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.