Cupcake Obsessed

Last Weeks at FCI

2010-10-28T18:59:00.002-04:00

Whew, this past month has been a total blur, which I guess explains why I've been MIA. In the past 4 weeks, I've completed many major end of class projects at FCI, graduated, quit my job, went to Disney World, and started a new job!! So I'm sorry that I've been neglecting my blog, but hopefully I will have more time now to be updating. I'll get to all the explanations in a bit, but first let's start with the projects!

Candy Bar Cake

Our first major project was to create a menu for a fictional restaurant of our choice. My restaurant was a dessert wine bar on the Hoboken waterfront, called Sweet Surrender. From my menu, my chefs selected two desserts for me to make - the Signature Candy Bar Cake and the American Classics Threefold. My threefolds were 3 related desserts on one plate, and the American Classics one was carrot cake, pineapple upside down cake, and apple crisp. The candy bar cake was flourless chocolate cake layered with chocolate mousse and a roasted peanut caramel, covered in chocolate ganache and then chocolate glaze. I served it with a caramel sauce and peanut butter ice cream. We had two days to prep and plate our desserts, a real challenge for me being as I had 4 separate desserts I needed to make. Everything went really well though, and it came out really well.

American Classics Threefold

After menu projects, we were on to our wedding cakes. The Level 1 students picked the theme, 1920's inspired with red, black, and white decor. I didn't want to do a traditional wedding cake with flowers, and pearls, etc. I decided to use poured sugar to created a mosaic border and blown sugar spheres to cascade down the cake. It took me a full class, 5 hours, to blow all of the sugar balls. It's a process similar to blowing glass, but with edible materials. The days that we did our cakes could not have been more humid, which meant shortly after putting my cake together, it was a sweating, dripping mess. Fortunately it held up for grading though.

When our wedding cakes were completed, we moved right into our final exam. Our final consisted of a written exam, covering everything we learned in the program, and a practical exam where we made five items we drew at random and created an edible stand to display them all on. The theme for our stands was "space." For mine, I did a stand with the sun and planets cut out and sugar poured into the holes. On the stand I had rockets, a moon man, shooting stars, and the moon. My final didn't go as well as I had hoped it would, but at least I finished it and graduated!

Graduation was really nice, with a lot of our instructors showing up to wish us farewell and send us off with their words of wisdom. I surprised myself and graduated with honors, meaning I had a 95 grade average for the entire program. I know grades mean very little, but personally it was reassuring being as I had invested so much into the program and given up so much to make it happen. While in school, I worked full time, attended class, maintained a small side business, and had a restaurant internship every Saturday night and some Sundays for over 3 months! It was tough, but well worth it in the end. Not long after graduation, I got hired at a very good restaurant in the city and started there this week!

I did it!

Welcome to the (Sugar) Jungle

2010-09-26T21:52:00.004-04:00

Doesn't my post title make you think of this?:

As much as I love Guns n' Roses, this post isn't about them (it's a baking blog!). One of the more exciting units at school was definitely our Sugar 2 section. We finally got a chance to pull, blow, and pour sugar into really beautiful, delicate items.

My sugar flowers I made

Toucan

The downside of this is that sugar is hot. Like really hot. We cook it to 329 degrees and then cool it down (but not too cool) before we start working with it. Even with the rubber gloves on, our hands were completely roasted. After two straight weeks of this, my hands were just completely swollen and covered in blisters. You kind of forget all about that though when you see how pretty your sugar work turns out.

That's the thing about sugar - the wow factor is high. Due to the amount of skill, tools, and space you need, sugar work is not the type of stuff the average home baker is making in their kitchen.

Crocodile

Angry monkey

For the culmination of the unit, as a class we made a giant sugar showpiece. We chose the theme "jungle" and all divided and conquered. Some people were assigned making the animals out of blown sugar, some people poured the base (a mammoth task given the size of the showpiece), others made the trees and leaves. My job was to pull sugar flowers. It's a time-consuming process, pulling one petal at a time and cutting it off the sugar, letting them harden, and then attaching them all together.

The final result was really cool looking. I loved the monkeys my classmates made, and the waterfall was really beautiful. Overall, we worked really well to pull this off, and I think it was a major success.

Final product

Ambitious Baking: Tiered Cakes

2010-09-08T22:47:00.005-04:00

I absolutely love the challenge of making fondant-covered cakes, even though my skill set in that arena is still pretty lacking. Every year our family friends host a massive beer pong tournament. It's really something you can't believe unless you see it for yourself. Every team agonizes over team name and comes decked out in matching uniforms.

Front View

I had a clear vision of the cake I wanted to make for this party. There's almost a 100 guests that attend this party, so it had to be big. I decided on a three-tiered cake with Solo "cups" made out of fondant mixed with a natural gum so they would dry hard overnight. I used real Solo cups to draw a template and mold the cups. There were 30 teams that participated, so I piped every team name on a fondant plaque that was then put on the back and sides of the cake. The letter piping was the last thing I did, and by the time I got to the last team, my hand was shaking.

Side View - Handwriting was a little shaky

The cake flavors were chocolate cake with cookies and cream buttercream (10"), white cake with passion fruit buttercream (8"), and banana cake with white chocolate buttercream (6"). Despite the massive quantity of cake, it was pretty much demolished at the end of the night. The cutting of the cake went down around midnight, many rounds into the tournament, so it should have come as no surprise that I sliced my hand while divvying up the cake. Luckily it wasn't too deep, and nothing that 5 Band-Aids and another Bud Light could not fix.

Back of the cake

The party happened to coincide with the beer pong commissioner's birthday, so I made a miniature birthday cake. I did a white covering with black polka dots and a pink glittery bow. Thankfully, my friend Vica came to visit just in the nick of time. When she arrived at my house, I was thoroughly in the weeds (chef talk for "in major s***") and didn't think I would finish on time to make it to the party with a completed cake, much less the tiny birthday cake too. Vica stepped in and made an awesome pastry assistant, helping me out with the finishing touches on both cakes.

I have no idea how cake designers transport their cakes without any damage. We had a short 10 minute drive to the party, and my cake arrived with many cracks (albeit they were only noticeable to me). We had a kind of rough drive there, with me sitting in the trunk of the Explorer and my mom driving, us yelling at each other the entire time. She probably could have driven a teensy bit smoother, but at least I know that when I need a delivery person for my future business, we already had the test run (fail). My mom has many skills, but apparently smooth driving is not one of them.

This cake was only 4"

I'm already looking forward to next year's tournament (the 5th annual!), but think I'm going to go easier on the desserts so I can rest up pre-tournament and maybe go further (my partner Morgan & I had a pretty abysmal showing).

Me & a few of my friend at the tournament

Evening of Desserts at FCI

2010-08-26T20:56:00.000-04:00

The Evening of Desserts is an event in the pastry program that we were all looking forward to. We had seen the Level 2s before us get to do it, and I know I was anxiously awaiting a chance to show off what I had learned for my friends and family.

My team's dessert - chocolate hazelnut mendiant

We each got to invite guests to come and sample desserts that we prepared and plated. My parents, my sister Melissa and her boyfriend Joe all came to check it out. Being on a Tuesday in the city, I was really happy they could make it.

Molly prepping the amuse bouche - a lemon scorpino

We had a menu of eight items that our guests could order from, and each team was in charge of plating one of the desserts. My partner Brittany and I were in charge of the chocolate hazelnut mendiant. I'm not sure why it's called mendiant, but it was a semifreddo. We made a (really boozy) cherry compote to go with it, a kirsch caramel sauce, and a really crazy chocolate piece. I had the idea for the chocolate "wave" from something I had seen on Best Thing I Ever Ate (which ended up being nothing like our finished wave).

With my parents - you can tell my mom has spent more time at the beach than I have this summer!

With Melissa & Joe - another illustration of how I've spent my summer tucked in a kitchen, away from the any sort of UV rays...they both work at the beach

The mendiant ended up being the most ordered item (thanks my classmate Molly who plugged our dessert in her intro), and Brit & I were a well-oiled machine.

Kataifi nest with fromage blanc mousse and fruit compote

Overall, the night went really smoothly. Everyone was super pleased with the results, and my family loved the desserts they ordered.

Panna cotta with peach compote, raspberry riesling granita, and granola

After everyone left, we got to taste the desserts we served. My personal favorite was the fontaine, which was a chocolate cake with ganache and fresh raspberrys wrapped in filo dough and baked. It was served with a trio of sauces, and was so good. A close second was a kataif (another type of dough) nest with the fromage blanc mousse.

Fontaine

Tiramisu

Champagne sabayon with roasted peaches

Plum soup with almond cubes and orange sherbet

Group scorpino shot to cheers the end of the evening

Week 30: Back to Plated Desserts

2010-08-25T20:07:00.002-04:00

There are three plated desserts units in the FCI pastry program, and in our second one we moved on to some more complicated desserts and some more polished plating. The style of plated desserts we do at FCI is VERY polished - a lot more so than I see my style evolving. On every plate there will be a dessert, a couple sauces, a tuile (thin cookie), a chocolate doodad, some fruit, a garnish, more garnish. Don't get me wrong, it all looks very pretty, but just a little too "done" for my taste.

Chocolate hazelnut mendiant with cherry compote

Speaking of actually taste, the desserts we made in this unit were fantastic. We made a lot of semifreddos which reminded me of ice cream...that isn't ice cream. The mint chocolate one was a particular favorite of mine, and I don't even particularly like mint.

White chocolate citrus semifreddo with strawberry salad

White chocolate hazelnut semifreddo - the raspberry cake part of it was excellent

What's been interesting to me has been the combinations of flavors we put together that surprisingly go well together. I like experimenting with this, and our chefs having a lot more experience than us and have been good leaders. When I read the dessert descriptions the night before class, I'm sometimes skeptical about how things with pair, but it's all been good so far.

Chocolate mint semifreddo with blackberry salad - sooo good

The highlight of the second plated dessert unit was the Evening of Desserts we hosted for our friends and family (more about that in another post), but a close second was the Saturday morning Chef Peter made breakfast for the 8 of us who had showed up for class. Poor Chef Peter, the only male in a group of 16 women, has to put up with a high chatter volume, lots of giggling, and a ton of Christmas carol singing (don't ask...) from us. The biscuits he made nearly brought the 8 of us to tears, they were so good. Buttery, light, flaky. I've never had biscuits this good before. I still dream about them.

Those biscuits!

More Wedding Pics

2010-08-22T22:21:00.003-04:00

Lauren, the bride of the second wedding I did in July, was nice enough to send me over some of the professional pictures after my last post. The pictures look incredible, and I'm so happy I can share them!

Some Wedding Baking in July

2010-08-18T20:08:00.003-04:00

On top of my already insane schedule, many months ago I agreed to take on two weddings in July. Back in April and May, this seemed like a good idea. Things were a little calmer back then, I think. Flash forward to mid-summer when things could not be crazier, and suddenly it was time for these to be delivered.

Had to throw out almost everything in my fridge to make room for the cake truffles -
just 1/2 the vanilla here!

The first wedding was for their favors which were 300 cake truffles. This was the one that I thought would be the easier of the two weddings, and boy was I wrong. So very wrong. I was under-prepared for just how long it would take me to complete 150 chocolate and 150 vanilla truffles and mistakenly thought I was on the ball. It resulted in a meltdown of epic proportions that required me calling my parents to bring in reinforcements - more chocolate and some moral support (thanks mom & dad!). Once they were all finished and bagged though, it was such a rewarding feeling and I was really happy with how they turned out. I had some pretty great reviews from the bride and wedding guests, and am really happy that everyone was pleased with the outcome.

Bunch of cake truffles packaged

For the second wedding the following week, I had learned my lesson and was super, super prepared. There were lists of lists. I needed to make an 8" cake covered in fondant and 144 cupcakes decorated with individually cut and painted (with edible luster dust) fondant pieces. The fondant decorations were shaped like blossom flowers and butterflies. I was able to get those all done over a week in advance to leave me enough time to bake everything the night before pick up.

Start time - just home from class

I was fortunate that when my parents were up to help out with Wedding #1, they took me to the grocery store so I had a car to transport all the ingredients. Which was excellent being as it was 12 pounds of butter, 3 dozen eggs, 10 lbs of flour, 10 lbs of sugar, and many more heavy items! That would have been quite a struggle carrying that back to my apartment.

One of the 6 boxes of cupcakes

Close up of cupcakes

The one issue with this all was that the pick up was on a Friday morning. I'm in class until last Thursday night and don't usually get home until midnight. Class is my first priority, so I knew missing one wasn't an option. Not having the freshest cupcakes possible also wasn't an option, so I settled on the fact I'd have to start baking when I got home from class and stay up as late as it took. Everything went really smoothly though, and I was getting a new batch of cupcakes into the oven every 20 minutes - about as fast as I could expect to go.

Close up of cupcakes

Finished cake

Sometime around 3:00 am, the cupcakes were baked and frosted, and it was time to start the cake. Covering cakes in fondant is always really nerve-wracking for me, but it went pretty smoothly, and I was happy with the way the fondant decorations looked on the cake. I boxed everything up, ending just after 4:00 am.

End time - documented to remind myself how crazy I am

Crashing into bed was probably one of the best feelings ever. What a long day - I was up at 7:30 am to go to my "real" job, then class, then 12 dozen freaking cupcakes!!! Talk about a sense of accomplishment. Somehow I managed to remember to take pictures of everything too (it was on my to-do list!).

The bride was nice enough to send me a pic from the wedding set up - looks beautiful!

Looking back on both these orders, I think I was clearly insane for agreeing to do them, but I'm so happy I did! Not only did I get to be a part of these awesome people's weddings, but I got to test the limits of my baking, something I really love.

Chocolate Projects: Fairy Tales

2010-08-11T19:53:00.003-04:00

This week I posted on Food 2 about our final chocolate projects. You should check it out there! Our theme was fairy tales, and I chose my favorite fairy tale - Little Red Riding Hood. My piece weighed about two and a half pounds and was made entirely out of chocolate. There were some challenging moments during the course of the project, but overall, it came out pretty close to how I envisioned it.

Initially, I had wanted to make the characters out of modeling chocolate (it's pliable like clay), but Chef Peter called that a cop out. Using various molds and piping techniques, I managed to make Red and the Wolf entirely out of solid chocolate. The only elements that were made out of modeling chocolate were the roof shingles, Red's hair, quilt, cape, and the pillow "cases." I hand-painted the quilt and pillows using luster dust mixed with vodka.

This project was a big deal for me because like I said in my Food 2 post, I had built up a lot of anticipation for this assignment. Plus, chocolate was never really my strength during Level 2, so I felt like this was a particular achievement.

Week 28-29 Chocolate II

2010-08-01T21:34:00.003-04:00

Week 28 brought the return of the dreaded chocolate unit. I did not enjoy the first chocolate unit - it was messy and tempering chocolate proved to be challenging. Surprisingly, I really enjoyed our second chocolate unit. I now have a feel for the tempering process, and the whole thing went much smoother.

Spiced Caramels

This unit we got to make a bunch of candies - both traditional and some not so much (beer ganache anyone?). In the first unit, we did hand-rolled truffles which have a less uniform look than their molded counterpart - bon bons.

Chocolate-dipped Butter Toffee

Peanut Butter Nougat - Soooooo good!

When I think of bon bons, lazy housewives lounging on the sofa eating them comes to mind. This is probably because whenever my dad would come home from work, a frequent refrain from my mom would be "What do you think I did all day? Lay on the couch and eat bon bons?"

"Paint-splattered" Dulce de Leche Bon Bons

My Glitter-ized Dulce de Leche Bon Bons

Bon bons are great because there's so many different fillings you can make. Almost any flavor can be used. One of the best class days in this unit was when our class had free rein to make a filling of our choice. I made a passion fruit caramel filling and a beer ganache filling. Some of my classmates fillings included caramel apple, tiramisu, wasabi, fig, peanut butter, and so many more. In the locker room after class, the culinary students just descended on the beer ganache bon bons, devouring almost all of them.

Gold=Milk Chocolate Bon Bons with Passion Fruit Caramel
Red= Dark Chocolate with Beer Ganache

Inside the Passion Fruit Bon Bon

In the chocolate unit, we also made our first 2-tiered cake, a chocolate cake with a delicious chocolate raspberry mousse filling, and a chocolate buttercream. Using cocoa butter colors as "paint," we made transfer sheets and poured chocolate over them. When the chocolate was partially set up, we bent the chocolate strip around the cake. It's a pretty cool technique, and the finished cake looked pretty good. The picture's deceiving though - it was way tinier in real life - just a 3" and a 6" cake.

CSN $50 Gift Certificate Winner

2010-07-28T12:09:00.004-04:00

The $50 gift certificate to CSN has closed, and the winner is...Comment #5!

Deb commented that she would purchase the Caphalon Fruit & Vegetable Set:

Congratulations! Deb, can you please email me (tarascupcakes@gmail.com) and let me know your mailing address so I can have the gift certificate mailed to you? Thank you everyone for entering!

Week 26-27 Sugar

2010-07-23T19:42:00.002-04:00

After moving on from the debacle of our first plated desserts unit, our next was sugar. We started off making some marzipan fruits. Carefully sculpting the pieces of marzipan to be the shapes of various fruits, we later airbrushed them to be quite realistic looking.

My mom loves marzipan fruits, so it was fortuitous that the following weekend I was going home. Using my level 1 basket weave skills, I made a lemon chiffon cake with lemon curd and vanilla Swiss meringue buttercream.

We also made a basket out of nougatine. Nougatine is caramel with almonds mixed in that is then rolled out, cut, and molded. It is VERY hot to the touch and was difficult to mold because you couldn't keep your hands on it for very long without feeling burned.

For me, the highlight of the 1st sugar unit was our classes with Chef Ron Ben Israel. Chef Ron is an incredibly talented cake designer, and I've admired his work for a long time. When I first looked at the French Culinary Institute, the fact that Chef Ron taught there was a major selling point. In person, Chef Ron was as entertaining as he was informative. Before long under his tutelage, we were making realistic looking sugar flowers. I wrote about the sugar flower classes over at Food 2, and you should check it out there.

Me with Chef Ron and a sugar flower I made

After sugar flowers, we worked on our pastillage projects. Pastillage is a sugar dough that dries rock solid and is excellent for supporting weight and building showpieces out of, but less excellent for eating. One of the ingredients in it is white vinegar, which is my absolute least favorite smell in the world, so I didn't enjoy working with it much.

My completed pastillage project

For our projects, we were tasked to make a cake stand in the theme of "Famous Moments in History." I chose to recreate Ben Franklin flying a kite and discovering electricity, probably making it the first time it was represented in sugar ever (although who knows with all the crazy cake competitions that are out there). Using only edible materials - pastillage, poured sugar, sugar paste, fondant, and cake - I managed to do the event some justice.

It's been a really great feeling to see that my skills level is finally catching up to the level of my ideas. Usually I have these grand plans in my mind and when I actually make them, they look nothing like what I pictured.Once again, my classmates totally blew me away with the amazing projects they created. I'm lucky to be in class with some incredibly talented people; it just pushes me to think bigger and work harder.

Ben

Along with the cake stand, we had to make pastillage favor boxes

Highlights of my classmates' work:

Liesel's Noah's Ark

Mary's Sheep Cloning

Brittani's Babe Ruth's 500th Home Run

Janelle's 1st Pixar Movie

Molly's 1st Man on the Moon (her cake was shaped like a moon)

CSN Stores Giveaway!

2010-07-21T18:26:00.006-04:00

I know I've been very neglectful of this blog lately, so this post comes at perfect timing. After the skillet giveaway went well, CSN would like to give a $50 gift certificate to one lucky Cupcake Obsessed reader.

Le Creuset baking set

CSN is great because they have everything from dining room sets to cookware to bedding. It's a serious one-stop shopping destination for all your home needs. Perusing their sites, there's so much there I have on my "wish list." The pictures here are what I'd buy if I had the $50 gift certificate.

Rolling pin like we use at school

To enter to win the CSN gift certificate, just leave a comment by next Wednesday, July 29 5:00 pm saying what you would purchase at CSN if you won the gift certificate with your contact information.

Winner will be selected at random. This contest is only open to residents of the U.S. and Canada. Good luck!

Week 25: Couple More Plated Desserts

2010-07-16T21:14:00.002-04:00

When posting pictures last week of the plated desserts unit, I forgot the last two desserts we made the night of our exam. We weren't graded on these desserts, but both were really delicious.

The first was a cold strawberry charlotte. The charlotte was made up of ladyfingers with a strawberry Bavarian cream (kind of like a mousse). It was plated with berry sorbet and salad with a clear sauce.

The second was a warm charlotte. This one was made from white bread soaked in butter (delicious on its own) that was filled with a mixed fruit compote and baked. We served it with a butterscotch sauce and a red plum spuma. A spuma is a delicious new frozen treat I've discovered thanks to FCI. It's just a sorbet with an Italian meringue (a very sweet, airy mixture of egg whites and sugar) folded in.

Week 24-25: Intro to Plated Desserts

2010-07-09T00:01:00.000-04:00

Our first plated dessert unit was only 6 classes long, but boy did it feel like a lifetime. Perhaps one of the units I was most looking forward to, it was almost a complete disaster. I'm now regularly blogging at Food 2, and you can read all about my class's struggles with plated desserts in the Food 2 School series here.

Chocolate Marquise with cherry compote & creme anglaise

Here's all the pictures I took from the unit. Everything we made was as delicious as it looked, if not more. My chef pants grew even tighter over those two weeks (and they're tight to begin with being as they're manufactured inexplicably so that the "elastic" waist is half the circumference of 1 pant leg). For many reasons, I was really happy to leave behind individual desserts for the time being.

Creme Caramel

My favorite items from the unit were probably the pineapple tarte tatin and the creme brulee (which has long been my favorite dessert). Any of the ice creams and sorbets we made were delicious, and I could usually be found covertly (ok, maybe not so covertly) taking additional scoops of them.

Creme Brulee with Pistachio Shortbread

My least favorite was definitely the creme caramel (flan). How can a cousin of creme brulee taste so bad?? For me, when I don't like an item it's usually because of the texture, and creme caramel is the perfect example of this.

Fennel Hazelnut Tart with Fig Ice Cream

To illustrate just how many components go into these desserts, for two of the pictures I identified each of the items on the plate.

Lemon Tart with Basil Creme Anglaise & Berry Sorbet

Milk Marmalade Tart

Manjari Chocolate Tart with Coconut Ice Cream

Banana Macadamia Financier

Pineapple Tarte Tatin with Pineapple Passion Sauce

& Lemon Frozen Yogurt

Spinach and Cheese Jalousie with Bechemel Sauce

Week 23: Chocolate Candy Stands

2010-07-07T23:27:00.001-04:00

Chocolate I feels like it was ages ago (over a month ago!), but I'm just getting to post the pictures of my finished chocolate project now. The task was to create a candy stand, complete with a bowl that held the chocolate candies we made in a theme of our choice. With the start of the summer, to me it seemed like a good idea to go with an under the sea theme. Chef Toni allowed us to use some coloring, and I decided to take full advantage of this. Brown is one of my least favorite colors, so a stand made entirely out of chocolate seemed a little "blah."

Close up of the bottom of my piece

My stand was made up of four white chocolate "waves" that supported the white chocolate shell bowl. Using a couple molds I bought, I made the fish and shells using a copious amount of disco dust and chocolate. Using a new technique Chef Toni showed the class, I also made some glittery chocolate seaweed to attach to the base. The work spanned over two days, and it was a rush to get it done. Despite our relative inexperience working with chocolate and the time crunch, my classmates made some pretty incredible pieces.

Me with my finished chocolate piece after class

Sidenote: You know those cans of compressed air you use to clean out your computer keyboard? We use those to instantly set the chocolate (the air comes out freezing cold). Because of people "huffing" them, the manufacturers have started including a bitter taste to them. In fact, when purchasing my canned air at Target, I even got carded! Unfortunately, with a class of 16 people all spraying these cans, it was inevitable we all got a taste of this truly revolting airstream. Nothing ruins the taste of chocolate faster than an accidental swallow of this air, and those classes had a lot of intermittent bursts of "Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwww."

Display of our finished pieces

Happy (Belated) Birthday, Dad!

2010-06-25T22:02:00.002-04:00

Whew, this post just barely made it in before it's no longer even my dad's birth MONTH. As it is, it's 3 weeks since it passed and I made this cake, but better late than never, right?

One of my favorite things about baking is being able to create something special for the people I love - my friends and family. My parents are hands-down my biggest fans, and my dad lately has been known to start telling complete strangers about how his daughter is attending the French Culinary Institute. When it came time for his birthday, I was excited to make something extra special and new just for him. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of asking him what kind of cake he'd like, to which he replied he had been hoping for red velvet. I'm sort of sick of red velvet, and I had wanted to make something just for him.

Chef Cynthia had given our class the most awesome chocolate cake recipe that our class devoured the scraps of when they were set out. I knew I wanted to use this as my base, and decided to also use chocolate ganache and fresh raspberries as filling and chocolate Swiss buttercream to cover the cake. In short, this cake was awesome. My dad really liked it too, hopefully even more than the red velvet.

I haven't really shared a recipe in a while, but you MUST make this chocolate cake. I'm not a huge chocolate fan (although my classmates who have seen me eat pounds of chocolate might disagree), and this has become one of my absolute favorite cakes. It's so moist, so delicious, and so easy to make.

Chocolate Cake Recipe

Ingredients:
2 1/4 c cake flour
2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 c butter (1 stick), room temperature
2 1/4 c light brown sugar
3 large eggs, room temperature
3 oz unsweetened chocolate, finely chopped
1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1 c sour cream
1/2 c hot brewed coffee
1/2 c hot water

Directions:
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Butter and flour two 8" cake pans and line the bottom with a round of parchment paper.
2. Sift together flour, baking soda, and salt.
3. Beat butter at medium speed until creamy. Gradually add brown sugar, better well until pale and fluffy, about 5 minutes. Add vanilla and mix well.
4. Add eggs one at a time, beating at low speed until blended after each addition.
5. Pour hot coffee and water over chocolate. Stir until all chocolate is melted. Whisk in sour cream until smooth.
6. Alternate adding the dry ingredients (3 additions) with the wet (2 additions), starting and ending with the dry mixture.
7. Pour in prepared pans. Bake at 350 until cake tests done (Cake should start to come away from sides of the pan and a skewer inserted should come out dry).

Start of Level 2: Weeks 21-22 Chocolate

2010-06-21T20:37:00.003-04:00

Chocolate fruit cake with chocolate leaves

Level 2 started with chocolate. I've never been much of a chocolate die-hard, and given the choice between chocolate and vanilla, I would choose vanilla any day. That fact didn't stop me from eating probably pounds of chocolate during the 2 weeks we spent on the first chocolate unit.

Somehow my ID got dipped in chocolate without me realizing

Before we could do anything, we needed to learn about chocolate. We got to try a bunch of different types of chocolate, including a 99% cacao chocolate. You can't even imagine how bitter that was. I used to be a strictly milk and white chocolate person, but in the past couple years, my tastes have changed and I've developed a real appreciation for dark chocolate.

Chocolate Orange Truffles

After learning about the history and manufacturing process of chocolate, it was time to move on to tempering chocolate. Tempering chocolate is the process of melting and cooling chocolate to a certain temperature then creating the proper structure required for chocolate to be hard and strong when it sets. It sounds easy, but it took a while for a lot of us to catch on to the process. And it was really, really messy.

The mess of working with chocolate was the primary reason I disliked it so much. After every class, I would leave totally covered in chocolate. We did get to make some pretty cool things with it though. Our first project was was a box that was entirely made of chocolate and held chocolate orange truffles we hand-dipped. We also made a bow on top, also out of chocolate.

Memorial Day Weekend

2010-06-18T20:35:00.003-04:00

The first official day of summer isn't until next week, but to me, the start of summer is always Memorial Day Weekend. I went home to the Jersey Shore for MDW and did a lot of baking. I had a couple free days, a few barbeques, and a lot of new recipes I wanted to try out.

First on my agenda was a fondant-covered cake. I've struggled with fondant for a long time now and felt this was a good opportunity to practice being as I had a birthday party barbeque to go to. The cake was a yellow cake (not a good enough recipe to repeat, so I won't include it here) with a chocolate Swiss meringue buttercream (my new favorite type of icing). I used a new fondant sold at Michaels by Duff of Ace of Cakes fame. I LOVE how Michael's is really beefing up their cake decorating aisle. Every time I go in there, there's more and more stuff I want to buy. Anyway, this new fondant tastes a lot better than the usual brand I use, but it's so much more expensive. $20 for 2 lbs whereas I usually pay about $15 for 5 lbs.

I made the bow loops out of sugar paste on floral wire. I'm slowly getting better at working with fondant, but have a longgggg way to go still, and not enough time to practice.

The cheating/bonus tart

I also made a strawberry cream cheese tart. The dough for the tart was a shortbread, which made it very difficult to work with. The recipe makes it sound like you can just roll it out and move it to the tart ring, but as soon as you picked it up, it broke. I found it worked best by pressing it into the tart mold. Once the shell was blind baked and cooled, it was filled with a cream cheese custard. If I made this again, I'd add a little bit of gelatin to the custard to give it a bit more stability. The strawberry compote was pretty straight forward. The recipe makes way more than 1 tart's worth of custard and compote, so my mom had a pre made (store-bought) Oreo pie shell that I just threw the extra custard and compote in that. Not my preferred method, but better than wasting the extra ingredients.

Original Tart

I also made an orange glow chiffon cake. I love chiffon cakes. They sound so retro to me, but they're so moist and delicious. This one was a huge pain in the butt because it stuck in my bundt pan (lessons learned - I should have listened to my mom and sprayed the pan), but well-worth the effort being as I ate it for breakfast for the next 3 days. The recipe didn't have an icing, but I mixed up a really simple glaze with just orange juice and powdered sugar and poured it over the top of the cake. The glaze was pretty thin so you can't really see it in the picture.

I had planned on also making a key lime coconut cheesecake, but as usual, I didn't budget my time very well and being as I also wanted to sleep over that weekend, the cheesecake had to be nixed.

Wedding Cake!

2010-06-13T19:34:00.004-04:00

Last month, one of my best friends got married. It was just a small civil-ceremony, and they're having a larger wedding reception next July, but I wanted to mark the occasion with a traditional wedding cake.

I frequently struggle with the distance between my ideas and my skill level. In my mind, I had a very specific idea of how I wanted this cake to look. I think that my first mistake was using an American-style cream cheese frosting, as opposed to a meringue buttercream. I've noticed in school that the Swiss or Italian meringue buttercreams provide a lot more stability than frostings made just by combining butter with powdered sugar. The cake was red velvet and I love cream cheese frosting with it, but next time I'm going to opt for a different buttercream. I also need a lot more work with fondant, and there were places it showed on this cake. Fortunately, I was able to cover a lot of the worst mistakes with the fondant cut outs.

Overall though, I was pleased with the way it came out though, and I was so happy to be part of this day. Congratulations guys!

Midterm Cakes: Level 1 Completed!

2010-06-11T20:31:00.002-04:00

The midterm for the program involved a pretty in-depth written exam and a practical exam. For the practical exam, we picked a cake type out of a hat that told us what cake flavor, filling, and covering we had to use. On the creative side, we were tasked to make a celebration cake for any occasion.

I happened to know in advance that one of my best friends was getting engaged while away on a cruise with her boyfriend. They got back the day of my midterm, and I thought it would be nice to text them a picture of a "Congratulations Kate & Adam" engagement cake upon returning to the US, newly engaged.My cake selection was chocolate sponge cake with buttercream (I chose peanut butter) and chocolate glaze. Not really wanting to make a brown cake, I tested out a white chocolate version first, but it wasn't as good as I wanted it to be, so I decided to use the dark chocolate glaze for the exam. The second version came out MUCH better. I also spelled "Congratulations" wrong on the first cake. Ooopsss.

The cakes my classmates came up with were SO impressive. Enjoy the photos below!

My Midterm Cake

Side view - really tough to get those sides perfectly smooth

Canada Day Cake

Las Vegas Cake - Check out the detail on the sign!

One classmate does really beautiful Japanese lettering on a lot of projects

Day of the Dead Cake

A classmate is obsessed with Disney - her Disneyland anniversary cake came out really amazingly

21st Birthday Roulette Cake

Fleet Week was the week of our midterm

Cinco de Mayo Cake

Really adorable level of detail on this cake - check out the mini croissants on the side and tiny eggs on the top

Hello Kitty Birthday Cake

Weeks 19 & 20: Cakes 2

2010-06-04T20:45:00.003-04:00

So Level 1 has come and gone, and I'm already 2 weeks into Level 2! It's been such a busy few weeks for me, and I've been unable to post much here. At the moment, it's no less than 80 degrees in my apartment and with my hotter laptop in lap, I'm going to try to keep this brief. A notoriously difficult thing for me to do.

The first item for Cakes 2 was a buche noel, the traditional Christmas cake. Funny story, this year for my company bake off, my cookie dough cupcakes were beat by a buche noel. Making this made me feel vindicated.

No buche noel is complete without marzipan robins and meringue mushrooms

A fraisier is a cake made in a ring mold with strawberries, a sponge cake, a chiboust (pastry cream-based buttercream), and a layer of green marzipan. It always says "Fraisier" on it, and the first time I wrote it on the cake, I spelled it wrong. Oops.

The next cake was a really awesome lemon chiffon with lemon curd (one of my favorite things) and buttercream. We practiced our basketweave technique, and I used the opportunity to practice my marzipan modeling skills. I think whales on cakes are about as cute as it gets.

The white cake was my favorite cake of the unit. It tastes exactly like it came from a box. And I mean that in the best way possible. I'm obviously all about baking from scratch, but boxed cakes are delicious. There's no denying that. This cake was filled and covered with a peach buttercream and covered in marzipan.

I had never had black forest cake before, but it had a chocolate cake with chocolate ganache, cherries, and whipped cream. Not bad, but I found it kind of dry.

Carrying the next two cakes home on the subway one night, I have never felt more popular. I had a board with 2 cheesecakes and the pistachio roulade and entered the subway just as all the Yankees fans were coming home from the game. On a subway car with 50 hungry guys, I had numerous inquiries about the cakes. I think I'm just going to carry cheesecake wherever I go.

This cake was a chocolate roulade with pistachio cream in it and rolled up. The cake is then stood upright. We covered the whole thing with fondant, mine was blue and purple marbled fondant.

I'll be putting up the pictures from our midterm soon. The task was to create a special occasions cake, and my classmates did a really spectacular job with some of the cakes they made.

Guest Blogging at Food2

2010-05-21T13:43:00.003-04:00

Today's an exciting day for me. Not only is it Friday (TGIF), not only is my midterm tomorrow (woo!), but my guest blog post just went up over at Food2, an affiliate of Food Network. Food 2 is an amazing website/blog dedicated to anything food-related. They were nice enough to ask me to do a post about the new Sex and the City movie with a cupcake spin, and I was happy to oblige.

Head over to check it out! Food 2 Sex and the City 2

Pictures from the FCI Fondant Class

2010-05-19T21:09:00.007-04:00

French Culinary Institute has a lot of amateur pastry and culinary classes, and for five weeks in April and May, I was fortunate enough to be able to volunteer to assist Chef Cynthia Peithman's amateur fondant class. The classes were on Saturdays, and it was a long day having 2 back to back classes. Being in school from 8:00 am until 9-10 on Saturdays wasn't fun, but it was well worth it.

Chef Cynthia is my Level 1 head instructor, but she's also a reknowned cake artist, and she had a wealth of knowledge to share with the 22 students who enrolled in the fondant course. Just watching the class alone was really informative for me. I've dabbled with fondant, but have never quite mastered it, and I think a lot of the tips and tricks Chef Cynthia shared will prove to be useful in my next fondant endeavor.

I took some pictures of the finished cakes the students made. Some of their talent really blew me away. A sampling of the finished cakes below:

Week 18: End of Petit Fours & Exam

2010-05-16T22:22:00.007-04:00

Last week was the end of the petit four unit, and the exam was on Saturday.

We started off the week with some caramel mou (pronounced moo). It's a soft caramel that has chocolate and butter mixed into the cooked caramel, which is then poured out and cut into pieces when it cools. It sort of had the texture and taste of fudge. On one of our pieces, we sprinkled fleur de sel over top the caramel mou. I just love the combo of sweet and salty. Not my favorite item of the week though. I don't think this was really special enough to warrant making again.

The lemon cookies were sandwiched with raspberry jam and dipped in chocolate. They were a little bigger than the size of a dime, which means they were teeny tiny. If I made these again, I would make them bigger. American cookie-sized, as I call it.

We also made some glazed petit fours - pyramids, domes, and the traditional petit four cakes I initially thought covered the whole petit four spectrum. The picture below shows the pyramids and domes before they were glazed in chocolate.

Once the pyramids were glazed and set, we cut them into small, bite-sized pieces. There were three buttercream flavors in this one - raspberry, vanilla bean, and chocolate. This was one of my favorite items from all of Level 1.

These iced petit fours are soooo cute. I can't wait to make them again for a fancy tea party (now I just need an excuse to actually have a tea party). The cake was an almond sponge, sandwiched with raspberry jam, with a layer of marzipan on top. The whole thing is then covered with an icing glaze, and decorated individually. They are VERY time-consuming.

Thursday we "trayed up" all the items we had stowed the prior Saturday and Tuesday.

Thursday night we also made Chef Cynthia's tahini cookies. Tahini is a paste made from sesame seeds, and it's used in making hummus. I wasn't sure if I would like tahini and how it would work in a cookie, but these were awesome. The tahini is kind of nutty and I sandwiched them with grape jelly, so it was reminiscent of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

I previously mentioned last Saturday's petit four exam, and what a disaster it was. It would take way too much space here to describe all of what went wrong, so I won't. If I had to give the incoming Level 1 students any advice, it would be: Do not drink on the night before an exam. It was a really, really bad idea. I had an off-the-charts hangover, the kitchen was hotter than normal, and everything was just going wrong. In addition to three petit fours we picked at random, we also had to prepare an original petit four of our choice.

My three random picks were chocolate macarons, tartelettes with passion fruit curd, and raisin cookies. My original petit four was a tartelette with a tangerine honey caramel and chocolate ganache, sprinkled with citrus fleur de sel. The flavors paired really well together, and it was by far the biggest success on my tray. As much as it was 4 hours of baking misery, my evaluation by Chef Cynthia went pretty well. There was no hiding the fact that my chocolate macarons were burnt, but she was a big fan of everything else.

My tartelettes next to my partner Aoi's mochi

Some other classmates' trays:

Week 17: More Petit Fours

2010-05-12T20:36:00.003-04:00

Week 17 continued with petit fours, and it was delicious. Mini cookies, cakes, candies...what's not to like?

We started off the week with langues de chats (cat's tongues....ok maybe this sounds gross), pate de fruits (jelly candies for grown ups), and coconut macaroons dipped in chocolate. The pate de fruits my partner and I made was raspberry apple and extremely sugary and addicting.

On Thursday, we made our Opera cakes. Opera cake is made with a hazelnut cake layered with coffee buttercream and chocolate ganache and then the top is glazed with chocolate. The whole cake is then cut into bite-sized pieces and decorated with chocolate piping. This was my coworkers' favorite item of the week. It seems like the inherently know which items took the most amount of time and effort to make, and pick those as their favorites.

On Thursday, we also made nougat, a candy made from basically sugar and nuts. We used a combination of whole roasted nuts- almonds, pistachios, hazelnuts, and some I'm probably forgetting. Then we cooked two sugars to different temperatures - one just sugar and the other with honey (which has a lower browning temperature than sugar), and poured them over an egg white foam. Once the mixture was whipped to be white and fluffy, we added the nuts, and poured it out over a nonstick surface. The nougat is dusted on both sides with A LOT of cornstarch, which I found to be odd and kind of unappetizing, and then cut into pieces. Alas, I will never know though because with all the nuts in this candy, it was strictly off-limits for me. Judging by the rate my classmates were eating it, however, it seems like the cornstarch couldn't have been that bad. I got a major workout cutting the nougat - it was HARD.

We also made a coconut version of puff pastry Thursday, which unfortunately I forgot to take pictures of my tiny bear claws and vol au vents. I also just forgot about them, leaving them in class for I guess whoever came in after us. The palmiers made it onto our tray though. We also made madeleines - which immediately made me think of this Friends episode where Freddie Prinze Jr. plays the male nanny who bakes madeleines. "Lighter than air... But that's not the point." (For my Friends-loving friends).

My team's tray. Left to right: nougat, coconut macaroons, palmiers,
langues de chat, opera cake, madeleines, pate de fruits

Whole class's trays

Saturday we tackled two types of cookies using a chocolate and vanilla dough together: swirls and checkerboards. These cookies look pretty, but they were a serious pain. Neither of the doughs wanted to roll out nicely, and it took a lot of effort to get the final results. In order to speed along the process, I felt the need to consume half the raw cookie dough (it was so good...my inner 8 year old was exposed, sneaking pieces of cookie dough). Unfortunately, the dough tasted better than the baked cookies (isn't that the worst?), which were just sort of boring.

Florentine is another sort of candy we made with a sweet tart dough base with a caramel mixed with almonds and candied orange peel poured over the baked dough. It's then returned to the oven for some final baking.

I'm almost all caught up with my petit fours posts! One more left, this past week that ended with our exam (which was one of the worst baking days I've ever had). Stay tuned for that sure to be dramatic story (sorry, Dad, I'll try to tone down the drama).

Week 16: Breads Exam & Petit Fours

2010-05-10T20:43:00.004-04:00

I am SO behind on my blogging! Life has been particularly crazy lately with school and work, but I'm going to try to get caught up by the end of the week.

Week 16 (almost 3 weeks ago!) was the end of the breads unit and the start of petit fours, which are bite-sized desserts.

The bread exam went well, but we had temperature issues all night long. My test items were croissants, chocolate croissants, petit pains (small rolls), and lemon poppy seed muffins. Because everyone was in and out of the proof boxes and ovens all night long, both had temperatures way too low, and the baking was very challenging. My croissants didn't come out as well as I had hoped, but the overall end result was okay.

The best part of the breads exam was that we all made individual pizzas using the pizza dough we made the previous class. Mine had mozzarella and pepperoni on half.

The end of breads allowed us to move on to petit fours. Previously when I thought of petit fours, I thought they were those tiny iced cakes that are served at tea parties. Turns out they are any bite-sized dessert.

First up was financiers. They're mini hazelnut cakes with a small piece of fruit on top of the cakes. We used rhubarb and pineapple.

We also made palets au raisin (raisin cookies), but my team used dried cherries instead of raisins though, so I guess that made these palets au cerise. They were coated in a rum glaze. These were really good, but only about the size of a quarter so it was too easy to eat 20 of them without realizing what you're doing. That was actually the problem with all the petit fours.

Tuiles are crisp almond "cookies" made with butter, sugar, and almonds. They're baked, and then molded on a tuile mold to have their curved shape. They reminded me of Pringles because of the shape.

Ah, passion fruit curd. My new favorite thing in life. We filled these mini tart shells (called barquettes (French for ships) with the curd and then put fresh strawberries and raspberries on top. I want to put passion fruit on everything from now on.

I was so excited to make macarons! I had previously made them and posted the results here, and it was great making them again. These traditional macarons, made with almond flour, were tinted pink (or color of your choice) and the filled with either raspberry jam or passion fruit curd.

We also made these almond macarons which were used two ways. With some of them we made a sandwich with chocolate ganache. Everyone in the class thought they looked like mini burgers. They've never seen my mini burger cupcakes I guess.

We also made Sarah Bernhardts with the almond macarons, using them as a base for a pyramid of chocolate ganache, that was then covered in a chocolate coating. Did I mention all these desserts are bite-sized? As in, 30 seconds and 10 are gone??

One of the key portions of the petit four unit was learning to "tray up," meaning arranging these petit fours on a pretty tray. There needs to be the same number of each item, and it needs to look nice and organized.

For LA Dwellers, Soap Lovers, and Cupcake Aficionados

2010-05-04T23:56:00.002-04:00

General Hospital stars with their namesake cupcake

One of the blogs I read, Food 2, had a really great post about a cupcake Vanilla Bake Shop (in Santa Monica) came up with in honor of an on-screen couple from the soap opera, General Hospital. I wanted to share because it had the recipe and an interesting interview. And because I've been totally negligent about my own blogging lately (internet issues for the past few days!). I hope to get a post up about the end of breads and the start of petit fours, but in the mean time, I can blog about other great baked goods that catch my eye.

I grew up watching soap operas with my mom, specifically All My Children. Funny story...my brother would also watch them during the day with my mom, and my dad had to put a ban on All My Children for Eric when he started talking about Adam Chandler as if he was someone we knew. (Sorry, Eric.)

Anyway, the "Lante" cupcake is a dark chocolate cupcake with a mascarpone filling and a chocolate hazelnut buttercream with chocolate pearls. Minus the hazelnut (which will send me running for the Benadryl), that sounds amazing. Fortunately, the recipe's there too. I think I'll be trying a nut-free adaptation of that in the future. For any readers who live in or near LA, Vanilla Bake Shop is giving away the Lante cupcake to the first 200 people who show up on May 5. Definitely worth checking out if you're in the area!

This one's for you Eric...

The Skillet Winner!!!

2010-04-30T18:29:00.000-04:00

As promised, I picked a winner shortly after 3:00 today (work delayed it a bit). Using random.org, a winner was selected.

The lucky winner is commenter #5 - throuthehaze! Congratulations! I'll be in contact with you soon to get your contact info to pass on to CSN so they can be sending you your skillet! If you end up making the tarte tatin, send pics!!

Thanks everyone for entering, and a big thank you to CSN and Cookware.com!

I have a lot of photos to upload from the past two weeks of school, so check back soon!

Skillet Giveaway and Tarte Tatin!

2010-04-26T08:45:00.002-04:00

I mentioned a couple weeks ago that CSN had contacted me, wanting me to do a product review from their site cookware.com and host a giveaway on my blog. Anxious to remake the tarte tatin I loved in the puff pastry unit, I selected a nonstick skillet. If you're impatient and want to get straight to the details of the giveaway, scroll down to the bottom of this post.

The skillet is a nonstick Farberware skillet. It's very lightweight, but felt sturdy when I was using it. And it is certainly nonstick. This tarte has a lot of gooey caramel that usually sticks to the bottom of the pan when it's flipped over (tarte tatin is an apple tart that is baked in a skillet, upside down, and then flipped over), but when I flipped it over this time, there was no caramel left on the bottom. I think it's pretty great so far, and can't wait to use it more. The only drawback to the pan though is that the handle is metal, and it can get really hot when you use it. This is true of almost all skillets, and all the pots and pans we use at FCI, but I felt that I should point it out.

Tarte fresh out of the oven, look at how clean the skillet looks

Ok, time for the recipe. Whether or not you win the skillet, I highly recommend trying this out. It's my perfect dessert - simple, delicious, and apple. Before we go into the details, I have a confession to make...I used store-bought frozen puff pastry. I fully intended making my own, but it's a time consuming process, and time is not in abundance for me lately. If you can make your own, I recommend doing it, but if you don't have time, frozen puff pastry will work just fine.

Shhhhh...don't tell Chef Cynthia

Ingredients:

Pastry dough, enough to cover the pan (I used puff pastry, but you could use a pate sucree or pate brisee)
5 tbsp unsalted butter, cut in pieces
1 1/4 c sugar
5 Golden Delicious apples
1 tbsp vanilla extract

Tarte covered in puff pastry, before going into the oven

Directions:

1. Roll out puff pastry or thaw if you are using store-bought.
2. Peel, halve, and core the apples.
3. Put the apple halves round side down in the pan (crowd them in there together, I only used 4 apples in the 12" pan, but wished I had 1 more).
4. Put the pan on the stovetop over medium heat. When the apples start to brown, add the sugar.
5. Lower the heat and cook until the sugar caramelizes.6. Add the tbsp of vanilla extract over the top of the apples.
7. Remove the pan from the heat and allow to cool.
8. Cover the apples with the puff pastry, tucking the extra into the pan (do not allow pastry to hang over the edge of the pan).
9. Bake the tart at 350 degrees for 25-30 minutes, or until the pastry is nicely browned and baked through.
10. Remove the tart from the oven and immediately unmold it onto a plate or serving dish. Be very careful - the caramel will be extremely hot. I put the plate over top the pan and then in one rapid motion (wearing oven mitts), flip it over.

Finished product!

Ok, so now the good part, the giveaway! It's very simple to enter - just leave your name and email address in the comments section, and I'll use a random number generator to pick the winner. Tarte tatin has been my favorite dessert featured on my blog, so feel free to let me know what yours has been in the comments. You have until this Friday at 3:00 pm EST. One entry per person! Good luck!

Week 15: Breads

2010-04-25T20:38:00.003-04:00

I am so behind in my blogging! For all of you who have been anxiously awaiting the giveaway, look for that post tomorrow morning - my apple tarte tatin is in the oven as I write this! Everything has been so busy, and last weekend I went up to Boston for Marathon Monday.

Two weeks ago was the last week of breads. I'm happy to have moved on from breads; I didn't find them terrible exciting (or pretty to look at on this blog). Tuesday we baked the Danish we had made the week before, and they were really great for breakfast the next day. On Wednesday, I came into work with a HUGE tray of Danish, croissants, and other assorted breads. My brother's girlfriend Meghann traveled into the city with me that morning, and at one point in Port Authority, she was like "People are staring at you..." It happens a lot when I'm coming into the city on mornings after class.

On Tuesday, we also made an oat bread. I haven't actually tried this yet. I just took it out of my freezer today to have for breakfast toast this week.

This tarte flambe was really great. It was like a better pizza. It had a custard made with creme fraiche and fromage blanc, bacon, and gruyere cheese. Basically, how could it not taste amazing. This was similar to the taste of the quiche Lorraine I liked so much during the tarts unit.

We made the five grain rolls on Tuesday and baked them Thursday. These were a little bit too healthy for my liking. As Chef Cynthia said, it felt like work eating this roll. I felt significantly healthier after one of them though.

I'm not a huge fan of banana anything, but I'm slowly warming up to them, and these banana crumb muffins definitely helped. The crumbs are this amazing mixture of almond flour, sugar, butter, and cake flour. The recipe is just equal parts of all four and can be used on a variety of different muffins, pies, crisps, etc.

Thursday, we also made soft rolls, ciabatta, pissaladiere, and a few variations of sweet potato brioche! As you can tell it was a really busy class. These soft rolls are one of my favorite types of bread. It's an enriched bread, made with butter, eggs, and sugar. The inside was really soft (like the name suggest), and tasted great with a bit of butter. Then again, what doesn't taste great with a bit of butter?

Thankfully with everything else we had on the agenda Tuesday night, the ciabatta was really easy to make. You just mix the ingredients together, leave it on your station, and turn the dough every now and then. The result was a chewy, awesome bread.

I was about as uninterested in the pissaladiere as I could be. Made with sauteed onions, anchovies, and nicoise olives, there was nothing on this that I eat. These were way overbaked though, so the majority of the class's ended in the compost bin. This was obviously not going to be the week I started eating anchovies.

We had made a brioche dough made with sweet potato puree. I was expecting it to taste a lot more like sweet potatoes, but it tasted like the first brioche we made. We made a few different things with the dough. My favorite was a craquelin, which is made by kneading sugar cubes that had been macerated in orange liquor and orange zest into the dough. When the bread bakes, the sugar cubes melt into this delicious gooey spot.

With the sweet potato brioche dough, we also made a sweet and savory roll. The sweet had sweet potato pastry cream piped on top, and the savory was filled with sauteed shallots and blue cheese.

Saturday's class we made lemon poppy seed muffins, corn bread muffins, English muffins, and focaccia bread. Due to the hectic pace of class and trying to get out on time to make my bus to Boston, I forgot to take pictures of both the English muffins and corn bread. The English muffins were a happy surprise. I've never really enjoyed the Thomas' version. They're just so dry and boring. The ones in our curriculum though are fried in corn oil (a major surprise to me) and then baked. As with almost anything fried, I really loved these, but they were not like the "traditional" English muffins most people know.

We made a sweet focaccia with apples, cinnamon sugar, and walnuts (not on my half) and a savory one with tomato and rosemary. I only have a picture of the apple one because my partner and I "lost" our tomato one under our station - totally forgetting to put it in the oven. Oh well, the apple one was pretty good.

I went to college in Boston (go BU!) and took the bus ride between Boston and New York plenty of times. I HATE buses, and it always happens that as soon as I get on the bus, I get struck with hunger. And then, invariably, the trip takes way longer than the four and a half hours it's supposed to. I also tend to have the strangest person on the bus choose the seat next to mine. The trip last Saturday up was significantly better being as I had a bag full of muffins and my friend Vica traveling with me. I can't say the same for the ride back on Tuesday, when we were sitting next to the bathroom in the middle of what felt like a nursery school. Without a bag of breads.

Stay Tuned...

2010-04-14T22:24:00.003-04:00

I know the CSN giveaway was supposed to be this week, but my skillet is still en route, and I can't make the tarte tatin without it! There was a slight hold up because we had to switch products (the cast iron was on back order). The new skillet is a bit of an upgrade and is this Farberware Premium Nonstick Skillet:

Check back next week for the chance to win!

Week 14: Cakes Exam & the Return to Breads

2010-04-12T21:37:00.004-04:00

Last Tuesday was our exam for Cakes I. We knew going into the practical exam that we would need to recreate the first cake we made in the unit - a genoise with pate a bombe buttercream and raspberry jam filling.

The exam went pretty smoothly. My genoise rose really nicely, and my buttercream was smooth (with only slightly visible pieces of butter in it). We also needed to create two roses out of marzipan and write "Happy Birthday" on it. We hadn't made the roses before, only saw a brief demo the class before, so we weren't being graded on them. Despite that, most of us still spent a large amount of time attempting to perfect these roses. I think my handwriting on the cake was nicer than my real handwriting.

Inside my exam cake

After the first half of the cakes unit, we moved back to breads. Our first half of the unit was viennoiserie (enriched breads), and this time we're doing lean breads.

Irish soda bread isn't a lean bread; it's a quick bread. It's made with baking soda, which is where the name comes from. This version had dried currants and caraway seeds in it, giving it an interesting taste. At first, I wasn't sure if I liked it, but by the third bite, it had grown on me. If I made it again, I think I'd go with the more traditional raisins and nix the caraway seeds.

Petit pains were the first real lean breads we made. They're like mini baguettes, or just a traditional dinner roll.

The next day I used one of the petit pains to make my usual turkey sandwich. It made for a nice upgrade from my usual boring wrap. There's definitely a satisfaction in making your own bread.

This bread is pain de Provence, made with olives and herbs de Provence (a mix of lavender, thyme, savory, fennel, basil and other herbs). When we were making this bread, my partner and I went to turn it onto the table to finish kneading, the dough was almost a soup-like consistency. We're still not sure what happened to it, but once we kneaded in some additional flour, it was fine. I'm not a fan of olives, so I mailed the extra loaf to my mom, who loves olive bread.

Saturday we made some baguettes, the traditional French bread. French Culinary Institute has a really amazing bread baking program and when I toured the school, my admissions rep gave me a baguette from the bread kitchen. That loaf of bread was so good, I ate almost all of it on my subway ride home. Very embarrassing when I realized people were staring. Our baguettes were good, but not quite the same. The bread kitchens have special ovens that release steam, and the ovens the pastry students use don't have this. Interestingly, when I read Julia Child's autobiography, it detailed her quest to develop a recipe that replicated French baguettes in American kitchens. The preliminary recipe called for dropping a heated asbestos tile into a pan of water to produce the steam. Once asbestos was discovered to be harmful to you, the recipe replaced it with a quarry tile.

Bagels always seemed like one of those things that must be way too difficult to make. These were relatively easy, and I can't wait to make them again. We made variations of plain - with seeds or cinnamon sugar on top. I was going to make cinnamon raisin bagels (my favorite) Sunday, but woke up completely exhausted and did very little but nap all day. The dough was VERY hard though, kind of like kneading a rock, and I woke up Sunday morning with really sore forearms and heels of my hands. I didn't even know those muscles existed!

While in class Saturday, Chef Cynthia set up a spread of cream cheese, salmon, tomatoes, and various other bagel toppings. I had an awesome plain bagel with cream cheese and tomato. Half way through the bagel, I turned to my partner and was like, "Know when you're eating something and it's so good that you feel sad that at some point it's going to be gone? That's how I feel about this bagel."

We made our danishes, but there was no time to bake them, so they're in the freezer awaiting baking tomorrow. We tried out various shapes including bear claw, pin wheel, and turnover. We used a variety of fillings such as cheese, fruit, pastry cream, and almond cream. I'm excited to bake these, but have a feeling the fruit ones are going to explode all over the other ones in the oven. When we bake these tomorrow, I'm going to be sure to keep those as far away as the others as possible.

Mets Birthday Cake

2010-04-11T21:59:00.002-04:00

It's been pretty hard for me to do any sort of baking outside class. When it comes to my free time, baking is low on the priority list after about 15-20 hours of class time a week. Last week, I had a friend's birthday party and knew I wanted to make a cake. I allotted myself 5 hours over 3 days to get it done. I must be getting better with sticking to a schedule because that's about all it took.

My friend Jeremy is a huge Mets fan (the type that goes down to watch them during Spring training), so I knew it had to be a Mets cake. I baked a vanilla bean cake on Wednesday and stored it in the freezer for the weekend. On Friday, I frosted the cake and started on the logo, which I made out of fondant. I ran out of powdered sugar, so I saved all the royal icing detail for Saturday.

After class Saturday, I made the royal icing and outlined the logo in white and did the lettering on the side of the cake in orange. The hardest part about making this cake was carrying it. After a week of class that had already left my arms dead, I had to carry this cake, which weighed about 20 pounds, from Hoboken to Brooklyn (albeit via subway). Jeremy was really surprised and seemed impressed though, so it was totally worth the shaky arms. I wish I had taken a better pic...the only one I remembered to snap was with my iPhone.

Week 13: Cakes, Cakes, Cakes

2010-04-07T21:34:00.004-04:00

First of all, this is my 100th blog post!!! I can't believe I've had that much to say on the topic of cupcakes, and other desserts (although my parents probably can).

Moving on... Week 13 (which didn't feel as unlucky as the number would suggest) was a continuation of the first half of our cakes unit. The cakes we've made have been really beautiful, and pretty delicious.

At the beginning of last week, I had a lot of cakes stored in the freezer from the weekend. The fruit mousse miroir (French word for mirror) was one I was really looking forward to making. It's on the cover of the French Culinary Institute's Fundamental Techniques of Classic Pastry Arts, it's definitely an eye-catching dessert. Mine wasn't quite as perfect looking as the book cover, but everyone at my Easter was pretty impressed. I also had the pate a cornet chocolate mousse cake I showed a picture of last week. In order to properly finish it, I woke up early Tuesday before work to hand whip cream to add to the top. That's dedication to my coworkers.

Fruit Mousse Miroir (made with cassis)

Completed Chocolate Mousse Cake -dark & white chocolate

Tuesday was a day of more traditional American cakes - chocolate cupcakes, carrot cake, and crumb cake.

I almost always prefer vanilla over chocolate, but these chocolate cupcakes surprised me. I mostly find chocolate cake to be just "eh." These were really moist and fudgey. Instead of a heavy frosting, we topped these with a chocolate glaze. They made a pretty good dinner that night.

I don't think I've ever eaten carrot cake. It's usually filled with nuts, which makes it off limits to me. This one had walnuts, so I had to rely on my coworkers to test the finished product and vouch for it. I wasn't a huge fan of this cream cheese frosting. I like my cream cheese frosting simple - butter, cream cheese, sugar and vanilla. This one had some lemon zest, which I don't like in frosting. I've made my peace with it in cakes, but not frosting.

We also made tiny marzipan carrots. My classmates and I find modeling things out of marzipan hilarious for some reason, and it always make us giddy when we get the chance.

The pecan crumb cake was another one I couldn't try, but it got pretty good reviews from my coworkers. With all the pastries they're eating these past few months, they're becoming pretty critical, in a good way. I feel I can rely on them to tell me what should be on the "bake again" list and which I should start looking for a new recipe.

This was a sachertorte, which is apparently well known as being able to keep for a very long time. Like for months. You can send this sachertorte around the world and back. It's a pretty dense chocolate cake (which I found to be a little too dry...especially after those awesome chocolate cupcakes), filled with apricot jam, covered in the jam, and then covered with a chocolate glaze. Traditionally, the word Sacher is written on it, as it was created by the Sacher hotel in Vienna. The hotel actually still sells sachertortes, and you can order them online.

This Dobos torte is a Hungarian cake that is comprised of 5 layers of sponge cake (they reminded me of pancakes), chocolate buttercream, and a 6th layer of sponge cake covered in caramel and cut in wedges.

Sunken flourless chocolate cake

Can't even tell it fell

The flourless chocolate cake came out of the oven and it looked like it rose so high while baking. Just as Chef Cynthia warned us though, it immediately began to deflate, sinking in the middle. It's supposed to do this, but to "cover it up," we covered the cake with creme d'or (chocolate whipped cream), and then chocolate meringue rods we had baked. It sort of looked like a forest to me. This was one of the 3 cakes I served for Easter.

The third and final cake that was served on Easter was this chocolate hazelnut mousse cake. In order to do the outside of the cake, we had splattered some white and milk chocolate down on a sheet pan, then when that set, spread dark chocolate on top. When that was hard, we cracked it into pieces to attach to the sides of the cake.

Upcoming Tarte Tatin Recipe & Product Giveaway!!

2010-04-05T22:10:00.009-04:00

Remember this from my puff pastry unit? It was a delicious blend of apples, puff pastry, caramel, and apple brandy, and I was lucky enough to have it in my apartment when I was snowed in during the last snow storm. It was so amazing that I ate the whole thing by myself. In one day. I'm not too embarrassed to admit that. I've been wanting to recreate that tarte tatin (upside down apple tart) since that day, but haven't had a cast iron skillet that the recipe needed. I've had my eye on one like this, but acquiring one keeps slipping my mind.

Last week I was contacted by CSN, one of the internet's largest home and office goods distributors. In addition to an awesome selection of cookware and bakeware, they have a site dedictated to home bars. I'm thinking one of the smaller ones would look great in my apartment. The best part is they want me to do a product review and giveaway on Cupcake Obsessed! I was so excited to be able to share something with my readers, and began perusing one of their sites, Cookware.com. I was delighted and overwhelmed with all the amazing baking products they offer; it's really incredible. They have 222 results for spatulas alone!! After spending last week browsing some kitchenware stores in New York City, CSN's prices were also a major relief to me. They have a wide selection of sale items, and everything feels reasonably priced.

After browsing the incredible selection and falling in love with this, these, and this, I decided that this cast iron skillet should be the featured giveaway. It's an item that everyone needs, if only to make the tarte tatin. Fortunately, you can make a ton more in a skillet like this.

Next week I will be featuring the recipe for the tarte tatin and giving away one Universal Housewares 10.5" skillet to 1 lucky blog reader, complimentary of CSN. Stay tuned next week for your chance to enter!

Week 11: Cakes I

2010-03-28T18:38:00.005-04:00

The cakes portion of our program is divided into two portions, separated by the second half of the bread unit. Making cakes are really time consuming. One cake we made this week had seven different components that had to be made. I figure it probably took about 3 hours of actual working in order to make that cake.

On Tuesday, the theme seemed to be chocolate. I like chocolate (not as much as vanilla), but working with it is just messy. Tuesday night I had to apply stain spray to my whole uniform. The first cake was a chocolate ganache cake. We built the cake in a ring mold using layers of chocolate genoise and chocolate ganache. Once the cake set in the freezer, we took it out of the mold and poured a chocolate glaze over the entire thing.

Using organic roses (so that they're not sprayed with pesticides), we made candied flower petals. We took the petals and brushed them with egg whites and then rolled them in superfine sugar. This was a really pretty and easy touch to add to the top of the cake.

Sliced Ganache Cake

The second chocolate cake was the one that had seven components was the Marjolaine. We made the chocolate genoise and the nut meringue layers the class before. From bottom to top it was: chocolate genoise (cake), chocolate ganache, nut meringue, chocolate whipped cream, nut meringue, praline buttercream, nut meringue, whipped cream, and a last nut meringue. The whole thing was then covered in the praline buttercream and coated with the chocolate glaze. This was a really decadent cake. And being as it took so long to make, a special occasion cake.

Marjolaine

Inside the Marjolaine

Next up for the week was our Charlotte Russe. The outside was built out of ladyfingers and inside was a white peach Bavarian (similar to a mousse). Both the ladyfingers and the Bavarian were amazing. It was a really fresh-tasting cake. I could see myself eating this in the summer. My ladyfinger piping skills needs some work, so I think I will be making it again.

Thursday night I had a really rough night at class. One of those nights where I was just like "whyyyyy did I come? Why am I not at the bar with my friends??" I love pastry school, and I'm so happy I made this decision to enroll. That said, not every class is a walk in the park. On Thursday, my jaconde (a very thin sheet cake we were using for two different cakes) was over-baked (each class has two assigned people to be bakers) and then another classmate carelessly unmolded my cake and broke it into many pieces. After that, the cake was basically unusable. I'm a total perfectionist when it comes to baking and school, so I was pretty unhappy about this. I ended up being able to scavenge some of my classmate's leftovers in order to make both of my cakes.

The Charlotte Royale was one of the cakes we made with the jaconde. We made a jelly roll using the cake and apricot jam. The log was cut into thin slices and we lined a bowl with them. The cake was them filled with a vanilla Bavarian cream with a round of white genoise placed for what would become the bottom of the cake. Once the cake set in the freezer, we flipped it over out of the bowl. I'm not sure yet how this cake tastes (it's one of three in my freezer currently), but it looks like a brain. If we had used red raspberry jam, this would have been the perfect Halloween cake. Right next to the peeled grape "eye balls."

Silpat with just the chocolate batter on it

Baked pattern cake

The next cake was one I was really excited to learn how to make. When I lived in Boston, there was this amazing dessert bar/bakery called Finale and they always had these type of cakes in the display case where the outside was a patterned cake. I never had any idea of how they got the cake baked into that pattern, but now I know the secret. Using a stencil and some chocolate cake batter (pate a cornet to be exact), you apply the chocolate to the Silpat (nonstick liner) and then freeze it. Once it's frozen, you put a white batter on top of the chocolate design, spread it thin, and then bake it. It's amazing!

This is the unfinished chocolate mousse cake that is currently in my freezer. I texted my roommate on Saturday, "If you're feeling inclined to bring home anything that needs to be frozen, don't." We have this cake, a Charlotte Russe, and a Charlotte Royale in the freezer taking up basically every inch of space. The chocolate mousse cake has white chocolate and chocolate mousse on the inside. Our mousse came out not as great as we had hoped, but tasted great. At some point this week, I'll finish that cake with some whipped cream and bring it to work. I'm really enjoying cakes so far. It's rewarding to have all the different components come together into something beautiful. This week we tackle some traditional American cakes, which will be a nice break from the plain and boring genoise!

Week 11: End of Viennoiserie and Start of Cakes I

2010-03-24T21:17:00.006-04:00

Thank God viennoiserie has ended. I love it, don't get me wrong, but I just can't eat that much of it before I need to order my chef pants in several sizes larger. Last week we had one more class of viennoiserie, and then we started cakes on Thursday. I'm really excited for the start of cakes; it finally feels like we're getting to more challenging parts of the curriculum.

Using some of our brioche dough, we made a brioche fruit tart. The base was the brioche, and it was covered with some pastry cream, apricots, and blueberries before being baked. This was a big hit in my office. I really love apricots; they remind me of 5th grade. In 5th grade, I ate a peanut butter and apricot sandwich every day for lunch. I'd get stuck in year-long kicks...one year cream cheese and grape jelly, another year just cheese on white bread. The apricot year was probably one of my healthier ones.

We also made a pannetone, which is a traditional Italian bread made at Christmas time. As far as breadish cakes with raisins go, I much preferred the kugelhopf, which was a lot more moist. The picture above was after the pannetone got squished in my tote on the trek from school to home to work. It was initially less misshapen.

Our last bread was a pain de mie, or Pullman loaf. This is a pretty simple white bread. Much better than Wonder Bread (as much as I love it). I had to give the majority of this loaf to a coworker to take home or else I would have made the whole thing into grilled cheese.

These ruche, or beehives, were so cute, and delicious. On the inside was 3 layers of brioche that was soaked with a honey/wine/lavender liquid. Those three things are delicious together. The layers were sandwiched with some creme legere (lightened pastry cream). The whole thing was then covered with a meringue, and then we took a blowtorch to it. I really love the blowtorch. Almost as much as I love this meringue. It tastes exactly like marshmallow fluff. We had made some bees out of marzipan to put on the hives the class before. Not realizing we were going to be making mini beehives, mine were on the larger side. Chef Cynthia called them killer bees.

Close up of the tiny bee face

Thursday was the start of cakes, which like I said before, is really exciting. I've seen pictures of what we'll be making, and some of it is really beautiful. All this is working up to when we eventually make a 3 tier wedding cake in Level 2.

Our first cake we made was a traditional genoise (pronounced jen-wahz). A genoise is a plain cake that is leavened simply with a meringue. There is usually no flavor added to the cake before it bakes. These cakes are frequently soaked in a simple syrup (sugar) or a flavored syrup. I will go on record and say that this cake sucks. It's dry and flavorless. I can't really see myself using this type of cake unless I'm compelled to for school. This particular cake in the picture was a plain genoise soaked in a raspberry liquor syrup with raspberry filling and a standard buttercream. Don't get me started on this pate a bombe buttercream either. My partner and I refer to it as "sugar flavored with butter." Not a good thing.

So cakes got off to a slow start, for me at least. We made these poundcakes, individual size. I LOVE poundcake. I would eat it everyday for breakfast if it wouldn't mean committing to being compared to Shamu for the rest of my life. Unfortunately, there was just something not right about these poundcakes. The texture was more like cornbread, then the buttery, soft poundcake I like.

To redeem the slow start of cakes, there was this dacquoise. A dacquoise is a cake made up of layers of meringue and buttercream. In this case, it was almond meringues and coffee buttercream. Being allergic to nuts, I couldn't try the whole cake, but the coffee buttercream was an improvement from the butter-sugar. I served this to my parents on Sunday, and they declared it the best dessert I've ever made. That's pretty huge being as I've made a lot of things they've sampled.

Continuing on the upswing was the angel food cake. This one was everything you'd want- great flavor and light, airy texture.

Also on Sunday for my parents visit, I got some low fat Cool Whip (I would have preferred homemade whipped cream, but cut backs need to come somewhere) and fresh strawberries and made the angel food cake into a really simple layer cake. This was hands down my favorite creation of the week.

Airmail Cosmopolitan Cupcakes

2010-03-21T21:10:00.002-04:00

Last weekend, I baked some cosmopolitan cupcakes in jars to mail out to my aunt's coworker. During her training process, this woman had been particularly helpful and my aunt wanted to send her something to thank her.

Dozen cupcakes boxed up and ready to ship

After discussing a few flavor options, we settled on my cosmopolitan cupcakes, the very first cupcake I ever posted on this blog. They are raspberry cake with lime frosting and hot pink sanding sugar sprinkled on top.

Before the lid went on

It's been really hard to find time/energy to bake anything outside of class, so I was happy for this opportunity. These went out on Monday and were received in Pennsylvania on Tuesday. Hopefully they were enjoyed!

Week 10: Viennoiserie

2010-03-20T21:06:00.005-04:00

Week 10 continued with viennoiserie - breakfast pastry, generally enriched breads. This unit was not kind on my waistline.

These were raisin nut danishes...a big hit at my office. At the beginning of this unit, our class soaked a large container of raisins in rum to use in various recipes. They were a really great addition to everything we used them in.

Fruitcake is one of those things that the mere mention of elicits groans and eye-rolling. I was doubtful too, but this fruitcake has totally changed my opinion. It was a butter cake base with dried cherries, raisins, pears, and apricots. I want to make one of these cakes for everyone I know-- a one woman crusade to reverse the opinion of fruitcake forever.

The challah bread was really good. Very rich and soft. Chef Toni taught us how to do the more complicated 6 strand braid for this loaf. Having never really mastered the art of French braiding hair, I didn't feel very hopeful that I would be able to do this. My braid turned out pretty well though.

Kugelhopf

Kugelhopf is a traditional Austrian bread, that's kind of like a cross between a bread and a cake, and contains more of the rum raisins. I really loved this bread; it was moist and had a really tender crumb. Definitely one of my favorites of the week.

Brioche was sort of similar to the challah to me, but better. It was extremely soft and buttery. I think I ate half the loaf. Like I said, my waist is looking for a reprieve from breads.

These brioche a tete are supposed to look like little heads (tete means head in French). I'm not sure why you'd want to eat something that resembled a head, but this is just another quirky example of French-named pastries. Mine looked basically nothing like they're supposed to look like. I'm okay with having not yet mastered the art of making breads that look like heads.

The only scones I had ever had came from Starbucks. I like Starbucks for some things, but their pastries are not one of them. Their scones had led me to believe all scones were like hard, dry rocks. Not so with these currant scones. They were really delicious with a little bit of strawberry jam. Chef Cynthia made us her variation of this recipe, which was even more moist and amazing. I'm a new scone convert.

Stollen is another bread like the fruitcake, a cake-ish bread filled with dried fruits and nuts. The whole thing is then covered in melted butter and rolled in powdered sugar. It's a traditional Christmas bread, and is supposed to look like the baby Jesus swaddled in a blanket. I'm not sure I saw the resemblance. Maybe if you squinted and turned your head to the side.

Croissants are one of my favorite pleasures in life. Even bad croissants usually taste good. And these that we made in class were really terrific croissants. Croissants are made similarly to puff pastry - layers of dough and butter rolled out, and folded, but they have yeast added to help with the rise. We made both traditional croissants and pain au chocolat (chocolate croissants). The French traditionally bake their croissants (and other pastries) a deeper brown color than most of us are used to, but I think this just made them even better.

I used the leftover croissants to make croissant French toast Sunday morning for my parents. There's this restaurant in Hoboken, Amanda's, and they make the absolute best brunch. My favorite thing there is the croissant French toast with strawberry compote, and I tried to recreate that. Mine was good, but Amanda's has made me cry tears outside the restaurant when I can't get Sunday morning reservations.

Week 9: Puff Pastry Exam and Start of Viennoiserie

2010-03-08T21:02:00.007-05:00

Last week was the end of our puff pastry unit, and our exam was on Thursday. After the exam, we moved into what I suspect will be one of my favorite units - viennoiserie. Viennoiserie is breakfast pastry made from yeast-levened dough. I haven't worked much with yeast, so I'm excited to start. Plus I love eating croissants and breads.

To finish off the puff pastry unit, we made speedy vol au vents, an apple dartois, and a mille-feuille (more commonly known here as a Napoleon). I don't know why these vol au vents are called speedy. I'm pretty sure they took just as long as the first ones. These were a square/diamond shape and we filled them with pastry cream and fresh fruit.

Mangoes and blueberries

The apple dartois was kind of like a fancier apple tart made with puff pastry. To make the top, we used a lattice cutter and then stretched the cut piece of puff pastry over the compote. I put cut outs of leaves on the sides. I love everything with apples, so this was a highlight of the week.

Apple Dartois

We made our third Napoleon on Tuesday. This one was just the classic version. Some classmates used some fresh fruit and jam in theirs, but I wanted to do the traditional version.

Napoleon Strip

Puff pastry was our third exam so far. It's getting progressively more relaxed for these exams, but it's still a very frenzied 3 hours or so. I was pretty fortunate this time. To determine what everyone would be making, we each drew a set of three items out of a mixing bowl. I got mille feuille ronde (round Napoleon cake), palmiers and paillettes. Both pailletes and palmiers are two pretty simple puff pastry items, and a Napoleon cake isn't the worst thing you could need to make. Paillettes are puff pastry cheese straws with a bit of spice. I had missed the class when we made them because of the flu, but they were pretty simple. A couple of my classmates weren't so lucky and received sets of pastries that were far more complicated. They all did really well though, so it was nothing they couldn't handle!

Puff Pastry Exam Tray

Vienoisserie started on Saturday morning. First, let me state that yeast is really the most foul smelling thing in the world. Particularly if you have a slight hangover. That being said, the bread it makes is delicious. There's also a lot of waiting involved in making bread. You mix the dough, then let it rest and rise in the proofer (something that looks like a cabinet and stays at the perfect temperature for yeast activity), then deflate it a little, then put it back in the proofer, more rising, and eventually it's ready to bake. The first thing on the agenda was orange cinnamon swirl bread. It tasted as awesome as that sounds. The inside of the bread was so soft and delicious. I will definitely be making that again.

Orange Cinnamon Swirl Bread - Outside and inside view

Using a portion of the dough from the orange bread, we made pecan sticky buns. A caramel, whiskey, pecan mixture gets poured into the bottom of the pan. Then the dough gets rolled into a log with a brown sugar spice mixture on the inside. We sliced the log into the rolls and fit them around the pan. After they baked, we flipped them out of the pan so that the caramel nut mixture was on top. These looked really great. It definitely made me wish I wasn't allergic to nuts. We also made something called Sally Lunn rolls, but somehow I forgot to take a picture of those. I'll see if I can steal a pic from a classmate to post up here, so you all don't feel left out.

Before Oven

Post baking

Saturday in Hoboken was the annual St. Patrick's Day celebration. St. Patty's Day in Hoboken is a really big deal. The town has a really large Irish population, 100 bars in 1 square mile, and a lot of young people. It's a recipe for a really great celebration. The drinking starts early and lasts all day (well as long as you can stay awake. I was in bed, asleep, last year by 7:00 pm), and when I left for class at 7:45 am, there was already people lined up outside the bars waiting for them to open. When I got off the PATH train with all these baked goods, I was engulfed in a sea of drunk revelers, who seemed to all want a piece of the sticky buns. I was able to protect them in order to bring them to the party all my friends are at. If you ever want to feel like the most popular person, bring a bag filled with home baked bread to a party with a bunch of people who are drinking. It's a big hit. The 24 chocolate Guinness cupcakes with Bailey's frosting I made as well didn't hurt either.

Week 8: More Puff Pastry

2010-03-01T21:43:00.006-05:00

Puff pastry continued into last week. I'm starting to get the sense that when it comes to puff pastry, it's a love it or hate it thing for my classmates. I'm firmly in the "love it" category. There's just something soothing to me in all the rhythms of making the dough. That said, I was not a huge fan of a new puff pastry we tackled this week - chocolate puff pastry. It was a huge pain to make, didn't produce as much rise as even the rapide.

On Tuesday, we made poires en cage (pears in cage), conversations, and fruit galettes. The poires en cage looked really cool and were fairly simple to make. We poached the pears in a caramel ginger spice liquid, which was delicious.

Poires en cage

Conversations are a pastry that is made using puff pastry, almond cream, and royal icing. It's all put together and baked. Out of the three desserts from that night, this one was my coworkers' favorite. I tried a bit of it (I'm not allergic to almonds, just hesitant to eat them) and thought it was really sweet. A little bit more than my liking.

Conversations - traditional on the right

A galette is a free form tart, and we used puff pastry to form the base. The fruit compote was made with a combination of cherries, blueberries, plums, and a touch of brandy. Nothing like some liquor to up the ante of breakfast.

Mini galettes

On Thursday, most of us braved the beginning of the snow storm to get to class and make jalousie, pithivier, and tarte tatin. Jalousie, pronounced "jealousy" is a puff pastry dessert made with a layer of almond cream topped with a layer of raspberry jam. It's made to resemble the Venetian blinds a baker always witnessed his neighbor peeking through, spying on his wife to catch her cheating.

Jalousie

Pithivier, also known as king's cake, is made with puff pastry, and frangipane - a mixture of pastry cream and almond cream. Traditionally, this pastry is made hiding a plastic baby inside the cake. I have no clue what the significance is, but I'd be freaked out to find a tiny baby in my dessert. Whoever finds the baby though gets to be king for the day.

No baby in this cake

Tarte tatin is one of my new favorite things to eat. It's so simple - just caramelized apples and puff pastry. With a splash of Calvados. First you caramelize the apples in a skillet using butter and sugar. Once you have a good color to the apples, you throw some Calvados (apple brandy) in the pan to flambe it. I poured a little bit too much in and ended up with a HUGE flame shooting up from the pan. Really, really scary. Fortunately, I still have my eyebrows. After the apples cool, you cover them with puff pastry and put it in the oven to bake. Once the puff is baked through, you take it out of the oven and immediately flip the skillet over to release the tart. All the snow made it impossible to get into work on Friday, so I was trapped in my house with this tart. At the end of Friday, there was no tarte tatin left.

Friday's breakfast, lunch and dinner

On Saturday, we used the chocolate puff pastry we had made the class before. We made and plated some banana tarts. Chef Joseph made some peanut butter ice cream to accompany them, and it was amazing. I'm not a huge banana fan though. It's just something about the texture I don't like.

Banana tart with peanut butter ice cream and chocolate sauce

We also made a chocolate Napoleon strip. The recipe called for only a creme d'or (a fast chocolate mousse) with the chocolate puff pastry, but our instructor felt it was just too much chocolate, so we also used a lightened pastry cream for a contrast of colors and flavors. The end result was really beautiful.

The crowning glory of the week

Week 7: Puff Pastry

2010-02-24T20:57:00.004-05:00

As I mentioned previously, last week the flu struck. It has been extremely challenging working the balance of a full time job and almost 20 hours of class a week, and the illness threw a major wrench in everything, bringing it all toppling down. My dad is probably going to call me up tomorrow and tell me how dramatic that statement sounded, but I'm going to keep it in anyway. Tuesday was the introduction to puff pastry dough, which is an extremely challenging dough. The dough needs to be rolled, folded, turned, chilled...and repeated over and over again. This process produces a dough that is almost a 1000 layers of dough and butter (!! 500 layers of butter?!). It is delicious. I can't even describe how delicious it is. I want to eat puff pastry wrapped around my every meal. Cheerios in puff pastry? I'm on it!

Vol au Vents

Tuesday we made two type of puff pastry - rapide and classic. The rapide is supposed to be a faster dough to make that produces less rise. With the use of no leaveners, this dough rises to up to eight times its size. It's baking magic. That night we assembled our palmiers and cheese straws, but didn't get to bake either.

Pineapple Bar Tart

Unfortunately, I had to leave class on Thursday almost immediately after getting there. It's really, really hard to stand in a kitchen, next to a 400 degree oven for over five hours straight, and it wasn't happening that night. I went home, rested up, and came back slightly recovered on Saturday. Saturday we made some vol au vents first. Vol au vents are a puff pastry case that is filled with with something. For these Chef Cynthia made two savory fillings - spinach & goat cheese and a mushroom. They looked great, but even puff pastry won't make me like spinach.

Palmiers, also known as elephant ears

We also made a Bar Tart that we used a touch of almond cream and some pineapple. This was the first time I ever cut a whole pineapple. I've seen whole pineapples in stores, but never had any idea how to cut them. My knife skills are slowly improving, and the whole pineapple was a big accomplishment for me.

Mille-Feuille

My mom always tells me how when she was pregnant with me, she and her godmother ate a steady diet of Napoleons. Maybe this is why I'm so in love with puff pastry. We made a Napoleon cake, called a Mille-Feuille, which I believe translates from French to "thousand leaf," referring to the layers of pastry. It was three rounds of puff pastry with a lightened pastry cream in between each. We put crumbs of the puff pastry around the edges of the cake. We sprinkled powdered sugar on top and then used knives heated over a flame to caramelize a cross hatch pattern.

Croquembouche Improvements

2010-02-21T20:17:00.002-05:00

As promised, I have dug up a picture of the Christmas Eve croquembouche disaster. Actually, my mom did. She wasn't able to come up with any photo of just the croquembouche. At the time she probably thought it would be best if this went undocumented. I think you can get this idea from the picture though....

If I hadn't pointed it out, you might just think that was a plate of cream puffs, instead of an attempted croquembouche. I'll repost the picture of my 2nd attempt at a croquembouche because I'm pretty proud of it and because that first picture is just pathetic.

And while we're on the topic of last Christmas (sort of), I found some pictures in my phone of the cake I made for Christmas Eve as well. I'm not sure why these never got posted to the blog, but now is as good of a time as any. This cake was more or less a total rip off of one that the very talented cake decorated at My Sweet and Saucy made and featured on her blog. I still have a very long way to go with my fondant skills, but I think they're improving somewhat.

Front of the cake

Back of the cake

Chocolate Raspberry Macarons

2010-02-21T10:37:00.000-05:00

I've been wanting to make macarons for a while now. They always seemed so tricky and like they'd be a sure failure. Wikipedia says it itself, "Making macarons requires a great deal of discipline and is a process that is highly dependent on exactitude, technique, and proper equipment. For this reason it is a notoriously difficult recipe to master and a frustrating endeavor for the amateur baker." I read up on them before taking the plunge last weekend. When I told people what I was making, most people immediately thought of macaroons, the coconut cookie. The French macaron is a sandwich cookie. The tops and bottoms are a meringue cookie that is supposed to be crisp on the outside and chewy and moist on the inside.

My first attempt was surprisingly successful. The filling I used was a chocolate raspberry ganache. I think there were several key steps here. The first was bringing the egg whites to room temperature. Several recipes recommended leaving the egg whites out for 24 hours. That seemed to go against everything I ever thought about eggs...like that they needed to be refrigerated. I consulted with Chef Cynthia, and she said that while there's no harm in leaving them out, they probably only need to be out for an hour or so. The second step was after piping out the meringues was to let them dry out a little bit before putting them in the oven. I'm anxious to try these again in a variety of flavors.

Week 6: Pate a Choux & Exam

2010-02-20T20:53:00.004-05:00

I'm really behind on my blogging and baking. As if it hasn't been hard enough balancing work and school, this week I got some sort of cold/flu/plague that just completely knocked me out for most the week. I had to miss class on Thursday, and I'm still playing a bit of catch up.

So for the first of the blog posts to get up to speed...last week's pate a choux unit! Pate a choux (cream puff pastry) was only a four class unit - pretty short compared to the other units.

Austrian dumplings with cherry compote - the chefs made these and plated them for us

On Tuesday, we made gougeres, which are cheesy puffs. I love, love, love the gougeres at Artisanal, one of my favorite restaurants in NYC. I'm not sure the ones I made were as good as theirs, but it was my first attempt. And it didn't stop me from eating them for breakfast the next day.

Gougeres

That class we also made St. Honore cake. St. Honore is the patron saint of bakers, and he was obviously not present in our class that night. I don't know what it was about this cake, but it seemed like putting it together was a disaster for everyone. It consisted of a base of flaky pastry with three rings of choux piped on top. That was baked, along with some ball-shaped cream puffs. The puff balls were them filled with the prepared cream, which was a chiboust. Chiboust is pastry cream with gelatin and Italian meringue.

Base of the St. Honore cake

Finished St. Honore cake

Everything was going well at this point, and I put the chiboust in the fridge to set up. Unfortunately, when I took it out, it had the strangest consistency. In order to get it smooth again, I needed to mix it so that it was a bit looser than I would have liked. The cream puffs were dipped in caramel and "glued" with more caramel around the base. Caranel is HOT. Like, really hot. And I dipped my finger into it. Like I said, no St. Honore in Pastry I that day. The remaining cream was then piped into the center of the cake. The cake itself was really delicious, but I don't think I will be making this cake again anytime soon. Maybe I'd need to stop by a church and make an offering to St. Honore before attempting it again.

Dipped cream puffs waiting to be assembled

The crowning glory of our choux unit was the croquembouche. A croquembouche is a cone-shaped tower of cream puffs that is held together with caramel and then decorated in a variety of ways. It's the traditional French wedding cake. This past Christmas, Martha Stewart had mistakenly led me to believe this would be an easy endeavor. It was a complete disaster. I think it ended up looking like a haphazard pile of leaking cream puffs. I can't say with 100% certainty because by the time it hit the table Christmas Eve, I was over a bottle of wine in. I'm feeling vindicated with this croquembouche though and am going to have my mom email me the pictures so I can post them to show how far I've come. While this croquembouche came out much better than the first, I don't know if I'm jumping to make another one any time soon. Maybe next Christmas.

Finished croquembouche - the puffs were dipped in caramel, cocoa nibs, and pink coconut

On Saturday we had our choux exam. This one was smooth sailing in comparison to the first. Everyone was significantly calmer, and we all were assigned to make eclairs in vanilla, chocolate, and coffee and a Paris-Brest. No St. Honore cake? No croquembouche? Piece of cake! I'm pleased with the way my exam results came out.

Exam tray

Happy Valentine's Day!

2010-02-15T11:11:00.002-05:00

Conversation heart cookies

Valentine's Day has always been one of my favorite holidays, regardless of my relationship status. It's just a fun holiday that partially revolves around chocolate, and who can object to that? I think a main influence of my love for the typically loathed holiday is my mom, who has always made it a really enjoyable day for the whole family. When my siblings and I were younger, we'd all get dressed up in our fanciest clothes and have a special meal that my mom had prepared for us. I've been trying to spread my love of Valentine's Day for years, and I think I'm making some progress. Typically, every year I host a party for my friends, but this year with school and work, there was just no time to plan it. To carry on my tradition of trying to make the day special for everyone, I went into baking overdrive last week to put together some treats to mail out to some friends and family members.

Slight modification for a friend who is into math

The first thing I made was iced sugar cookies. These are really a pain to make. They're so labor intensive and (in my opinion), don't taste that great. But, when they're done right, they look amazing, so I continue to make them. My inspiration for these was the very talented baker/blogger at A Dozen Eggs. I seriously do not know how she does it! I made two sets of cookies, traditional conversation hearts and boxers & lips. They took two nights to complete.

Hot lips & boxers

I also made Rice Krispie treats. I haven't had a homemade one of these in forever. My only complaint is that the recipe on the back of the box (which claims to be for a 13x9" pan) just does not make enough. They came out pretty thin. So, if you're making these using that recipe, double it. I like really thick Rice Krispie treats. I put some heart sprinkles on the top of these.

Rice Krispie Treats

Next up was brownies. I used the tried and true recipe from the Baked cookbook. These are really great, especially if you use good chocolate. No Hershey's chocolate in these...

The marshmallows started looking like this

And ended like this

The thing I was most excited about making for this Valentine's Day was marshmallows. I had never even contemplated making these before I started seeing recipes pop up for them, and I thought they were going to be incredibly complex to make. They could not have been any easier. With only a few ingredients, and a minimal level of skill required, these were really great to make. I dyed them pink for the holiday. I love making things that have a "wow" moment, and these went from a flat cloudy white mixture to a fluffy, shiny marshmallow in under 10 minutes.

Cut marshmallow, rolled in powdered sugar

Hopefully everyone enjoyed their treats!

Everything packaged and ready to go!

Superbowl Desserts

2010-02-12T17:32:00.005-05:00

Somehow I've managed to fit in some baking outside of class this past week. Over 15 hours of my week are devoted to baking in class and then I have a full time job, so it's been tough finding outside baking time. Last week for the Superbowl, I made chocolate chip cookie ice cream sandwiches and cupcakes to bring to a party.

The ice cream sandwiches went over huge, and they were relatively easy to make. The night before, I made a batch of chocolate chip cookie dough and put in in the fridge. On Sunday, I scooped out cookies that were approximately the same size and baked them. After they were out of the oven and while they were cooling, I took some ice cream out to soften. My original plan was to make my own ice cream, but I was short on time. Once the ice cream was soft enough, I spooned it onto one cookie and pressed another on top. After they were sandwiched, I rolled the edges in rainbow sprinkles.

The cupcakes were a vanilla base with raspberry jam on the inside. They were all frosted with vanilla and half were rolled in coconut.

Week 5: Pate a Choux

2010-02-08T21:47:00.004-05:00

With the completion of the Tarts & Cookies unit, we've moved on to pate a choux. Pate a choux is cream puff pastry. Initially, I wondered how many things you can make with cream puff pastry, and like I suspected, not much. The whole unit is only four classes long and we've already done two of the. The last class is entirely devoted to making a croquembouche. I had attempted a croquembouche (cone-shaped tower of cream puffs) for Christmas Eve, and it was a total disaster. Maybe I'll post that sad picture next week.

Eclairs

Choux is a really cool dough. You cook part of the ingredients (flour, butter, water) on the stove until it's thickened and then you cool it down in a mixer before adding a TON of eggs. Seriously, 10 eggs per batch of dough. That's a lot. When you pipe it into whatever shape you desire, and it looks pretty flat and dense. Then you bake it and it puffs up almost triple its size and the inside is completely hollow and airy, ready to be filled with something delicious. Like I said, cool stuff.

Paris-Brest before it's baked

Filled Paris-Brest without the top on

The first item in choux was eclairs. I thought I didn't like eclairs, but these were really good. I think the key is that I don't like pastry cream that eclairs are usually filled with. It's too thick and weird-textured. The eclairs we made in class though were filled with flavored creme legere (pastry cream lightened with whipped cream). We made vanilla, chocolate, and coffee. The coffee were awesome.

Finished Paris-Brest

The second class in the choux unit had cygnes (swans), profiteroles (ice cream-filled cream puffs), and Paris-Brest. Paris-Brest is sort of like a cake. It was created by a baker in France to commemorate the bicycle race between the cities of Paris and Brest, which is why the choux is shaped like a bicycle wheel. Once the choux pastry is baked (with almonds sprinkled on top), it is cut in half and then filled with a special praline buttercream that is carefully piped into the center to further resemble the treads of a bicycle wheel.

Profiteroles

We had our first introduction to plated desserts with our cygnes and profiteroles. Both were plated in a lake of chocolate sauce, and we decorated the plates with some of the creme anglaise Chef Joseph had reserved before spinning the rest into the rest into ice cream. I have a lot to learn about plating, but I thought my first attempt wasn't too bad.

Cream puff swans

Chef Cynthia also demoed popovers for us. Because they're so hard to get clean out of the pans, she thought it was best not to have us all make them. Which was probably a good call. After seeing the pan, I think it would have taken us all class to scrape out the remnant popover.

Popovers

First Exam: Tarts & Cookies

2010-02-07T00:20:00.005-05:00

This past Tuesday was my first exam in pastry school. Technically, I had already taken my sanitation exam (which I passed!), but this was the first actual exam testing my knowledge of baking. Not knowing what to expect, I was thoroughly freaked out and studied probably more than I ever had before. The exam had both a written and practical component. I felt confident about the practical (actual baking) part, and the written section was a lot less difficult than I thought it was going to be. Each of us was randomly assigned a set of 2 tarts and 1 cookie. They were all things we had previously made in class, and I got nut tart, chocolate ganache tartlettes, and bourbon pecan cookies.

Presentation tray of finished tarts & cookies

I'm happy with the way everything came out. I felt like I was organized, worked at a good pace, and produced a good end result. Chef Cynthia seemed to think everything went well, but I won't know for sure until I get my grades back on Tuesday. She did say my cookies were a little on the large side, but I'm pretty sure they tasted okay (I couldn't actually try two of my final products because of the pecans and hazelnuts).

Close up of my ganache tartlettes, decorated with white chocolate

Now that tarts & cookies is over, we've moved on to choux (cream puff) pastry. After each unit, we rotate partners and this unit I happen to be the odd man out (we have 17 students in my class). I think it will be okay as long as I can stay on top of dish washing!

Pastry School Week 4: Last Week of Tarts & Cookies

2010-01-31T20:50:00.005-05:00

This past week was our last week of tarts & cookies. Our big exam is Tuesday and I have a lot of studying to do (and Grammys to watch), so I'm going to keep this brief. Or at least try to...as I'm sure you have already noticed I have problems with brevity.

Tuesday was chocolate day in class. We made a chocolate Bavarian tart, a ganache tart and sablee cookies, which are not chocolate.

Chocolate Bavarian Tart

We had real issues with the heavy cream (well, at least I did). It seemed much thicker than usual, and it was warm. Now that it's been several days since I ate it and no food borne illness, I can say that I'm sure it was fine, but it was definitely sketchy. The chocolate Bavarian tart was amazing though. We made a chocolate custard and lightened it with whipped cream--soooo good.

Ganache Tart

The ganache tart was very rich. We also got to practice our piping skills, adding the white chocolate as a finishing touch.

Sablee cookies

Ok, so these cookies are one of my favorite things we've made so far in class, if not my absolute favorite. Pate Sablee could be used as a tart dough, but we rolled it out into cookies. We added a bit of candied orange & lemon peel into the dough and finished them with a lemon glaze. And then I ate all of them for breakfast the next morning.

Thursday's theme was caramel- we made it both for the tartelettes tatin and caramel nut tart. I've had issues with caramel in the past, but this one went pretty easily. However, at one point we were watching our instructor demo something and the room filled with a lot of smoke. Someone had left a pot of caramel on the stove and it had turned to char.

Tartelettes Tatin

These apple tartelettes were something else I ate for breakfast this week. Tarte tatin is a classic French dessert with the caramel is poured into the tart pan first, followed by apples and then covered with dough. When they come out of the oven, you quickly flip them over, out of the tart pans.

Bourbon Pecan Cookies

Caramel nut tart

Inside the caramel nut tart

The caramel nut tart got really great reviews from my coworkers. Even though I can't eat it (nut allergy), I think I'll definitely be making it again.

Saturday was the last class before our exam. We did some review and finished up the last tarts.

Raspberry compote

We made a raspberry apple compote for our linzer tortes. Those are two of my favorite fruits, so I thought it was great.

Linzer Torte

I also couldn't eat the linzer torte because it had hazelnuts in the dough. Stupidly, after rolling out the dough, I must have touched my lip and it was sooo itchy after that. The lattice top of the torte was a real challenge, but I'm happy I know how to do that now.

Quiche Lorraine

If I could eat one food for the next three months without gaining 100 pounds, it would be quiche Lorraine. I was iffy on it when I saw it on the syllabus. For some reason I didn't think I liked quiche, but this one was really amazing. It was a flaky crust and a really creamy custard with bacon and gruyere baked into it.

Now it's time to study for my test! That was definitely not brief!!!

Pastry School Week 3

2010-01-25T20:07:00.005-05:00

I can't believe the first three weeks of pastry school are already over, and I can't believe how fast it's going. We're continuing with our tarts and cookies unit, and you would think I'd be sick of tarts by now, but there's so many (delicious) variations!

Sliced fig newtons

They all got crumbled when I put them in a bag

Last week we started out making fig newtons. My brother really liked the packaged kind growing up, but I was always wary of figs. In fact, this was the first time that I had even tried figs. We used dry figs because apparently figs are only in season at the end of summer. We cooked the figs in port wine, water, and sugar. It smelled really good, even though my figs took about four times as long as everyone else's to cook. I wasn't a huge fan of this cookie, but they came out pretty well.

Onion tart

Everything I've make at school during the week, I bring into work for my coworkers to eat. All of the tarts and cookies basically disappear as soon as I put them down on my desk. The onion tart was the exception to this. I was wrong in believing we'd only be making sweet pastries, and this onion tart was the first savory recipe to appear on the syllabus. The tart was made from carmelized onions, blue cheese (the amount of mold on that cheese really turned me off), walnuts and tomatoes. The whole thing smelled very strongly of cheese, and not in a good way. A few brave coworkers tried it, but there were no rave reviews. A lot of "it's....okay...."

I braved my nut allergy to try these spritskakor cookies. They have almond paste in them, and almonds aren't one of the nuts I tested as allergic to, but I sometimes have a reaction from eating them. All kinds of nuts are frequently processed in the same plants, so there's a lot of cross contamination. Fortunately I had no allergy symptoms, and they were just as great as my coworkers were reporting. They were a really great butter/almond cookie piped into a rosette with a spot of raspberry jam on top.

Clafoutis is a traditional French dessert that is a baked custard traditionally made with cherries. The original clafoutis is usually made in a bowl, not a tart shell. This one we made was made in a tart shell, with blueberries instead of cherries because cherries aren't in season. So this was kind of a departure from real clafoutis. It was still delicious though.

So there's two things that I'm really afraid of - burning myself and cutting myself. Being a pastry chef, both of these are bound to happen...more than once. This past Saturday I burned my thumb pretty badly trying to attach a KitchenAid bowl to the mixer I had previously had cooking on the stove. I should have realized that the bowl would be as hot as what was in it (135 degrees) or hotter, but I wasn't really thinking. I didn't cut myself this week, but during a lesson of candied lemon peel, we needed to julienne lemon peel, which means to cut it in thin strips. Our knives are REALLY sharp, and in order to do this, they had to be really close to your fingers. I think I need a lot more practice with knife skills before I feel more comfortable with them. The candied lemon peel came out really nice.

With the candied lemon peel and the meringue that burned my hand (well the bowl it was in at least), we made lemon tartlets. Using lemon curd we had previously made and refrigerated, we filled the mini tartlets and then piped a decorative design with the meringue. Then using a BLOW TORCH, we browned the meringue edges. The blow torch was also scary (see fear #1 compounded with my fear of things exploding). The candied lemon peel went into the center.

The last item on this week's menu was nut tart. Using our pate sucree (sweet dough), we lined our tart rings with it, spread a thin layer of raspberry jam, sprinkled over some toasted almonds, and then poured in the almond and hazelnut batter we had lightened with a French meringue. We were supposed to sprinkle powdered sugar over top in some sort of design. In the haste of the last minutes of class, I haphazardly overlapped two cardboard circles and powdered away. When I removed the circles, I immediately realized the design resembled cleavage. Oh well, lessons learned! Only one more week of tarts & cookies before our big exam on February 2!!

Pastry School Week 2: More Tarts & Cookies

2010-01-18T11:50:00.005-05:00

Fresh Fruit Tart

My second week of classes at the French Culinary Institute were a lot less nerve-wracking. I had calmed down a lot since the start of class, allowing me to make some really great things in class. We're in the tarts and cookies unit of the course until February 2nd, and we continue to make more and more of these two pastries.

Tarte Bourdaloue

I hadn't ever really contemplated how many tarts one can possibly make. I had never made an actual tart on my own (only pies), and that has quickly changed over the past couple weeks. I am now on my way to becoming the Queen of Tarts.

Tarte Alsacienne

The class is extremely fast-paced and every class, in the matter of only five hours, we make between 3-5 completed pastries, depending on whether we have a sanitation lecture as well (that exam, my first at school, is this week!). Because we make all components from scratch - doughs, fillings, etc., it takes a bit of time to get to the finished product.

Pots de creme

The tarts we made this week were Tarte Bourdaloue (poached pairs and almonds), Fresh Fruit Tart, Apricot Tart, Tart Alsacienne (apple & custard), and mini fresh fruit tarts. In addition to this, we made gingersnap cookies, Vanilla Kipferls (vanilla hazelnut cookies), and Chocolate Heaven cookies, and pots de creme (kind of like chocolate custard).

Apricot Tart pre oven

Apricot tart after baking

The most exciting moment of the week was learning how to flambe. Being scared of both fire and knives, the choice of going to a culinary school may seem dubious, but I'm determined to overcome both in these next 9 months. I'm already making progress- I cut myself and lived and this week lit a pan on fire (on purpose).

Gingersnap Cookies

Vanilla Kipferl

Chocolate Heaven Cookies

For the Tarte Alsacienne, the apples were first sauteed and then using apple brandy, lit on fire. It was very cool! Seemingly unrelated, right after we were done flambeing, we saw a couple of firefighters walk by our classroom. They must have gotten word that there were beginner students playing with fire.

Fresh fruit mini tarts

Week One of Pastry School!

2010-01-10T20:27:00.003-05:00

A couple months ago I applied and got accepted into the classic pastry arts program at the French Culinary Institute. I will be attending the night program, while working full time, and cannot be any more excited to have started!! Baking is a real passion of mine, and it's amazing to be able to take it to the next level. Classes started this past Tuesday, and with the first week done, I can safely say that I LOVE it!

Full uniform - my embroidered jacket didn't come in yet. Sexy hat!

This week I got an email from a friend that said something along the lines of, "Hey, I saw you started pastry school this week. It's about time you realized that's what you should be doing." I feel that way too.

First fully baked project - apple tart

The first week of classes was simultaneously exciting and terrifying. I was so nervous to start. I had no clue what kind of skill level my fellow classmates would be at, what my instructors would be like, etc, etc. I get all kind of anxiety about starting new things, and this time was no exception. Fortunately everything went so smoothly. My chef instructors are amazing. The head instructor is Chef Cynthia, and she's really incredible. She made Caroline Kennedy's wedding cake, and now in addition to being an instructor at French Culinary Institute, she has her own really impressive cake company in NYC, Cakeline.

Banana tart - A couple of the rosettes got smushed in the fridge

In our first week of class, in addition to covering some basic lessons, we made and completed an apple tart and a banana cream tart. I brought the apple tart to work and I swear it was completely gone within 5 minutes of unwrapping it. I shared the banana tart with my family yesterday, and they approved. I'm really looking forward to all the other things I'll be learning and hope to be able to update this with pictures and stories while I'm going through these next 9 months before I graduate!

Christmas Party

2009-12-21T19:29:00.000-05:00

I used to have an annual Christmas cocktail party every December 22nd (actually the first year it was the 23rd, but the hangover on Christmas Eve proved to be something I did not want to repeat year after year). Last year, for various reasons, I didn't end up having the party. This year, I wanted to reincarnate the party in a much smaller, tamer version.

Mini vanilla cupcakes

Even though the party was smaller, that does not mean that I held back on the desserts or food. As I was setting up the table with cookies and cupcakes before any guests had arrived, I realized I had made enough food for 4 times the amount of guests I was expecting.

Chocolate chip, oatmeal raisin, peanut butter

I had prepared my cookie doughs the week before and stored them in the fridge. Whenever I had time in the week leading up to the party, I would throw a couple batches of cookies in the oven and store them in Tupperware.

Sugar cookies

This year I made a few of my favorite "classic" Christmas cookies: chocolate chip (perfected over many, many tested recipes), oatmeal raisin, peanut butter, and the sugar cookies I wrote about in the last post. I also made mini vanilla cupcakes in festive liners from left over batter I had from an order last week.

It wouldn't be a party with just desserts (ok...maybe it would be) so I also made a Christmas punch (a blend of pomegranate juice, cranberry juice, pineapple vodka, and seltzer) and some assorted hors d'oeurves. The biggest hit seemed to be cocktail hotdogs wrapped in bacon and baked in dark brown sugar. It sounds weird, but it was really, really good.

Finally - a Cookie Success!

2009-12-15T17:31:00.001-05:00

The first time I attempted to make iced sugar cookies, it was a total disaster. I quickly got frustrated and abandoned the whole project. I've been admiring these beautiful sugar cookies on blogs like My Sweet and Saucy and A Dozen Eggs, and mine looked like a preschool arts & crafts project.

Bit of a flooding issue

That was over the summer. Cookies have always been a challenge for me, and with this holiday season, I've been determined to produce beautiful and great tasting cookies. After trying countless chocolate chip cookie recipes (and forcing the results on my coworkers), I've finally found a recipe that produces my idea of the perfect chocolate chip cookie - soft, chewy and thick.

Christmas Trees

After I worked out that battle, the next challenge was to revisit the sugar cookies. I decided to go into it with a plan, drawing out each of the 3 cookie designs I wanted to make, and accepted that it was going to be a very time-consuming project that required a lot of patience. Overall, it went pretty smoothly. Except when on my first batch, the gingerbread people, the brown royal icing flooded out of the top of my pastry bag, all over my counter and floor. Two gingerbread men were lost in the process...

Pretty snowflake

Aside from that initial hiccup, the rest, although really time-consuming, came out really nice. I plan on serving these cookies for my holiday party I'm hosting on Friday, and I think I'm going to make a second batch when I go home for Christmas.

I took these pictures with my iPhone, so while the quality is great for a phone camera, overall it is a bit lacking. Have I mentioned how much I love my new phone my brother gave me for my birthday? I downloaded the Epicurious app and browse recipes on the bus ride home from work - it's really perfect.

Bridal Shower Cupcakes

2009-12-13T23:50:00.003-05:00

Last weekend, I was asked to make the cupcakes for my friend Lauren's cousin's bridal shower. Melissa, the bride-to-be, is also the one who ordered the space-themed cupcakes the other week for her fiance.

I made three dozen cupcakes in chocolate, vanilla, and red velvet. All of the cupcakes were frosted in vanilla buttercream. The colors on the shower invitation were sage green and cream. For the chocolate and vanilla, I dyed the frosting sage green, but I didn't think the green looked good on the red cupcakes so I kept it cream-colored.

For the top of each cupcake, I made gold blossom flowers and gold hearts that had the monogram 'M' inside them. I thought the overall look was understated, yet elegant - perfect for a bridal shower.

Thanksgiving - A Bit Delayed

2009-12-08T19:52:00.004-05:00

It now feels like we're close to Christmas and Thanksgiving is well in the past, but I had some pictures from the desserts I made that I wanted to share. The dessert menu started off even more ambitious, but when I realized we were only having nine people for dinner, I scaled it back so that everyone didn't have to eat two whole pies each.

The whiskey apple pie

On the menu was apple pie (my favorite recipe from the Baked cookbook), salted caramel ice cream, and pumpkin cupcakes. Apple pie is my favorite type of pie (and apparently my father's least favorite). This was the very first time I made my own pie crust, and I'm not sure why I haven't tried it sooner. As long as you have a food processor, it's so easy. The Baked pie recipe calls for a tablespoon of whiskey, so on the morning of Thanksgiving, I had the bottle of Scotch out on the counter. Every single person who came down the stairs felt the need to question me whether that was what I was drinking for breakfast.

Salted caramel with salted caramel ice cream

I almost tossed the ice cream after I cooked the custard on the stove. It seemed lumpy and like it was not going to turn into a good finished product. My mom convinced me to just strain it one more time and put it in the ice cream machine (one of my favorite impulse purchases we've ever made). Moms are so smart. After coming out of the machine, it was a really beautiful texture - very smooth and rich. I made it with a salted caramel I had made the day before (also from the Baked cookbook). There was extra caramel sauce left, and everyone ended up pouring it over all of the desserts.

Pumpkin cupcakes

The pumpkin cupcakes were as delicious as they always are. I had really wanted to make all the desserts for Thanksgiving. At one point, I was even talking about making the chocolates that we serve with fruit course, but that plan had to be scrapped when I realized there was just not enough time to do everything, especially since I was going out to the bars Wednesday night. My dad apparently didn't know the plan was for me to make everything, and he ordered a cheesecake from someone who was selling them at his work. All throughout the dinner, I talked trash about the cheesecake. By the time dessert came, no one would touch it, I think out of fear that I would throw a fit at the table. I ended up feeling bad that the only person who ate a slice was my dad, but fortunately my mom was able to reserve it a couple nights later at a holiday gathering she had. Sorry, Dad! For Christmas don't be ordering any outsider cakes!!

My sister with a cupcake - Meliss, you finally made the blog!
(Eric, hold your comments)

My 25th Birthday Party

2009-11-30T20:46:00.003-05:00

Mini pumpkin cupcakes

On November 17, I turned the age that when I was much younger I considered to be officially "old" - twenty-five. I was not psyched to be passing this age milestone, so I decided to deal with it in my favorite way - plan a big party. With the party to look forward to, I happily started planning all of the details of the party - most notably the desserts.

Center of the top cake tier

I decided I really wanted a birthday cake - like a big birthday cake. I've been really wanting a Wall-E shaped cake, but decided it didn't really fit with the theme I was going for. The color scheme was purple - my favorite color, and I decided to go all out.

Top chocolate cake tier

From the outer space order I did, I used the remaining pumpkin spice batter to make two dozen mini cupcakes in bright purple liners. Once I topped them with cream cheese frosting, I sprinkled them with purple sugar.

Cakes chilling in the refrigerator with the party beverages

The next piece of this was the cake. I baked a 6 inch chocolate cake that I filled with chocolate frosting and chopped Reese's. I then covered it with more chocolate frosting. The 9 inch cake was vanilla bean, frosted and filled with vanilla frosting. After refrigerating both cakes, I covered them in a lavender fondant. The cakes were then refrigerated again. I stacked them using wooden dowels as support in the 9 inch cake. Then I painted the cakes with an edible sparkly paint and wrapped a darker purple ribbon around the bottoms of both cakes.

Sugar cookies set up on the table

I also made some sugar cookies cut into circles. These were iced with royal icing and covered in purple sugar. Everything came out really well and looked really nice set up. The party was as much of a success as the desserts were.

Side view of the table

These Cupcakes Were Out of This World

2009-11-24T22:56:00.000-05:00

White chocolate spaceships

Really terrible subject line, I know, but the second order I had last week was for five dozen assorted flavors for a surprise 30th birthday party. The birthday boy is apparently a big fan of all things outerspace related, so I brainstormed with his fiance to come up with cupcakes to reflect this. She was able to find a chocolate mold online of tiny spaceships, and I used this to make white chocolate rockets.

Box of space cupcakes

The flavors of the cupcakes were red velvet, cookie dough, chocolate Oreo, vanilla, and pumpkin spice. On the pumpkin and vanilla, I piped a swirl of dark blue frosting and sprinkled some edible gold glitter and silver dragees over top before putting on the spaceships. I thought these looked pretty cool, although again I had the same issue with the edible glitter migrating all over my face when I accidentally touched it. I looked like Edward stepping into the sun (geeky Twilight reference there...).

Close up of the space cupcakes

A Crazy Week & My First Wedding Order

2009-11-23T20:43:00.004-05:00

Last week was absolutely insane. My birthday was Tuesday, and in addition to being incredibly busy in my real job, I had two orders to bake, one of my favorite coworker's going away party, and my own birthday party on Saturday. Over the course of Wednesday through Friday, I baked almost 250 cupcakes, a two tier cake, and 2 dozen sugar cookies. My to-do list was 3 pages long, but somehow I got it all done.

Close up of the cupcakes

The first order I had was for a wedding - the first wedding I've baked for aside from my aunt's. It was 150 cupcakes to be given as the favor. Half were red velvet with white cream cheese frosting and the other half were vanilla with chocolate frosting dyed black. Silver, white, and black dragees were sprinkled over all of cupcakes.

My apartment was overrun with cupcakes

These didn't take me nearly as long to bake as I expected. The most time-consuming aspect was individually boxing each cupcake. Each needed to be "glued" to the bottom of the clear plastic box and then tied with a ribbon and the favor tag. Fortunately, I had an all-star help team consisting of the bride's sister Linda, who I had done the fiesta order for back in May, and her cousin Andrea. They were such a huge help, and I can't even imagine if I had to tie all those boxes without their help.

Individual cupcake favor

I can't wait to see the pictures from the set up at the wedding and will hopefully be posting them here if I get them.

White Chocolate Mocha Cupcakes

2009-11-16T21:53:00.005-05:00

Last weekend I was home for the weekend with both of my siblings, and when I couldn't come up with a new type of cupcake to make, my sister Melissa suggested one based off her favorite Starbuck's drink - a white chocolate mocha. It was the best suggestion I had, so I went with that.

The frosting started out looking more like batter before I changed strategy

I didn't bother looking up a recipe for it; I've started to really enjoy coming up with my own recipes. Most cake recipes stem from the same base - 3 cups of flour, 2 cups of sugar and a cup of butter. It makes it easy to remember. To this base, I added several teaspoons of instant espresso powder and a couple tablespoons of cocoa powder. I also brewed some coffee (using my parents Tassimo that I want to steal) and used half coffee half milk as the liquid ingredient. I kept sniffing the batter to see if the coffee scent was strong enough. Which led me to keep adding more espresso powder. Next time I'd cut back on the espresso powder by a couple teaspoons - one of these cupcakes could have you up for days.

Wish I had red wrappers for these to mimic the Starbuck's red cups I love
during winter!

For the frosting, I wanted to use the frosting I made for the Whiteout Cupcakes. I don't know what happened to the recipe (I think it had something to do with the fact that apparently half and half is not half milk/half heavy cream), but it did not come out right initially. I ended up adapting it into a typical buttercream frosting and added melted white chocolate. The final touch was a sprinkling of cinnamon (credit for that idea goes to Melissa - I've never ordered the drink at Starbuck's, but apparently that's how the drink is served).

Cookies are Hard

2009-11-11T20:55:00.009-05:00

Started out so promising

I don't know what it is about cookies. No matter what recipe I use, they almost always turn out poorly. I just want to make cookies that look like they're from a magazine or cookbook. Instead they turn out looking super flat and sad.

Less than stellar results

I was on a cookie kick the other week. I don't know what it was. I make great-looking cupcakes, and I just don't understand why I can't do cookies. Determined to make the perfect chocolate chip M&M cookies, I started with a recipe that I found on Martha Stewart. The recipe called for all butter, no shortening. I did exactly what the recipe said - mixed everything together correctly, chilled the dough for the right amount of time, and baked for exactly how long the recipe told me to. It was looking promising...until I looked into the oven and saw my beautifully formed cookies and turned into a cookie pancake.

Better results round 2

Determined to overcome my cookie inabilities, I picked the highest ranked chocolate chip cookie recipe on Epicurious and decided to make those. This recipe had half butter and half shortening. I guess it made a big difference because these cookies did not flatten out. I still wasn't 100% satisfied with these cookies. I would have liked if they had a more buttery flavor. I think I still need to tinker with the shortening to butter ratio.

Another surprise cookie package

Another Perfect Fall Cupcake: Caramel Apple

2009-11-02T08:56:00.000-05:00

Apples are one of the reasons I love fall so much. I know they're available all year round, but autumn has things like apple cider and caramel apples. Last year I had made caramel apple cupcakes, but I wasn't 100% happy with it. While looking for apple cake recipes this year, I kept coming across ones that essentially used an applesauce as the source of apple in the cake. I finally found one that sounded interesting that had you grate the apples and then caramelize them in a saucepan with butter and brown sugar. I made note that it was the recipe I wanted to use and exited the page. A couple days later when I was trying to figure out where the recipe was that I found, I could not remember what website it was on for the life of me. I still have been unable to find it, and I'm not entirely sure that I didn't dream this recipe.

Butter & brown sugar in the skillet

Working off that, I went about caramelizing the grated apples (I used Gala apples). I used my pumpkin spice recipe to work off. First I melted the butter in the pan and mixed in the brown sugar. I should have let the mixture caramelize a bit more, but it came out pretty well. The texture of the cake was really moist and less muffin-like than the one I made last year.

Grated apple after cooking it on the stove

For the frosting, I first made my own caramel and let it cool, I used it to make caramel frosting. I used the remaining caramel to swirl on top of the frosting. The caramel frosting complimented the apple cake really nicely. I'm hoping I have an excuse to make these again this autumn.

Finished cupcakes