bob make a gingerbread house, but I'm sure he could have given me a few tips last Saturday when I was building mine.
My gingerbread dough turned out great and after cutting out templates for my houses, I rolled out the dough and cut out the pieces to bake. I also cut out holes for the windows.
We melted sugar to pour in the window frames and it gave the windows a very realistic look. Next, I made a batch of royal icing to start gluing my house together. Bob Vila uses nails, chefs use icing. These fours walls were up in no time.
Orange Reese's Pieces on the front of the house? Of course. When this was finished, I decided to attach my roof. This is where I needed the Bob Vila hotline. I made my roof slabs slightly larger than the side pieces so there would be some overhang, but I didn't think about making them slightly thinner so they wouldn't weigh so much. This is some heavy duty gingerbread.
If you haven't already guessed, I glued my roof on top and while I was decorating the rest of the house, it promptly decided to collapse. Thinking fast, I broke pretzel rods in half and lined them up along the top of the house. Chef Vila, I mean P, helped me cut down my roof a bit so that it would fit better with the pretzels as support and all was well. Almost....don't look too closely at my roof on the back right side. It's a good thing it doesn't rain in candy land.
I went for a pretzel motif on the back and a sprinkling of red hots all around. The marshmallow fence is surrounding candy corn lights underneath the windows. There are even grazing deer near the tree.
In the end, everything was fine and I took home a nice house. But since this old house almost destroyed my grade in class, I decided it might be fun to destroy it in the street in front of our house. Okay, it was really Greg's idea, but I was totally on board. Plus, I didn't want it to start attracting ants to our dining room table. Here is the documented destruction.
Me and this old house on our street.
The house plummeting to its demise.
Is anyone getting a Wizard of Oz flashback here?
The wicked old gingerbread house is dead.
I must say, this was very cathartic and a ton of fun. Perhaps I'll feel the urge to smash my wedding cake next Saturday? I guess we'll have to wait and see.
My work of sugar art is complete. And no (additional) body parts were injured in it's completion! I actually had a ton of fun creating different designs, sugar cages and flowers this week and managed to glue the whole thing together without drizzling hot sugar anywhere it shouldn't be drizzled. Here is what I have entitled "el azucar...hazlo."
As the proud designer, I paparazzi-ed the heck out of it. Here are the close-ups, views from above and behind, etc.
Honestly, I took so many pictures in class because I was fairly certain "el azucar" was not going to make it home in one piece. And I was right. The pieces in the last photo plunged to their sugary death before I left the kitchen. Luckily, I had already received my grade and praise from Chef P.
I am finished with another term of pastry school and will begin my last - that's right, LAST - term in the kitchen this weekend. It's terrifying yet exhilarating at the same time. After this term, it's internship time! But let's not get ahead of ourselves. The first four weeks of my final kitchen class are all about architecture and design skills. We'll be creating a gingerbread house and a wedding cake. I'm obviously more excited about the gingerbread house...
p.s. In case you're dying to know, my work of sugar art is entitled "sugar...do it" in English. Hazlo is a Spanish command that I was taught a few terms ago so I can yell at cooks in the kitchen. Or in my case, for myself when I was burned with sugar and hesitant about working with it again. It was definitely worth the end results.
While I have always enjoyed singing along to Def Leppard's classic hit "Pour Some Sugar on Me," I never thought I'd actually experience this phenomenon in real life. And then Saturday in class, I literally poured some hot sugar on myself. I turned out more blistered and burnt than sticky sweet, but I guess that's what happens when you boil said sugar to 320 degrees before it hits your body.
Here's my rendition of "Pour Some Sugar on Me."
I can't see if the sugar is hot enough. Let's take a closer look.
We are boiling now, but it still needs to be about 90 degrees hotter. Sugar that hot should not be poured on anyone, even if you are a rock band groupie. Here's the price you'll pay.
Luckily I was on my way to the sink to wash off my thermometer when I "caught" the sugar in my hand so I was able to wash it off before my skin became too attached to it. After some vinegar soaking, Advil taking and gauze wrapping in class, I was ready to prepare a second batch of sugar in the afternoon. Once I got over my fear of getting burned (by actually getting burned), the sugar was really quite fun to work with. We poured casts for our centerpiece displays and then made ribbons, flowers and other designs with pulled sugar.
My main centerpiece is a dark green color with gold accents.
And I used lighter colors to make designs with later in the day.
The scraps are hard like glass shards and you could probably cut yourself on them. Thankfully, I did not.
I made a mini-heart display for my parents to take home after their visit on Sunday.
Shockingly, the pieces made it all the way to their house without my mother eating them. Probably because she devoured all of the leftover chocolates we saved from the previous week. And dessert. I caramelized bananas with my fancy new torch and threw them into a bowl of homemade vanilla bean ice cream with pieces of my chocolate box. (Yes, this is what the vanilla bean was used for!)
Can you see the tiny bean flecks?
If not, just imagine them. They look like dirt but taste way better.
I also made homemade lasagna and garlic bread for our lunch on Sunday. The garlic bread was truly homemade as well. I made a batch of country white bread earlier in the week.
Next time I'll score the bread a little deeper so the air doesn't escape out the sides during baking, but it turned out delicious and made for wonderfully hearty garlic bread.
Despite my unfortunate incident with sugar, I'm ready to finish up my centerpiece this weekend and move on to the next (and final!) term in the school kitchen. And I'll limit my sugar pouring to singing along with the band.
