9 posts tagged “baking”
I haven't told the stories of the carrot cake I made out of the Baking Illustrated recipe, or my disappointing Paula Deen blueberry muffins- seriously? You'd think Paula "Queen of Butter" Deen would have really tasty muffins but they were actually boring. I thought I had pregnant brain when I made them, because I was sitting there while they were in the oven and I'd think oh! I forgot to put spices in! or oh! I forgot to add the vanilla! Then I'd look at the recipe and realize no, she doesn't use any. What? Anyway, my last couple baking efforts have been passable at best.
Lately the baby's been making me want herbs and spices, like sage and cinnamon. I was looking through Baking Illustrated, thinking wouldn't it be awesome if I baked everything in there and blogged about it, when I saw the coffeecake muffin recipe. Ooh! Cinnamon!
I was not thrilled when I started the recipe and found out I was going to have to pull the food processor out of storage. Sigh. I hate cooking with the food processor. I have a Kitchenaid, that's what you're supposed to bake with. I noticed there were nuts to chop so okay, I decided to use the food processor. I started by chopping together the nuts, some cinnamon and brown sugar and managed to get everything sesame seed sized like they asked, but not in five one second pulses. I started going one, two, three, four, five and there were still a lot of large chunks of nuts. Crap. Then I tried ooooone, twooooooo, threeeeeee, and somewhere in the middle of four it was good. Okay. I separated them out into two bowls- one to mix in later, one for topping- and moved on to the batter.
Oh, the batter. Flour, sugar and salt, mixed with the food processor. Then you add the butter, which was softened and sliced, and process until it looks like oats. Okay, except zap number one? All the butter disappeared. Crap. I think they shouldn't have had you soften the butter. Don't you usually use cold butter when you make streusel? I added some of the flour mix into the streusel top, stirred it up, added the rest of the dry stuff to the food processor and went to the wet stuff. Sour cream? Check. Vanilla? Check. Egg? Frick. Somehow the eggs had been put on the top shelf of the fridge and half of them had frozen and cracked. Damn. This is why I hate top and bottom fridges. Anyway, I found one that was okay and mixed up the wet stuff, then added it to the batter. Again with the one second pulses, and that's where I hit the problem. Pulse until it's moistened? Again, one shot. Then add the streusel and pulse till the streusel's distributed and everything's crumbly? Um, one pulse and everything was mush and not at all well distributed.
I think, had I been thinking, maybe colder butter in larger pieces- half inch pieces did not do it for me here- and I would have been willing to do it in the processor because that is an efficient way to cut it in. However, then I think I should have transferred it to the Kitchenaid and mixed it up the rest of the way so it didn't get to be such a mushy mess. When it came time to add the streusel, definitely stirred it in by hand. Oh well. Moving on!
Putting them into the cups and getting the streusel on them, not a problem. Then I forgot about the last time I baked something from Baking Illustrated and took them at their word- 350 for 18 minutes, turning halfway. When I made the carrot cake the recipe said 35-40 minutes and it really took over an hour. I put the muffins in and was talking to the Husband on Google chat and another friend on Facebook and left them five minutes over how long they needed to go and ew. Gooey. I put them back in the oven and decided whenever I thought about them next I'd check. I think it ended up being about twice the time the book said, about 35 minutes before I checked them again and they were done according to my toothpick. Stupid Baking Illustrated.
After all the bitching I did about these muffins, they came out looking okay and were pretty tasty. The Husband and I each had one and really liked them. I credit the sour cream. The Husband, who is not a nut eater, didn't notice the nuts. I'm not sure why, because I did. Anyway, I think I've learned my lesson. Tomorrow I want to make their quick cinnamon roll recipe and I'm totally going to check after the amount of time they say they need to bake, but be prepared to take them out after twice that time.
I did some googling and apparently I'm the only person out there who has a problem with Baking Illustrated. Huh. It really makes me wonder what my problem is, then. You know, they go through and work and work and work and fine tune their recipes and it's not like they're in Denver- or I'm in Denver, for that matter- making these recipes and having to adjust for altitude. I follow the recipe. I don't substitute things. I seriously doubt my silicone baking cups would have made that much difference in this instance. I just don't know. We'll see tomorrow.
Being pregnant and crazy means I come up with some ideas that I normally wouldn't and should be vetoed but they aren't because people fear the crazy pregnant lady. For example, the Husband's birthday was last Friday and while I was thinking about what we were going to do for it, I got an e-mail from Ikea saying that June 20th was Midsummer's Eve and the Swedish celebrate it with meatballs and potatoes and herring and strawberries and caviar. I decided to pass on the herring and caviar and just focus on the other items. That part turned out pretty well. I made use of my friend Kraft Foods and did their easy cheese swedish meatball recipe- seriously, buy meatballs from Trader Joe's, then let them thaw in your fridge overnight and stick them in the crockpot with a can of beef gravy and half a cup of sour cream. Damn tasty and stupid easy- as well as this one I discovered for potatoes. The potatoes were a big hit and also pretty easy to do. The Husband got his second banana cake of the week- check Better Homes and Gardens for that recipe, and I used store bought cream cheese frosting. Everyone raved about it. Who knew? Anyway, after the dust settled we had a lot of leftovers, particularly strawberries. I lurve strawberries and haven't had strawberry pie in forever. What better way to use the two containers of leftover strawberries than put them in a pie?
I may be lazy, because I bought frozen pie crusts, but I do have standards so I didn't want to buy a sleeve of that red goo from the store. I paged through my cookbooks to see what could be done. The Joy of Cooking was pretty minimal in their pie recipe so that got nixed. I think I found a couple recipes that called for rhubarb or making a chiffon pie or else didn't have a recipe at all, among the Gourmet cookbook, Better Homes and Gardens and my Baking Illustrated book, so I hit the web. I was thinking Paula Deen, but first I saw the Emeril recipe. It did set off warning bells in my head, because some of you might remember the great Black Forest Cake debacle of Christmas 2006- apparently it was so bad I never blogged about it, but it involved a spectacular meltdown. I used an Emeril recipe to make a very involved Black Forest Cake and there was epic fail which caused me to proclaim, loudly, that Emeril could suck it. Anyway, come on! Strawberry pie! It'll be awesome!!!
Ha ha haaaaaaa. I sliced and hulled the strawberries while the pie crust baked, then started to make the sauce that would hold the pie together. Strawberries, check. Cup of sugar, check. Vanilla, also check. I cooked that until the sugar melted and while that was going on I mixed up the cornstarch/water/brandy cocktail Emeril asked for. Okay, the sugar melted so I added the cocktail to it and then let it cook until it thickened. It thickened nicely, let me tell you. I let it cool while we ran errands then poured it into the pie crust, covered it and stuck it into the fridge. It said let sit 6 hours, so I figured waiting until the next day would be fine, right?
I had dreams about this pie, mainly because when I licked the sauce off the spoon and the sides of the pot it was really freaking tasty. Way better than the red goo you get at the store. I got all excited and said "I'm never buying red goo from the store again! Emeril, you're a geeeeeeeenius! I'm sorry I blasphemed against you after that whole Black Forest hot mess! Damn, this is tasty!!!" At work I promised my assistant she'd have a tasty piece of strawberry pie, made from scratch, no less, the next day. On the way home from work I picked up some squirty whipped cream, because I thought that would taste super good. After dinner settled I looked at the Husband, all excited, and said Pie!!! We pulled the pie out, I got a knife and some plates and forks and took the cover off. As soon as I stabbed it with a knife I knew something had gone horribly wrong. The nice thick sauce from the day before? Soup. How the hell could it have gone from nicely thickened like pudding to runny and nasty overnight in the fridge?! We still ate the pie, in bowls instead of on plates, with squirty whipped cream to kind of bring it together, and it still tasted nice but damn. We made the "Can I pour you a piece of pie?" joke too. My aunt's mother in law made the soupiest lemon meringue pie in christendom and my uncle always used to say "Can I pour you a piece of pie?" I also said some nasty things about another Emeril recipe biting me in the ass. Screw you, Emeril! I am NOT going to be fooled again!
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go cry into my pie bowl. Sniffle.
The Husband and I like hanging out with other married couples. We've sort of fallen into the habit of having dinner with our friends K and J once a month, either at our place or theirs. This month was our turn, so we had them over and I made chicken paprikash. K has a very Polish background and I grew up in a super Polish/Ukranian town, so we both know from hearty peasant food and have a great time talking about pierogis or kielbasa or other tasty things, so when I decided to make paprikash I was really playing to him. Especially when you consider J hates mushrooms.
The recipe I used was from a local food blogger. I'd made it once before and the Husband loved it. It's hearty, it makes a lot and it calls for a pint of sour cream. How can you go wrong with that? Ha ha ha. As has been mentioned before, I should have READ AHEAD!!! tattooed on my forearm. While I had made the recipe before, I totally forgot the "Let cook for one hour" step. Heh. When we got home from work I though oh, we have an hour, no problem. I had the Husband start with the mushroom, onion and garlic cooking and I cut up the chicken and tossed it with the flour and spices. I don't know why, but whenever I put something through a flour dredge it takes me twice as much flour as the recipe calls for and I never remember that so halfway through the dredging I had the obligatory "put more flour in the dish" moment while the Husband browned the chicken pieces. Somewhere in the middle of all that K and J showed up, so I informed them my lack of forethought meant they were going to have to wait for dinner.
Once dinner was simmering on the stove I did have my only moment of forward thinking and started on dessert. Dessert was chocolate cupcakes with melty centers, recipe taken from my page a day cupcake calendar. The recipe had you melt the chocolate and butter together, then let it cool. The cupcakes needed to cook for 20 minutes, then sit for five, then be served immediately, so I did the figuring and got everything ready to put them in the over when we sat down to dinner. That actually worked out well, and the Husband made the noodles to go with dinner while I was doing that, so we were just about ready to sit down to dinner when I realized I forgot the vegetables. Argh! I can not be organized!
Dinner went well. J picked out the mushrooms and handed them around to everyone. Everyone loved the paprikash and had second helpings, so I figure it was a success. J made a comment I hadn't even considered- chicken paprikash is a lot like beef stroganoff. There's a sour cream based sauce, chunks of meat, mushrooms, you eat it with noodles, relatively slow cooked, huh. Around the end of dinner the timer for the cupcakes went off so I opened the over door. They didn't look done so I muttered "stupid oven" and let them go for a few more minutes. About three minutes later, I realized oh! They're not supposed to be done! Crap! The cupcakes that were on the edges of the tray didn't have the melty centers, but the ones more toward the middle did. It didn't matter, everyone seemed happy and ate a bunch.
All in all, it was a nice dinner with friends. Right now I am debating adapting the recipe for the crock pot. That wouldn't be too hard, right? Ha! You know me!
I should have known this week would be a disaster from the word go.
I put my cake together Tuesday night and it was a little warm in the house, so I stuck it in the freezer and promptly forgot about it. I got it out Wednesday and let it sit on the dining table. A little while later I came back and it was sweating profusely. I touched the cake and some of the frosting came off on my finger and it felt all slimy. Ew! There was no way I was taking that in to cake class. So, I made another cake. I took time off work after lunch and put the cake together while I made the rest of the frosting for the next class. I got the medium frosting for the sweet peas and bows done, then I started on the stiff frosting for the roses. We needed one cup of shortening. How much did I have? Half a cup. I can not believe I've used an entire 6 pound tub of crisco in a month. Ugh. I called D and she agreed to bring more crisco to the house when she came.
After work we went home and I realized I couldn't frost my cake until D got there because I had given her my big froster tip and my spatula/knife thing to wash in her dishwasher. Crap! D was late getting to my house, too, so there was a lot of last minute running around. I finished mixing the frosting while D garotted my cake layers, put a layer of frosting in the middle and put the second one on top. Then she packed the stiff frosting while I frosted my cake, because she still can't get frosting to stick to the sides of hers. This is where fun thing number two kicked in- I ran out of frosting. My poor cake. It was sparsely covered in spots, covered with crumbs and looked like one hot mess. AND we were running late, so we threw everything into the car and off we went.
When we got there, the teacher looked at my cake and raised an eyebrow. I told her my sad sweaty cake story and she said, "You know, if you'd just left it, it would have been fine. It's just condensation. It would have dried in time for class." GAH!!! So class started and she showed us how to make sweet peas and bows. I filled up my frosting bag and my frosting was way too stiff. Crap. I emptied out the frosting bag, put some water in the tub, stirred it up and tried again. I think I made the frosting a bit too runny, but she said it shouldn't work too badly for making roses. Trustingly I filled up the pastry bag. She had us all get out nickels and showed us how to make the beehive shaped frosting base of the rose, then had us make about 15 of them on the wax paper squares we had to bring. Okay, done and donerer. I looked over at D's frosting globs and started laughing. See, we had to bring frosting colored for the bow and sweet peas and D had covered her cake in Tiffany blue frosting. We decided that what goes great with Tiffany blue? Chocolate brown! Except we didn't put enough coloring into the frosting and it was more the color of peanut butter. So, D's frosting beehives looked like tiny mounds of poop. We laughed about that until we noticed the girl across from us. She had neon day-glo pink frosting and her piles of frosting were rather tall and had kind of a pointy top that was wider than the base. It looked like she had a tiny army of bright pink penises. We started snickering. Her mom looked up, saw us looking and said, "You guys! She's only 13!" She said it while she was laughing, so we figured we weren't in too much trouble.
Then it was time to put petals on the rose, and here's where it really came off the rails. She had us put a rosebud type swirl around the top of all of our frosting mounds. We were supposed to really press into the top of the rose to get it to stick. I did, and my mound went splat. I picked up another mound and it puddled too. Yeah. That frosting she said would be good for roses was way too mushy. So I started over. I dumped all the frosting off my wax paper squares and refilled my bag with the stiff frosting for roses. Since I'd made that frosting a little stiffer than the sweet pea frosting, I softened it with a bit of water and also, once I got the bag filled, worked it with my hands to soften it up. Then I made frosting beehives, marveling at the difference the stiffer frosting made. Of course, this meant I was waaaaay behind when it came time to put the petals on. In fact, I'd just filled the bag when she started putting petals on so I half watched, half made beehives. Eventually I caught up and was ready to put my petals on. My first rose looked like someone had kind of smooshed the petals up. It didn't unfold nicely, it was all straight up in the air. To make matters worse, I have no idea if it was the frosting or my tip or what, but for some reason frosting didn't want to come out of the top of the tip as evenly as it did out of the bottom, so I had a really ragged edge to the top of the petals. I set the rose down and tried the next one. D went to take hers off the rose nail and dropped it in her lap. The teacher said that she hadn't wanted to say anything, but every time she's taught the class, someone always drops a rose. Shortly thereafter, I finished my second rose and promptly dropped it. Into my purse. Did I mention my purse looks like this? That pretty green one? Had a pink rose inside it. Yeah. After our rose dropping fiasco, D and I gave up. D put some random designs on her cake and I watched everyone else put roses on their cake and we waited out the end of class.
People in our class had some really pretty cakes. The other Me in class's cake looked really nice and D and I expressed our jealousy. We mentioned she'd done such nice cakes and we wished ours had turned out that nicely. That's when she told us this was her second time in the class. No wonder! At the end of class, the teacher handed out certificates of completion. Mine, appropriately, got a frosting blob on it. D and I talked about it and decided we were a bit burnt out on cake class and maybe we'd wait a while to take the next one. This is good, because I was getting tired of the late Tuesday night frosting and Wii parties and making the metric ton of frosting every week.
The Husband called towards the end of cake class and wondered if we'd be in the mood for food. I told him that after the class we'd just had, D and I needed Olive Garden. See, there's one cure for tough times and that is melty cheese and alcohol. Usually our go to place for that is our favorite Mexican place, where they make queso that's like liquid crack, but for frustration this extreme, we needed Olive Garden. More specifically, we needed red wine, fonduta and a tasty chocolate dessert. That bad. We talked about it at the restaurant and we both knew that making roses wasn't going to be easy, but it seemed like this class had been extra frustrating. Grrr.
When I got home I decorated my cake. No roses. A shell border, lots of sweet peas and a bow. It looked like this.
First off, hello everyone who's joining us because I made the This Is Good! Imagine my surprise at that one! Very cool! Hopefully I'll get to reply to everyone's comments soon. And now, the continuation of Hell's Kitchen. Okay, not really, but here's what happened the third week of cake class.
As mentioned before, D and I were a bit apprehensive about making clowns. First off, that's a LOT of frosting. Who in their right mind feeds a kid that much frosting? Second, clowns are creepy. While we were discussing the clown class, D kept bringing up "famous" clowns from history- Stephen King's It, John Wayne Gacy, Ronald McDonald, Shakes the Clown- and saying there was no way she was going to make a clown. I was a little concerned because I was taking the cake in to work and the day after cake class we were having a reception for our new coworker, who is getting married on Saturday. What better way to say "Yay! You're getting married!" than a cake with freaky freaky clowns on it? This was not looking good.
D came over to my house Tuesday night with her cakes- unbroken this time, she'd made them Monday night and bought the huge storage bags to carry them in- and we had dinner. No drinking this time. Well, okay, I had a glass of wine while I made frosting, but that was it. We looked at the class requirements while eating dinner and discovered that all we needed to make was one batch of thin frosting to cover a cake. How did we get that lucky? Well, this might squick some of you out, but our cake class teacher told us that if you make buttercream frosting with water, it'll last in the fridge a long time. By long time, we're talking probably the month's worth of classes. So last week after we frosted our cakes, we combined the leftovers and discovered we had just about the required amount to frost a cake. Rock star! We also needed some medium consistency frosting, which we again had from last week, and we'd need a little bit of thin, which we skimmed from the leftover frosting after D frosted her cake with the fresh stuff. Good deal. Cake frosting went well this time around, although I'm not sure what D is doing wrong. Her cake had bald patches again. Actually, I think I have an idea of what D is doing wrong. The teacher told us that when we frost, we should cover the top of the cake with frosting, then the sides of the bottom layer, then the sides of the top layer. Then you take the frosting knife and hold it against the side of the cake and slowly spin it on the turntable, periodically stopping to wipe the frosting off your knife. Once that's done, hold the knife on the cake and again turn the turntable, smoothing out the top. This is what I do. I'm not sure what D does, I think it's a random variation on this, but when she gets done it looks like she's just slapped frosting on the cake and tried to smooth it out. There were still spots where you could see cake through the frosting. I don't know what to tell her.
Anyway, we showed up to cake class Wednesday night and learned that it wasn't going to be all scary clowns, we were also going to learn a couple flowers and some leaves as well. We learned shell borders and big stars, and how to twist your wrist while making big stars to give you pretty flowers. I wasn't happy with my shells. In the picture, they show you these shells with a nice tapering point at the end. Mine looked like their back ends exploded. The teacher said they looked good, though, and pointed out that if I was making a border those ends would get covered up anyway. After those, we put on the dot tips and made big dots- for faces- and small dots. I totally would have made a bunch of grapes, but we couldn't get the tub of purple coloring open. Seriously. No one could get the tub of purple coloring open. This could possibly have been because D and I both tried after we'd been practicing frosting techniques, so we had frosting hands, and we probably greased it up good for everyone with clean hands. Oh well. Cake covered in grapes, I will make you, mark my words. We also learned how to take the big dot and turn it into a heart, although most of our hearts looked a little odd and our teacher said it actually worked a little better to turn the hearts into shamrocks. D pointed out that her hearts looked more like women with big thighs crossing their legs. Again I have to ask, how the hell do you get the points at the ends of these things? I swear, the people taking pictures for the decorating books get in there and fix the hell out of those things so they're all perfect, because there's no way one person is that perfect. We also strapped on the leaf tip and did leaves, and the teacher announced I had the touch for leaves. It's still really weird to her her say "Lorelai has the leaf touch, those look great!" and realize oh yeah, that's me!
After we'd done that, the teacher had us gather around her so she could show us how to make clowns. I have to say, it wasn't as bad as we'd been expecting. The worst part really is their creepy heads on spikes. You use the big star tip to make a stack of frosting for the body, then you squirt two legs out of the bottom and arms off the sides of the top. It was at this point that I realized that what she was making sort of looked like a rabbit, so I decided no scary clown for me. The teacher finished the clown, spiked the body with the head and sent us off to make our own clowns. I started mine, but instead of finishing it like a clown, I tried to make a bunny. Logistics failed me on this, as one of the arms didn't want to stay attached to the body and kept sliding off and my round blob of frosting wouldn't hold the ears. I think my problem was that I wanted the ears to stand up. I should have made a long eared bunny, so that the ears could spill down the back and therefore wouldn't have to defy gravity. Once my bunny was done, I moved on to putting flowers on my cake- so pretty! Let's take a look.
You're probably thinking we've reached the end of this entry and where does Brokeback Clowntain fit in? Well. D and I had been discussing how really the only way we'd feel okay making clowns would be if we did CSI: Clown College and had them all broken and jacked up and made our clown cakes look like a crime scene/horror movie. Since I'd turned my clown into a bunny, I didn't worry about doing that but D was all about going with our original idea. She made her clown's body and tried to attach one of the arms, but ran into the same problem I did, where one of the arms didn't want to stay attached. When it fell off, inspiration struck. She left it lying there, dismembered on the practice board, and made one regular leg for her clown and one broken one, then stuck the head in at a bizarre angle and piped "Ouch!" in front of it. It looked like this-
Next week is the final class, I believe. This is the class where we learn to make roses. There have been instructions in all the lessons and I think we were supposed to be learning it step by step, but our teacher thought it made more sense to learn everything all at once. So, next week will be Cake Class: The Rose Ceremony. I'm really excited about that. I mean, come on. Who doesn't like frosting roses? Other than my diabetic mother? Or dentists? Or people who don't like frosting in general? Hopefully it'll be really easy so I can be like that woman in that old commercial. "Oh! I worked so hard! No need to thank me, really!"
I should add, D didn't decorate her cake last week so this week she was determined to make it look like something, and here's how it turned out.
Our local craft store was offering "Enroll in cake class and we'll tell you that your friend comes free, but really we'll just charge you both half price, which is still a pretty sweet deal," so D talked me into enrolling with her. We were both pretty excited. I mean, we're in cake class! We're going to learn how to decorate cakes and that's just a few steps away from meeting Duff and being on Ace of Cakes and winning the love of Geoff, right?
One thing we didn't realize- cake class is really expensive! Even with the half price admission, you still have to buy the book and the box of started stuff and meringue powder and butter flavor and a sweet ass cake garrote and a turn table that will cause you and your friend to be all "I got two turn tables and a cake garrote, Where it's at!" in the middle of the store. Then you have to stock up on cake mix and go to your local bulk foods place and get a six pound tub of shortening (shudder) and what you and your husband refer to as "a baby" of powdered sugar because that thing is seven pounds and squirmy when you try to hold it. All in all, that's a lot of stuff, even using your shopper coupons from the craft store for a discount.
The first class was interesting. Apparently there were two D's and two Me's, so D and I picked cake class names. Because we're dorks, she became Sookie and I became Lorelai. Ah, Gilmore Girls. During class one, which was held in the middle of the store with a lot of loud people and children wandering around, the teacher showed us how to make buttercream frosting and frost a cake, then told us that at the next class we'd need to bring in our own cake, preferably looking like the one she just frosted. No problem, right?
Since I had all the frosting makings, I told D to come over with her cake the night before class and we'd go take care of business. Thanks to my two mixer bowls (Thanks mom!) I made me some frosting and D some frosting and we both set out to frost our cakes. I had made my cakes the night before and done like the teacher suggested, which would be bake it just a little under, then let it sit on the counter until you can touch the pans with your hands, then flip the cakes out onto a rack and stick the rack in a garbage bag. I shite thee nay, that really does make a tasty, moist cake. Then we were supposed to let the cakes rest and frost them the next day. D had made her cake that afternoon and put them in storage bags. Layer #1 got a chunk taken out of it when she tried to pull it out of the bag. Layer #2 broke in half. Not a problem, right? We can always frost it together. Except not so much.
While D had been waiting for me to finish making frosting, she was drinking a bottle of Arbor Mist sangria and watching my husband play the rabbit game on our wii. It took a while to make the frosting and she couldn't remember how to frost a cake because she'd been distracted by all the people in the store, so she waited for me to be ready to frost the cake. By the time I was ready, she'd had the whole bottle of sangria. Whoops! Her cake was a hot mess. I tried to help fix it and I thought it looked okay but the next day at cake class you could see that she'd taken off more frosting than she needed. Her cake had a few bare spots and you could see the crack down the center. Mine, on the other hand, looked like this-
We had to come with a design we wanted to put on the cake and frosting in colors for our design, as well as frosting to practice writing and star making. Then we spent half an hour making stars and making clusters of stars, which you use for character cakes, as well as long wavy lines and tight up and down swirly lines. We also learned writing, and my cake writing looks a lot nicer than my handwriting. That could quite possibly be because I was tracing what they wanted us to do.
After practicing, the teacher showed us how to make cones out of parchment triangles (which, I swear, I only achieved mine through witchcraft and sorcery. I have no idea how, I am not that spatially oriented) that we filled with piping gel, and then we traced our designs on wax paper and transferred them onto the cake. We had to fill in the designs with frosting using the techniques we'd learned in class. How did mine turn out?
This week's class will feature the freaky clown heads we originally refused to buy because, come on, clowns. Ew. I think we're going to learn more writing and more design work this week as well. Hopefully on Thursday I'll remember to write about it, instead of waiting forever.
Oh, and I took the cake in to work on Thursday. By the time the day was over, all that was left was one rather largeish piece that the Husband and I split at home. Everyone said it was good cake. Good deal. I hope they like this week's. I may have to turn it into CSI: Clown College to keep from being squicked out. We'll see.
I should throw in, I'm really enjoying cake class. I think I'll keep it up. The next level is flower making and I think you make a basket cake in one of the classes, which I think is cool and I've always wanted to try, and then after that it's fondant and gum paste, which is what they use a lot on those Food Network cake challenges and which sounds really exciting. I may go broke doing this.
Last night while the Husband was grilling dinner- Isreali spice chicken for him, some seasoned turbot we got at Trader Joe's for me- I pitted two and a half pounds of cherries. It wasn't quite the arduous task I'd thought it might be. I pulled all the stems off then took my paring knife and held the cherry, stem end up, on the cutting board. I put the knife on top of the cherry, pressed down, then rolled the cherry until I'd bisected it. Then I pulled the two halves apart and dug the stone out with my thumbnails. I think it took maybe fifteen minutes to get them all done and then I was good to go.
The clafoutis went together easily- eggs and sugar, a splash of vanilla because I didn't have a vanilla bean, some brandy, some flour and then some milk. I was a bit worried because the recipe said "whisk in milk to form a smooth batter" and I went from almost a loose paste after I'd added the flour to something very liquid after I added the milk. I was a bit worried what they called for was too much milk because when I think batter, I think like pancake batter. Pancake batter is usually a lot thicker than what I ended up with. The blog I read didn't say anything about dinking with the recipe and they didn't mention "OMG it was a huge mess!!!" so I figured what I was doing would all work out and I put the cherries in the bottom of my big oval corningwear dish, poured the stuff over top of it, set it in the oven and hoped for the best.
When I put the clafoutis in the oven, I realized we were going to have a lot of it so I had the Husband call his brother and tell him to come over. The Husband was all, "What are we having? How do you pronounce that again?" I told him to tell M, "Come over! We're having hot booty clafoutis!" The Husband didn't say that and M showed signs of turning down our offer, so I again shouted from the kitchen "HOT BOOTY CLAFOUTIS!" This time M agreed to come out, because, you know, everyone likes hot booty. By the time M made it over, the 45 minutes were up and the clafoutis looked lovely. It was all puffed and pale yellow and golden brown in places. Of course by the time I took a picture, after the five minute settling time, it had deflated. It dished up rather nicely, though. See? M and I debated the merits of ice cream versus whipped cream with this and decided that, texturewise, whipped cream would melt nicely on top. It was quite a good choice. There were really good vanilla and brandy flavors that went well with the eggy mouth feel, kind of like the creme brulee french toast I make on occasion. We had a first round, then decided to go back for more. I thought that after resting a while longer the flavors were a little stronger, but M disagreed. Between the three of us we managed to eat over half the 9 x 13 pan. Oh man, tasty.
Because it isn't me cooking if there isn't some mishap, after washing my hands six times yesterday, then a shower and hairwash today, my nails are still a little stained. At least I got it all off my fingers yesterday, they were purple for a while.
Today is the Husband's birthday, so as something special I made sort of croissants while he was in the shower. My quick and easy food enabler, the Kraft food magazine, had a recipe in the most recent issue for "blueberry cheese rolls", which looked good. Of course, we're more of the mindset that if you put blueberries in something, it should be muffins, but all recipes are modifiable. Instead of blueberries I used chocolate chips on a couple, and chopped up leftover strawberries from last night's dessert on the other two. They came out really well, all soft and gooey. I had a chocolate one and the chips that were under the folded dough came out all nice and mushy. The Husband had a strawberry one and didn't say much about it, he was too busy eating.
We really liked these rolls and they were super easy to do. I'm thinking that the next time we have brunch I'll make these for all involved and play around with fillings. I wonder how things would taste if I used jam instead of fresh fruit? Or maybe pumpkin butter? Hmmm. Well worth the experiment.
Originally for the Husband's birthday, I had planned on making a Dalek cake. Unfortunately, I am a lazy whore. Saturday when we were planning the menu for our Father's Day/Husband's birthday lunchapalooza, I told him I had planned on making him a Dalek cake, but it was a lot of work and since it was going to be rather hot and humid on Sunday, maybe that wasn't the best of ideas. I did admit I'd been mulling Dalek cupcakes over in my head, but hadn't quite figured the logistics yet. The Husband was super excited about this entire venture. He requested the Daleks be made of banana cake, his favorite, and made some suggestions for various details on the cupcakes and we were good to go. Or so I thought...
Saturday before Mass we hit the grocery store and I got the banana cake mix, a box of swiss cake rolls and some chocolate chips and heavy cream to make ganache. While the Husband was at Mass, I made the cupcakes. I used a mixture of round and square silicone baking cups, because I wanted to play with the shapes a bit. Then, later that night, I took the cupcakes out of the cups and hit snag number 1. The square silicone cups released just fine. The round ones? Not so much. What had originally started out as 10 square cupcakes and 12 round ones was now 10 square cupcakes and 6 slightly mangled but usable enough ones. Okay, fine, less work for me. The original plan had been to turn the cupcakes upside down and top them with half a swiss cake roll that I peeled the chocolate from- before you have a clutch the pearls moment, I was going to cover the whole thing in ganache. I figured leaving the chocolate on and then coating it with ganache was a bit too gilding the lily. This is when I hit snags number two and three- half a swiss cake roll wasn't enough on top of the square cupcake,
Sunday when I got up I started right in on the cupcakes. I started the ganache and while it cooled I cut the swiss cake rolls in half and peeled them. After that was done I attached them to the cupcake bodies with toothpicks.
Thankfully, A showed up when I was in the detailing phase, so I put her to work coating everything with ganache.
Originally my thought had been to just pour ganache over everything, but after A tried that with the first one we realized that wasn't going to work. I got out a brush and A painted the cupcake bodies with ganache, then passed them over to me so I could put on the skirt bumps- chocolate chips.
The cupcakes went over really well. Everyone thought they were both cute and tasty. There was some joking going on about how they were possibly Elvis Dalek cupcakes, since the components were peanut butter and banana, and let me tell you, it's hard to do a Dalek voice with an Elvis accent. All in all, this project was a lot of fun, and the Husband loved them, which is what's really important. However, I hope he enjoyed them, because I'm not entirely certain I'm going to do that ever again! :^)
