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.

mac practice

macarons with salted caramel filling
I'm a little out of practice with macs since I've been in a cubicle for the past five weeks, so I decided to break out the piping bag this weekend. I've shown the stages above: piped, baked, filled and, of course, eaten.

I want to make these again so that next time I can hide a tiny nugget of green apple pâte de fruit (fruit jelly coated in sugar---like those fruit slices you can buy in candy stores) in the middle of the filling. It will taste like a caramel apple then!

I had a life-changingly good macaron this weekend at Francois Payard Bakery in Soho. The outer shell was delicately crispy and the inside velvety soft. GO GET ONE NOW. I recommend pistachio, or if you're feeling Halloweenish, pumpkin.


fudge ripple
And you know I can't go a weekend without making ice cream. I kept it simple today. Vanilla ice cream with ripples of thick, fudgetastic chocolate. I liked it so much, I shot it on a bright pink background. Très jolie.

picture time

vanilla cake with nutella buttercream
This darling ladybug-on-a-leaf cake was for a first birthday party. I snapped pictures as the cake came together so I could do a play-by-play for you.

So let's get started.


We built the ladybug's body using 3 ten inch cake layers, 2 six inch cake layers and lots of Nutella buttercream. After the cake chilled, I carved it into a round mound that Anthony thinly crumb-coated.


Next, we covered the body in fondant and airbrushed it red. While the body dried, Anthony formed the head out of Krispies and we covered it in black fondant.

We've found that it's nearly impossible to get a true black by coloring or airbrushing white fondant. We just keep a small tub of black fondant on hand instead.


The rest was simple. We assembled the body and head on top of cake boards I had cut into a leaf shape and tricked our little lady out with antennae, spots and lots of sugar flower daisies.

Anthony liked the daisies.

And I liked the cake scraps.

short and sweet. and frozen.

tres leches ice cream
Creamy coconut ice cream. Crispy coconut and vanilla bean meringues. Squares of buttery cake soaked in coconut milk.

Chris's favorite cake also makes a stellar ice cream.

savory and sweet

zucchini, potato and leek crostata
I was baking last week but not blogging. Chris and I went to a funeral on Saturday and I was feeling very introspective.

I made the tart, or crostata, pictured above, last weekend. Lovely, right? Chris kept driving me nuts by calling it a pizza. This is not a pizza. It is a savory crostata---a medley of vegetables baked inside a buttery pie crust. CROSTATA.


ricotta ice cream with caramelized pistachios
and chocoate ice cream
I finally made my favorite gelato from Rome. It came out so well because I've upgraded my ice cream machine to the Lello Musso Pola 5030 Desert Maker. It's HUGE, especially since it only churns 2 quarts of ice cream at a time.

But OH what amazing ice cream. Absolutely as smooth as the ice cream I churned at Gramercy Tavern. I tested a basic recipe of vanilla and was amazed at the difference in quality between what i used to get from my old machine and what I got from the Lello. And best of all, it churns 2 quarts in a meager 20 minutes.

So I've gone a little mad over the last two weeks.

I've made a total of eight batches of ice cream: peanut butter with dark chocolate chunks, mint julep, Vietnamese coffee, vanilla bourbon, ricotta with caramelized pistachio, five spice pumpkin, olive oil and chocolate.

As I said, a little mad.

The chocolate in the picture was a recipe that included evaporated milk. I did not like the end result. It was chocolatey, but not as deeply, soul-piercingly chocolatey as I like.

The ricotta, however, also pictured above, was amazing. The caramel on the pistachios melts in the freezer, creating ribbons of bitter, lightly salted caramel running through the ice cream. I usually don't feel satisfied by a dessert that doesn't include chocolate, but it was different with this ice cream. Totally satisfied and wishing I had made a double batch instead.

double deliveries

red velvet cake with cream cheese frosting
Anthony and I had two cakes this weekend and I thought this wedding cake would be the easier of the two. Boy was I wrong. It assembled easily enough, but because of a communication issue regarding the venue, we nearly had a cake wreck on our hands. The reception was outside.

OUTSIDE. IN THE ELEMENTS. HUMIDITY. BLAZING HEAT.

Cream cheese frosting is not meant to hold up in humid, warm weather. We set the cake up outside and knew immediately we had to move it into refrigeration before the icing melted off. We rolled it on a cart through the restaurant's chaotic kitchen, over an uneven floor and to the walk-in fridge in the back. The only problem was that the fridge was used to store seafood in it and the cake would have absorbed the fishy odors. So we moved it again, back through the kitchen chaos and into a spare freezer. Drama. Stress. Deliveries are the worst.


vanilla cake with nutella buttercream
This Victoria's Secret bag was for Amanda, the bride-to-be. Really would have liked some black to go into this cake, but that idea got vetoed. We created the stripes with surgical tape and airbrushed on the color. I'd seen other people do a cake like this with strips of colored fondant they cut out and pasted onto the surface. It looks bumpy that way, and vaguely like railroad tracks for what I assume would be a sexy, pink train.

last taste of summer

ginger shortbread cookies with watermelon
and crenshaw melon sorbets

I've been hankering to make some ice cream sandwiches all summer, so I figured I had to do it this Labor Day weekend before the summer officially ended.

I wanted to use a crispy cookie just to see if I would enjoy it as much as I enjoy a traditional soft cookie. If I had made the cookie a bit thinner, I think it would have been enormously successful. Also, the cookie recipe called for crystallized ginger. I wish I had grated in fresh ginger because the crystallized ginger just wasn't intense enough for me. The sorbets, though, turned out beautifully---smooth and sweet with intense melon flavor.

chocolate gingersnap cookies with strawberry ice cream

These cookies were INSANELY delicious---chewy and spicy and dotted with chunks of melting semi-sweet chocolate.

I decide to stuff the cookies with strawberry ice cream. One problem, though. I don't like fruit-flavored ice creams because they always end up tasting, well, flavored and not truly like fruit. I would much rather eat a sorbet. But strawberry ice cream is a difficult flavor to abandon because it is part of the HOLY TRINITY OF ICE CREAM.

Chocolate. Vanilla. Strawberry. Or as it is sometimes labeled, Neapolitan.

When I was a kid, my parents used to buy a gallon tub of Neapolitan from Pathmark called "Whale of a Pail." Back then, that neon-colored strawberry was my favorite flavor. Partly out of sentimentality and partly because of the flavor's universal appeal, I decided to give strawberry ice cream another chance.

I went with a base recipe that used cornstarch instead of eggs as the thickening agent because I was hoping that the strawberry flavor would be stronger that way. The end product was good but not intensely strawberry enough even though I tripled the amount of strawberry puree the recipe called for. Arg. At least I have the cookies to drown my disappointment in.