The Lone Wolf...

...or why to avoid a business partner at all costs.

Well, not always. Over-generalization can be a problem with me sometimes.

I can only offer four short pieces of advice on whether or not to take on a partner in your business.

1. Talk about ownership before you begin planning. You don't want to get so far into the planning and building stages that major damage can be done by splitting ways with a partner.

2. No money, no ownership. If you are bringing money to the table, your prospective partner must bring money as well. Sweat equity is not enough, especially if your partner expects to collect a salary. No risk, no reward, right?

3. Consult a lawyer. Don't do what you "think" seems right to you. Especially if you have no previous experience in dividing a business.

4. And most importantly, it's business. It may make you uncomfortable to ask for what you want or need or to play hardball with someone you might consider to be a friend. But you need to do it because starting a business is a financial and personal risk. So take a step back to make sure you are doing what is best for your future.

the case for base

For my ice cream business, I’ve chosen to go with an organic ice cream base made by Blue Marble Ice Cream in Brooklyn. An ice cream base is the beginning of your ice cream. It contains all the basic ingredients such as milk, cream and sugar, but does not contain any extra flavoring, such as vanilla or chocolate. The base itself also comes pasteurized, as specifically required by national law (all ice cream base for retail sale must be pasteurized. You can do this on your stove top as long as you don’t sell wholesale or you can purchase base from a company that pasteurizes it for you). The finished base is usually packaged in 2 or 3 gallon bags and most frequently arrives fresh though it can be frozen and dethawed when you're ready to use it.

Once I have my base, I portion it out (into three quart containers because of the constraints of my ice cream machine) and add flavors and ingredients to customize the base to my liking.

I keep getting asked why I am not making my own ice cream base from scratch, like most restaurants do. When I worked in a restaurant, I would combine the milk, cream, sugar, eggs and flavoring ingredients and cook the base on my own. So why not repeat this same process in a retail setting?

1. When a company like Blue Marble pasteurizes for you, they also homogenize the base. Homogenization creates a more stable emulsion in your ice cream by breaking down the fat particles into itsy bitsy pieces. That way, when you churn your ice cream, the fat particles are less likely to clump together and create a grainy texture. And a homogenizer is an extremely expensive piece of equipment and well out of reach for a start-up business like mine.

2. To make my own ice cream base in my shop would have been cost prohibitive for me. The main ingredient in ice cream is milk so I naturally think that all ice cream makers should use the highest quality milk possible (side note, if the store you buy ice cream from is not talking about where their dairy comes from, you have a problem. Don’t be fooled by words like “artisanal” or “hand-made.” ASK THEM WHERE THEIR DAIRY COMES FROM).

Blue Marble makes their base using grass-fed, organic dairy from organic farms in Maine. For me to buy grass-fed organic dairy to make my own base would have driven my food costs so high that I would not be able to actually pay my fixed costs to stay in business. I simply would not have been able to order enough bulk organic dairy to drive the overall cost down to where I could afford to use it.

3. I want to be a business woman, not just a chef. I know. All you cooks and chefs out their think that sounds sacrilegious. But since I am a small business, I will be taking care of marketing and promotion, book-keeping, inventory and ordering, hiring and employee training and much, much more. In other words, if I spend all my time making base, I will not have time to actually run the business. And yes, I could hire someone, but I am just starting out and have only so much money at this point. At least for now. I didn’t think this way originally, until I was able to speak with the culinary manager at Shake Shack and he asked me why I wasn’t going with a base so I could focus on actually running my business. Why, indeed…

……..

And I’m in good company, as far as ice cream base is concerned. Bi-Rite creamery, the darling of the new wave ice cream scene, also uses a pre-made ice cream base from Strauss Organic Farms in California. They are just one of many.

I’m not saying that in the future, as my business grows, I won’t turn to making my own base. I would love to do that and, honestly, would have preferred to do so from the start (I am despotic in nature and would love nothing better than to control everything myself). With enough start-up capital it can be done successfully (check out the Penny Ice Creamery in Santa Cruz, run by the amazingly talented Kendra Baker). But for now, using a pre-made base is the decision that makes the most business sense for my company.

I'm Legal

Drinking age, yes. But also as a business owner. My new ice cream business, Milk Sugar Love Creamery and Bakeshop is actually Milk Sugar Love, Inc., a corporation created in NJ and insured with liability coverage, working out of a health-department inspected commercial kitchen and licensed to sell in Jersey City.

As a consumer, this should be VERY important information for you because so many beginning food businesses are not. A lot of people starting out baking out of their own homes, which most state laws clearly prohibit. Health department requirement also prohibit this.

I used to think this was ridiculous until I began to think about the implications of eating food baked in someone else's home kitchen (and then sold to others as a business). I have worked in a restaurant and understand what it means to deep clean a kitchen. I have rarely seen a home cook that has a kitchen cleaned AND SANITIZED anywhere near as well as a professional kitchen. And that is just the beginning. There are no children or pets allowed in professional kitchens. Did that baker who just made the cupcake you bought play with Fido and then not wash their hands before starting work again?

Many people starting out in the food industry just don't want to spend the money to follow the law and put the consumer's health and safety first. Yes, creating a legal business is expensive, but it simply is not worth risking the safety of your customer (and the the lawsuit that will surely follow) to save money.

Also, from a professional standpoint, people baking out of their homes also hurt the industry as a whole because they are more often than not charging artificially low prices because they have no overhead (i.e. fixed costs). They are not paying to rent a commercial kitchen or to get the licenses needed to operate legally. If, as professionals, we all did this, we could improve the industry as a whole by helping customers adjust to and understand the real cost of doing business. The blame for this also falls on our mass-producing food culture, but that is a topic for another day.

So please. Do your research, ask questions and support legal small businesses.

Au Revoir, for now.

I'm moving!

The new repository for my photos and witticisms will be on the official blog for Layers NYC, Anthony's and my cake business.

Please check out the new blog HERE and stay tuned as we whip up more confectionery delights and continue to move forward with plans for our future ice cream business. Don't forget now! Conquering the world with our frozen treats in 2013!

here kitty, kitty

 

vanilla cake with vanilla buttercream and strawberry jam

A cake for a very "girly-girl", as her mom put it. This cake was for Elizabeth who is graduating today. Her mom cuts Chris's hair at Aire Salon here in Jersey City---a wonderful salon run by the enormously talented duo, Aiko and Racheal. 

Aiko and I had a spirited discussion over the origins of Hello Kitty which led to frantic googling of her history. We discovered that Hello Kitty's full name is Kitty White and that she currently resides in the suburbs of  London with her parents and younger sister, Mimmy. She is a baker and an artist and keeps a cat as a pet (that's just twisted, right?) named Charmmy Kitty. She has an on-again-off-again relationship with Dear Daniel, also a cat, but they haven't gotten serious because, given that she measures five apples high but weighs only three apples, she is all looks and no substance. I'd like to thank Hello Kitty Universe for including such salacious details.

Check out the Layers NYC facebook page for a picture of our other cake from this week, a bottle in a box. And Anthony let me airbrush this one! He's an airbrush hog, so this was a treat.

pounds and pounds of butter

vanilla cake with chocolate buttercream

We don't get a lot of requests for chocolate buttercream so I haven't tasted it in a while. I'd forgotten how DELICIOUS something as simple as chocolate buttercream can be. I highly recommend it. We put in 3/4's of a pound of 55% chocolate in there so it was intensely chocolatey.

This cake was for Julianna's Christening. Her mother had a very special Christening gown made for her and wanted the cake to reflect the details in the gown. Anthony and I have been extremely excited to do this cake because we wanted to whip out some techniques we don't normally get to use.

We Ron-Ben'ed this baby.

This is now a phrase by the way.

Ron Ben-Israel, a prominent NYC cake designer, makes good use of silicon molds to customize his cakes and add details from a bride's dress, or a special piece of jewelry. Here's a link to a blog that details the process. It's amazing.

We used silicone molds to make detailed fondant pieces that matched the details on Julianna's Christening dress. We then painted the pieces by hand with silver luster dust and attached silver dragées to add a little bling.

We also made peonies for the first time. It was a nice break from an endless line of roses and daisies.

And we also made a two-tier buttercream wedding cake to go with a slew of delicious cupcakes made by one of Anthony's close friends and cupcake wizardress, Tara Roed.

I'm still reeling from the amount of butter and sugar we went through this weekend. I had fifteen pounds of butter in my freezer and it is GONE now. 

there's nothing like Australia

I would love to move to Sydney. It's just gorgeous---filled with parks and surrounded by water. The downtown area is all walkable and the outlying areas are connected by easy-to-navigate public transportation and a nifty ferry system.

The food was outstanding. I ate either seafood or Thai food every night (apparently Thai is the hot thing right now in Sydney) and drank at least two flat whites (microfoam poured over a shot of espresso) every day. My brand of choice was Single Origin Roasters and their coffee was some of the best I've ever had.

I visited two terrific bakeries, Bourke Street Bakery and Becasse Bakery. Bourke Street was in Surry Hills, the Sydney neighborhood where our hotel was located. My favorite was the rhubarb tart with almond, though the passion fruit meringue tart was a close second.

Becasse was located in a kick-ass mall in Sydney CBD.  The mall had a myriad of mouth-watering options in their beautifully designed food court, as well as all the high-end shopping a girl could wish for. The bakery was classic French, and Chris and I made our way there every afternoon for a petit goûter. I always had the cream puff because I'm such a sucker for them.

I was surprised how expensive restaurant prices were. I talked to one of our waiters about it and he said that it was because the minimum wage is much higher in Australia (just over $15 an hour). Love the idea, but it blew my vacation budget to hell. Apparently Australia in general is riding an economic high due to increased demand for commodities. One tour guide mentioned that Australia is  the third largest provider of coal to China.

Security was quite tight in the airports as well. There was a strictly enforced quarantine for food items. Not even water bottles from the plane were allowed outside the airport. We flew Qantas, and even sitting in economy, it proved to be ten times better than United or American, which we flew from Newark to Los Angeles. Free movies, exremely friendly staff and tolerable food---amazing!

The weather was too cold for me. They had just finished an extremely wet summer and temperatures were already starting to drop into the 60's while we were there (it's fall there right now). It was extremely windy as well. At Cairns, we endured choppy seas which made it difficult to snorkel and made quite a few people sea sick on the boat rides we took out to the Great Barrier Reef. Luckily I have a strong stomach and a good sense of adventure. Everyone I talked to said that the wind (which was at 30 knots every day) was unusual for this time of year. A freakish phenomenon apparently.

sea lion ahoy!

chocolate cake with vanilla bean buttercream

This Sea Lion cake and accompanying cupcakes were for Amelia's 8th birthday party at the Prospect Park Zoo. I can't remember what I did when I turned 8, but it certainly couldn't have been as cool as having your party at a zoo.

I carved the sea lion's body out of cake, but his head was Krispies. I did a test run with this fellow because I've never done a Sea Lion before and I wanted to experiment with his body shape and his massive flippers. In all honesty, he doesn't look quite look like an actual sea lion. He's a little cartoonish because that's my style---I grew up copying Garfield comic strips, so I like things with rounded edges and a chubby look. I tried a billion different things for his whiskers, but couldn't get them to look natural and ended up leaving them off altogether. He was still pretty cute, though, and I thought the color palette was lovely.

The Sea Lion with just a buttercream coating, with his fondant skin in place
and lastly, headless, so you can see the Krispies interior.

Amelia's mom, Roxy, is an amazing illustrator, and she drew the sea lion on the actual invitations. I tried to use her lovely drawing and colors as inspiration. You can see more of Roxy's work here.

southern exposure

coconut layer cake and lemon layer cake
This month's Saveur magazine had a stellar article and set of recipes from Ben Mims about Southern layer cakes. The photos were spectacular---I bought the magazine in the first place because of the giant wedge of red velvet cake on the cover. I intend to bake each of the five recipes, so I started this weekend with the two that looked most intriguing to me.

I was concerned that they would be too sweet. There was just so much sugar in the recipes for the frostings, the cakes and the fillings. But I was pleased with the end results. Sweet, but not sugar bomb sweet.

The coconut cake was my favorite. The cake was a basic butter cake, but it was soaked with coconut water. The frosting was thick and candy-like and covered in a shower of freshly grated coconut. The longer it sat in the fridge, the better it tasted.

The lemon cake was the same basic cake but with lemon zest in it. Delicious. The frosting was a different story though. It was lemon curd with an indecent amount of butter in it. Too much for me. It tasted like the cake was frosted in butter rather than a lemon frosting. Yech.

what you'll be eating in 2013

chocolate almond ice cream cake
So this is your sneak peak into what I'm working on for my business! There are layers of coconut cake, chocolate ice cream and roasted almond ice cream. And those are shimmery, crunchy golden sprinkles on the top.


I am in the middle of writing a business plan right now and will be finished by mid-May. And then the real fun begins. First off, I'll need to find investors. Then I'll need to find an accountant and a lawyer, incorporate my business, buy insurance, find a location, supervise a build-out, finalize suppliers and much, much more. It's mind-boggling, but I am still aiming for May 2013.

So stay tuned and I'll keep you up-to-date on how I'm progressing. Sometime soon, once I finalize a menu, I'll be having a tasting party and I would LOVE for everyone to come!

bears, bunnies, bottles

red velvet cake and cupcakes
So Anthony and I finally got to do a cupcake tower. You would think that we would get more requests for them because they CRAZY popular right now, but we haven't. The tower was for a baby shower and we completed it with a 6" cake on the top.


We made little sugar paste toppers in the shapes of bottles, bears and bunnies to go on top of the cupcakes. I loved the color palette, too. Deep red (from the red velvet cake) next to baby blue (from the fondant) is a stunning combination.

Can you say CHUBBY TEDDY?

Now a word about NJ restaurants. This is the second delivery we've done to a NJ restaurant that has gotten messed up by the staff. We included the actual stand with this order and carefully explained to the restaurant workers how to display the cake and cupcakes. Then we get pics from the event and the cupcakes are piled on trays with the cake haphazardly in the middle. C'MON MAN! Everything was labeled for the event. So what happened to the stand????

ice cream education

2012 ice cream short course, penn state university
I spent the past week in total ice cream immersion at the nation's oldest and best-known educational program dealing with the science and technology of ice cream. My brain is still overwhelmed with knowledge and my stomach overfilled with ice cream samples.

The most important thing I learned was that consistent ice cream quality depends on having a balanced recipe. We learned formulas to help us determine if a recipe was balanced or not, and we learned how to adjust recipes to compensate for ingredient add-ins.

Here are some of my favorite pics from the week. For more ice cream fun, visit our facebook page, 2012 Penn State Ice Cream Short Course.

The production area for the school's ice cream creamery.
On the left, ice cream cartons on a conveyor belt, ready to get filled.
On the right, the actual ice cream freezers.

Me with Dr. Bruce Tharp (stabilizer and emulsifier guru) during a sensory evaluation lab.
We are showing everyone how to rock a hairnet.


Churning ice cream in an old-fashioned White Mountain ice cream maker.


My dream soft-serve machine---frozen custard ROCKS!


A continuous ice cream freezer.
That's ice cream with 150% overrun in the bucket on the right.
Overrun is the amount of air you churn into the base.

A calf in the Penn State barns. Moooooo!

I was elected Secretary, or my preferred term "tech guru", of the class.
I instituted the Golden Cow Award for our favorite teacher.
I made this trophy all by myself---I love using gold spray paint, don't you?

Christmas cake and Christmas pup

Christmas cake: chocolate cake with vanilla buttercream
For Christmas, I got to make a baby's first Christmas cake for a very special baby, Sydney Mae. I decided to make another giant red bow because I'm really loving how my bows are looking lately. I like to make them hugely puffy (a quality, in truth, that's only desirable in a bow).

I added candy canes, which I made out of fondant, and a few holly sprigs (thanks again to the incomparable holly-making skills of my partner, Anthony).


I made the candy canes by rolling out to thin ropes of fondant, one red and one white, twisting them together, then rolling the twist out two meld the two ropes together. They looked freakishly realistic once they were dry.


Skippy
Chris and I have adopted a seven-year-old Shih Tzu named Skippy and it took me no time at all to become completely obsessed with him.

I have this week off and I am already dreading having to go back to work because I will miss hanging out with my pup all day.

two-tiered holiday cheer

first birthday cake with vanilla cake and nutella buttercream
This holiday cookie-themed cake was for Xavier John who turns a year old today. The cake was for his birthday but also for a cookie baking competition and party that his mother, Erika, holds every year during the holidays.


Anthony and I decided that since this cake was for the cookie party as well as a Christmas birthday, we would make blinged out gingerbread "cookies" out of fondant and decorate them with royal icing and gold dragees. We made Christmas tree shapes, stars, snowflakes, gingerbread men, candy canes and ornaments. They looked so real I wanted to bite right into one.

Anthony created the finishing touch in the form of a few of his lovely sprigs of holly that we tucked in next to the cookies.


lemon tarts with toasted meringue
I also made lemon tarts for Chris' Christmas party at work this past week. Fifty bite-sized tarts in crispy, buttery pastry shells. I was able to get the scalloped edge on the shells by cutting out the pastry dough with a scalloped cookie cutter. Yeah buddy.

For the filling, I used a lemon cream which is lemon curd but with much, much more BUTTER in it. The trick is to cook the eggs, sugar and lemon juice first, then let the mixture cool enough so that when you add the butter, it doesn't melt but emulsifies instead. Once you chill it, the mixture come together to form a very thick, buttery cream.

the bent spoon

the bent spoon
The weather was so lovely this weekend, Chris and I trekked down to Princeton, NJ to listen to some choral music at the university, eat an amazing brunch at Elements and try ice cream from a business I've admired from afar for a long time now.


The Bent Spoon offers a selection of 16 flavors of ice cream which they display in gelato pans. The girl at the counter said that they spin their ice cream with very little air in it, just like gelato, by using a gelato paddle in their batch freezer. The result is deliciously smooth and intensely flavored. They focus on using local, seasonal ingredients and get all their dairy from a small dairy co-op. I'll let you know what the name is exactly once I find out. I e-mailed the owners and am waiting to hear back. Good NJ dairy is nearly impossible to find...

I was still stuffed from brunch so I ordered two sorbets, grapefruit and cranberry ginger apple. Both were pleasantly tart though a little sweet for my taste. I also wished the ginger came through a little more in the cran-apple ginger. I LOVE me some spicy ginger. Chris had coconut ice cream and chocolate hazelnut ice cream. Again, both were a little sweet for me, but overall delicious. I also asked for tiny samples of a pair of new fall flavors, pumpkin mascarpone and honey. The honey was hands-down the best flavor I tried.

The Bent Spoon also offers large and miniature cupcakes and a assortment of cookies and other baked goods. I settled on a mini vanilla cupcake and a chocolate chip cookie.


The cookie looks the way I want a chocolate chip cookie to look. Pockets of chocolate seep through from the inside and the center looks slightly cratered so you know it wasn't over-baked. When you break the cookie in half, you can see that they threw whole round chocolate pieces into the dough (the girl at the counter said they use Guittard chocolate) so that they melt while baking and form stratified layers of chocolate inside the cookie. YES. VERY TASTY. I thought the actual cookie part was, unfortunately, a bit bland. It did look beautiful, though, and was perfectly baked and yes, I ate the whole thing. Sorry Chris.


I took a small nibble from the cupcake icing and immediately knocked it off. I am just not a fan of that birthday cake frosting (butter, confectioner's sugar and milk). It's too sweet, too grainy and forms a weird hard shell on the outside when it sits too long. The cake was very moist, but again, I wished for a bit more flavor. Maybe they were using more oil than butter in their baked goods? Not really sure. It looked adorable, though.

two weeks in pictures

I didn't make this beauty. Anthony made it for a dinner party and I forgot to post my shots. It's a Bûche de Noël with mascarpone mousse, pecan dacquoise, gingerbread cake and chocolate glaze.


I made four batches of macs and these pics are from round one. I filled these with peanut butter ganache from a recipe given to me by a friend and former coworker (thanks Cassie!). The ganache was amazing.


I made more ice cream. And here is my very own idea for an ice bath. I cook with some random set of pots and pans I bought on sale at Macy's. The set came with large and small stock pots. I fill the larger pot halfway with ice and water, nestle the smaller pot inside and pour my hot ice cream base right into the small pot. ICE BATH! The smaller pot doesn't sink into the water because its handles rest securely on the sides of the larger pot.


And last but not least, a small first year anniversary cake for Cara and Chris. I tried to match the flowers from the original cake from last year but I ran into an issue with my florist. I ordered the flowers well in advance and let them know that they were for the top of a cake and needed to be in bloom. I also specified that I needed a light pink color. Here's what they gave me when I went to pick the flowers up today.


THEY'RE NOT EVEN FULL GROWN FOR PETE'S SAKE.
AND THEY'RE WHITE.
I had a back-up plan thankfully, but geez the stress. And for what it's worth, I would NOT recommend purchasing flowers from Exchange Place Florist in Jersey City.

chocolate hazelnut sponge cake

This recipe was created by Elizabeth Faulkner for the October issue of Bon Appetit. I didn't finish it with the decorations because I was mainly curious about the techniques she used in the components. The cake was a traditional sponge cake which called for whole eggs and yolks beaten until light and fluffy, egg whites with granulated sugar and corn syrup beaten until frothy and cocoa powder and all purpose flour folded in at the end. I didn't like the cake that much. It wasn't a bad recipe, I just don't like sponge cakes. I hate cakes that need to be soaked with something like simple syrup (or as this recipe called for, straight up brandy) in order to make them moist.
The two layers of filling, a hazelnut ganache and a hazelnut mousse, were incredibly delicious. The ganache had no chocolate in it, which I found curious. Hazelnut butter, hazelnuts toasted and ground into a paste, replaced the chocolate and I loved the result. It was savory and rich and I want to try it as a bon bon filling as soon as possible. The mousse was terrific as well. I was thrilled that it didn't call for any gelatin in the mousse because I HATE gelatin in mousse. It ruins the texture for me.
What amazed me the most was how important it was to let the cake hang out in the fridge for a few days before eating it. I tried slivers of the cake the day I made it and each of the following two days. For me, it tasted best on the second day. The flavors came together and the mousse had time to soak into the cake and make it more soft and moist.

Charlotte Patisserie

I can't believe it's been almost 2 years now since I graduated from the French Culinary Industry. After graduation, only a few of my classmates went on to work in the culinary industry and no one yet has opened their own store front. That is until two weeks ago. Mike Lechowicz is the first person from my pastry class to open his own place. He named his French-inspired pastry and coffee shop Charlotte Patisserie because "Charlotte" sounds French but also means "apple pie" in Polish. Cute. His shop is on bustling Manhattan Avenue just steps away from McCarren Park in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

Everything in the display case looked so delicious---cakes, tarts, macarons, danish, scones, croissants. Best of all, he brews Counter Culture beans in a shining La Marzocco espresso maker.


The shop's interior was lovely, all exposed brick and dark woods with stainless steal accents. Mike did the build-out himself and installed all the plumbing. He said the building used to be an All-State Insurance office, though he did such an amazing job with the space that you can't even tell.

He also has access to a spacious backyard area where he plans to have outdoor seating along with wine and savory offerings in the near future.


So if you're in the Greenpoint area, definitely drop by and enjoy a cappuccino and a buttery almond croissant. Mike gets up at 4 a.m. every day to bake them fresh and I guarantee you'll love them.

it's freezing out so I made ice cream

tarte tatin ice cream
rich vanilla bean ice cream base
+
salted caramel sauce
+
crunchy puff pastry nuggets
+
brown sugar-glazed apples
=

frozen heaven

let's play ball

chocolate cake with vanilla bean buttercream
This was a birthday cake for the two-year-old son of a terrific friend and sous chef, Roger. Roger is an amazing pastry chef and an incredible chocolatier. You can check out his cakes and candies on his Playroom Dessert Company facebook page.

Roger contacted me this week and asked if I had time to make his son's birthday cake. The only specifications he gave me were that it should be 12" round, have chocolate cake and vanilla buttercream and have a sports ball theme. I wanted to do something colorful and dimensional because what kid wouldn't love that? I knew I got it right when I delivered the cake. Roger's son Danny saw it, smiled, and immediately tried to grab the baseball right of the top. Mission accomplished.

I would also like to take this time to say how much I appreciate having a great partner like Anthony. Anthony had to work this weekend so I did the majority of this cake solo. GEEZ. I'd forgotten how much longer it takes when you do everything yourself. Especially rolling out fondant, which he is always nice enough to do for me when we work together.