Happy Solstice!

I've been having awful luck with cakes lately.......and apparently I've been having awful timing with posting on this blog.




In my defense, a lot of the time that I spent away from the computer was because I've been moving around a lot. The awesome job that I had in Ft. Lauderdale became not so awesome anymore and I made the decision to leave early and return to a life that was not so depressing and lonely. Is it sad that the only real thing I loved about the job was that I got paid enough to indulge my cake obsession? Anyway, I digress.



So I moved down to Miami for a little, then I moved to Tampa, where I'm currently crashing with my friend as the resident homeless bum. So now that I've clarified where I am geographically, let's get to it.

When I make a cake, because I'm still practicing, I like to try stuff out whenever I make a cake for someone, so for a Christmas cake I decided to do for a party, I wanted to attempt modeling with modeling chocolate. I have never made modelling chocolate, nor have I ever modeled anything, but hey that's are experiments for right

I decided I wanted to do some kind of winter wonderland cake because it's generic enough for a holiday shindig in America....it practically screams Happy Solstice!
And a quck text to the host: "Penguins or Snowmen?" confirmed the obvious....that penguins ALWAYS beat snowmen. So I looked at cake central and came up with a couple design ideas. I loved the idea of an igloo, but I couldn't imagine taking a hunk of fondant like that and just wasting it (I am unemployed now you know).

So The cake I made was Double chocolate with oreo buttercream. I made three layers and I baked the extra batter in small Pyrex mixing bowls to see if an igloo shapedcake would appear from one of them. I made my own fondant again and it was like the best I've ever made it so yay me, practicng is working.  Theres a reason they let the contenders on Food network challenges bring their cakes filled already. The one joy of my life though at that point was how fabulous the igloo came out. It just popped out perfectly dome shaped and ready to be covered. I was in love with it.
Anyway so I covered it in ice blue fondant which took me far too long to colour and got cracking on some modelling chocolate. PS Modelling chocolate is ridiculously easy to make....why didnt anyone tell me??? it is like 100 times awesomer than fondant to make and eat. After a long night of modelling, I managed to churn out this scene:

Its still one of my favourite cakes though. It makes me feel all snowy and Christmassy when I see it. The sad part is, I never made it to the party. My car, Kit, decided it was just a little too Christmasy and couldn't take the wicked cold we have been getting in FL.



Sigh.....



at least this one didnt crash in my backseat in a thump of glory.

Hi there!
It's been a while since my last post....and I think I can use the excuse that I was in emotional recovery.
I had my first cake disaster.....and yes, it was on the topsy turvy cake.
Little back story to the cake: I wanted this cake to be my crowning glory of cakedom, I was so excited, I baked 9 cakes total!!! 9!!! it took me a whole weekend to do the cakes, the 2 batches of buttercream, the 10 pounds of fondant. Honestly, I wasn't planning on this cake being for anyone so I don't know why I put that much effort into it, I guess it's that whole "practice at 100%" thing that stuck in my head from Real Housewives of Atlanta (guilty pleasure alert!)
This was my cake of experiments I guess, and pretty much all were successful except for well....the cake......

 I made an AWESOME OREO buttercream, seriously, how kickass is that....OREO filling in a triple chocolate cake with a layer of white chocolate buttercream on top. It just sounds awfully decadent doesn't it?

So I get to class, and after driving around the parking lot like a creeper to find an empty shopping cart (sidebar: one of the ones I found had a dirty diaper in it....WHO DOES THAT??) and once I found a clean one I took all my supplies inside. I needed to knead my fondant because I left a package of icing sugar out when I made it an it was unusable as it was.......So I spent a HUGE majority of time doing that and figuring out how much fondant I would need to cover my behemoth cakes (seriously, I don't know why they come out so huge)
I soon realsed that we were not doing the method on topsy turvy caking that I thought we were doin, the one that "mimics" instability by creating an optical illusion, but we were in fact creating REAL instability with the cakes.

 uh oh.

I covered and stacked my cakes, which took forever, and as I predicted, I was burnt out. I hate leaving the class with an unifnished cake however so I had planned beforehand to use candy as decoration instead of making borders and flowers etc. I'm pretty glad I did that becaus it made the next story a little more bearable.

Once I semi finished the cake and class ended, I took it carefully to the car in a shopping cart and placed it ever so gently in the car. SinceI live alone, I had no way really of getting someone to hold the cake for me as I drove, which I would have done if it wasnt a practice cake. So when a guy decided I was inching slowly enough along that he could cut me off safely, all 50 pounds of cake went THUMP......

No more shall be said on that.

The last tier was saved tho and I made a TON of cake truffles from the broken layers. So all was not lost.....comes with the territory when practicing I guess.

Did I mention my neighbours love me?

To good health

So all this heavy baking has taken its toll on my self control. I've gone from not wanting cake at all to thinking mmmmm a good piece of mudcake would be delicious right now. This behaviour must stop! But I cannot give up my goodies.....so what's a baker to do? Substitute of course!
This week I wanted to try out two healthy substitutes for that sweet tooth fix.
The first comes from everyone's favourite queen of substitutes; Hungry Girl. It's not listed on her website as a recipe but while she was on Goof morning America, she mentioned that if you mix 1 can of pureed pumpkin with any cake mix, you end up with a perfectly good cake, with no pumpkin flavour.....impossible you say?
Well I'd be skeptical too if I hadn't already tried HGs cake substititutions and had moderate success. Plus it made sense.....pumpkin is pretty watery and mild so it would be good in cake right?

I did this on a whim as I had some pumpkin left from the whoopie pie experiment and a box of spice cake mix leftover from Halloween sales. I figured if HG failed me, and the pumpkin flavour did come through, at least the spice cake would be a good flavour companion.
I mixed the cake mix an the pumpkin together and it was thick, which is expected. I decied to mae them into muffin/cupcakes because those are portion controlled. I didn't realise the thick batter would not settle out and form a nice smooth done on the cakes but they have a nice homestyle look to them that I can appreciate. They were also DELICIOUS and not dry at all. I wouldnt use the substitute for anything that needed to be cut/carved or stacked higher than maybe 2 tiers because it didn't have the structural integrity of a cake with eggs, but for a quick dessert it was great. I must try this with other flavours because the pumpkin flavour really didn't come through too noticeably.

So they're not the prettiest....but at 130 cals a pop.....I'll let em be....next time I will smooth the tops down.

So then I thought, what if  I don't really want cake....what if I get a craving for something smooshy and comforting...mmm like a good fudgy brownie....surely pumpkin is a little too watery for brownies right?

So I googled what to use with a brownie mix and I found TONS of advocates for blackbean brownies. You just puree a can of blackbeans (with water not brine) and mix that with any brownie mix and ta da! I had to try. And wouldn't ya know it....brownie mixes were BOGO at Publix this week.

The blackbean brownies are currently cooling and waiting to be sliced but so far they look delish! I sliced my finger making the blackbean puree (note to self....buy a food processor!) so that set me back a little. But the process was relatively painless and the warm brownie I tasted (I'm jus testing for doneness...gosh!!) had no black bean flavour and was surprisingly very filling which is an always welcome side benefit of the fiber and protein from the beans.

Macaron Chacaron

I decided I'd split the macaron post into 2 in case you didn't care about the long process to find the ingredients and just wanted to read the long process it took the make the macarons (macaron chacaron *does dance*....dammit!)

So I got all my ingredients together and took a deep breath. From all my reading I knew I was in for a long process, but I attempted pumpkin whoopie pies earlier (they were aight...made me realise for me personally,a cookie should be a cookie and a cake should be a cake....) and the filling melted before I could get a good shot.....damn you Florida.


Macarons were then the only thing left on my October to-bake list. And would you believe it, it's also the October Daring Baker's Challenge...I had to redeem myself....

Using MyFoodGeek's Almost Foolproof macaron recipe (hahaha I couldn't resist with that name) and looking at Canelle et Vanille's blog for inspiration, I began.
I sifted out my almond flour and icing sugar. Then I tried to make a meringue. Imagine my surprise when my maniacal pan to avoid cracking eggs ended when i read on the back of the egg-whites-in-a-box "Not for use in meringues". Awesome.
I tried it anyway, and it fluffed a little but not enough for me to experiment with my $9.99 a pound flour on it so I threw it out. My new plan? Meringue powder! I didn't even make the link between meringue powder and meringue in cooking until that moment. I mixed it up according to the directions and got great super fluffy results when I poured my syrup in. I read somewhere online that they should be stiff enough that a whisk shaped puff off meringue should stay in the whisk attachement when taken out. I then carefully folded the almond flour mixture in using the "macaroner" procedure (yeh....it has it's own named procedure...now if thats not intimidating I dont know what is)
I read also that under-folding folds turn the macaron into a whole different cookie; ironically named the "success" cookie and overfolding results in no ruffly feet. So I made sure to slowly fold my mixture until it "flowed like magma" and got ready to pipe.
So far so good. I piped my little macaron circles and the settled beautifully, but not too much.
I found every pan I had that could fit into my tiny oven and piped all and left them to dry for 40 minutes.

Then I baked them off.....this was the crunch time. I did the whole shebang, timed it to a tee, didnt open the door to peep, put a wedge in the door 2/3 through and you know what.....my macarons had feet! I've heard those are the hardest part to acheive so I was so excited. I sent this image to my sister

Caption:
They have feet!
She responded, I'm guessing that's good?
LOL....yes it is. :)

I was so excited! and after learning a lesson on waiting for macarons to cool before lifting them off the pan (nom nom nom cracked rejects) I ended up with some sweet lookin little french sandwiches if I may say so myself:







hon hon hon macarons! you er not so tuff now eh?? (my very poor french accent sorry)

but you er yummy!

The Chronicle of WholeFoods

So October has come to a close...and as a personal goal, I needed to get some stuff off my to-bake list bfore I thought of stuff to do for November ( Yes, I am indeed aware that I have a problem ok lol)
This weekend became my errand weekeend, I needed to get to a Whole Foods store on a quest to find almond flour. Publix unfortunately, did not have it (and at 9.99 a lb I can see why!!)
Did I mention I have a tendency to get lost a lot? 'Cause this weekend was a whole lotta gettin lost in the right places. I started off on my quest to find Whole Foods. Of course I took some wrong turns and on my way back to square one so I could try again I spotted a Barnes and Noble and quickly made a detour. For the life of me I could NOT find a Barnes and Noble anywhere....nor a Waldenbooks (okay okay I didnt really look for one....sorry Kelly) but I'd been looking for one for a while now to check out the books I had mentioned a couple posts ago. And boy did I.
I spotted the cookbook section an I was like awesome, there's alot. I saw some Pierre Herme books, a couple Dorie Greenspan and I grabbed about 5 and sat down to peruse them. When I was done, I went back and spotted another shelf of cookbooks and grabbed about 5 more. This cycle continued about 5 time, and I had "perused" about 15 books, including the ones I wanted, Baked!; Tartine, Bakewise, Paris: history of Sweets etc. I'm glad I checked out the books before buying them on Amazn because, call me crazy, but I like pictures with my cookbook. I need to know what the end product is supposed to look like. Seriously if i have to google what a St. Honoré Cake is supposed to look like then I might as well go online for the recipe. Pictures=instant reference point.
Anyway, I settled on 3 books, Heavenly Cakes by Rose Levy Berenbaum- this was a tough choice between this book and The Cake Bible. I figured I would figure out some way to get the Cake Bible on coupon because there were no pictures. lol. I'm glad I chose this one, the reviews say it is amazing....and after glancing it I agree....
and
Baked! New Frontiers in Baking by Matt Lewis et al.- I'm kind of in love with this cookbook. It is so unpretentious, it makes baking red velvet cake seem like something that all the cool kids are doing. (my fav line: "A brownie with icing is not a brownie.....it's masquerading as cake")

The last book I bought was the Good Housekeeping collection of Best Loved Desserts. I HAD to buy this one. The Good Housekeeping New Book of recipes is a STAPLE at my house and well it was on sale and it had pictures. SOLD!

After spending an inappropriate amount of money buying these I stumbled into a Michael's which just happened to be there. I figured since I was never going to find the elusive Whole Foods I might as well use my 50% off coupons I'd been hoarding. I gave my last coupon away to a lady in line buying student kits for a cake decorating class . :) I figured I'd share the joy....I kno how expensive those things get.

Anyway would you believe it, on my way home to unload my loot, I found the elusive Whole foods...the exact reaction was "holy crap!!! whole foods! whole foods! *swerve*.
And after a little stretching and breaking open of stock boxes, I found the almond flour. Hooray me! I stocked up.....because apparently Whole Foods= Narnia. I picked up some egg whites in a box (muahahahaha no egg cracking for meeee) and I went home.

It's Macaron time!
(I kid you not, I "sing" this in my head everytime I say that. Damn you Spanish Directv)

Spoke too Soon

So I moved....yay!! It was so tiring, I haven't felt like lugging my Kitchen Aid out the car...and you know how much I love that thing so you can imagine. Anyway so if you read my last post you would see that yesterday was supposed to be my first dessert decorating and candy making class.....and you'd be right! it WAS supposed to be my first class.
I'm still getting over the exhaustion of moving so I took a short nap and prepared myself mentally for a 3 hr class.....
got into the car and drove over to the high school where it was being held.
OF COURSE I got lost.....I actually drove past where I remembered the school being and thought "huh...weird that school has a playground..never noticed that before....guess I'll keep driving..." Drove right past it thinking it must be a nursery school or something and I must have been mistaken. Turns out the high school is attached to an elementary school. If only I was lucid enough to read the sign lol. Anyway, I called my sister who gave me the correct address and I plugged it into my GPS. After getting myself sufficiently tied up in my GPS cord, I realized I was only 5 mins away. I was already late at this point and I hoped that the people ran on Trini time, which in Florida isn't too much of a stretch.
So I get to the school, late, search around for a parking spot and finally hustle inside.
Ok so I've never been in an American high school, and I'm sorry but at night with noone else around those hallways are SCARY as hell...it's all quiet and all you hear is your own steps....at any moment I expected some crazed janitor to throw a garbage bag over my head....Glad ForceFlex of course....
Eventually I found myself practically running thru the labyrinth-like halls "Breakfast Club" style trying to find the darn classroom. Every once in a while I would run into a random janitor around a corner who looked at me creepily while mopping....didn't help.
I found one janitor chatting to her friend on her blackberry (lol) and figured she woudn't kill me with her industrial sized broom and stopped and asked for directions to the classroom.
After getting LOST in the maze and somehow ending up on the opposite side of the school, I ran into the janitor again and she actually walked me to the room. There were lights on so I figured I was late and the class was going on.
I knocked on the door.....no answer.......
Ran around to the front door......no answer.....in fact noone was even in the class room.
I was tired and pissed off at this point. So I called the office and left a pretty b*tchy voice mail saying that there's noone in the class and I paid already and I would like to know what is going on. Then I felt kinda bad, I started thinking well maybe it's like the first day of school when u don't do anything really but take roll?
I found the front office and I walked in looking crazy and told them there was noone in the classroom.
"ooooooooh, you're the girl."
"uh ok?"
"You didn't leave a phone number, um....the class was cancelled.....yeahhhh"
"You have my email."
"excuse me?"
"I registered online, you sent me a confirmation, you have my email address....you could have emailed."
"we don't email. We call."
"But I did everything online..you've emailed me before."
*silence*
"Sigh....Is my money back in my account?"
"uh you have to call to get it refunded"
*awkward silence*
I think they figured i would have left and called to get a refund but I was so confused and angry that I just wasted an hour of my life and stressed myself getting lost to get there to find out
a) the class was cancelled
b)they didn't bother to tell me
c) they didn't even refund my money knowing the class was cancelled.

Anyway so a lady came out and refunded me my money then and there cuz I think it became apparent I was not leaving till I had my $ nor was I calling back the office I was currntly standing in.

I'm LIVID at this point..... I KNOW I left a phone number but whatever.....you're so quick to email me back with a reciept and payment info but you can't scrounge up that same info and email me back saying the class was cancelled...or at the very least say "hey you have to follow this procedureto get ur money back". You don't know how far I may have had to drive or what else I had to do that day bullcrap I didn't leave a phone number.
Honestly if that's the level of unprofessionalism they display I am glad I won't be committed to a 7 week class there.
Publix saved my night tho, with their new bogo deals....I love Publix....their slogan is SOOOO on point.

This weekend I am going to attempt macarons.....cuz I love them, and cuz I need a pick me up

Halloween's coooming, halloween's coomming

Last night was my fourth and final Wilton Method course......
Our teacher Miss Patty, let us design our own final cake, which was cool cuz the final cakes suggested in the course book are pretty darn hideous.
Miss Patty "gently" suggested we could do a halloween cake because of the date (PS miss patty and I could be BFFs...I kind of love her). I jumped on it. I have an unusual love and nostalgia for Halloween considering it never used to be a big deal in Trinidad. My British kindergarten teacher made it a big to-do every year and bcuz of all the expats in my neighbourhood...we trick or treated every year and went to Halloween parties. I started googling cakes and designing stuff....drafting designs (with colours....cuz we know I have wonky coordination skills)

In the midst of this cakey daydreaming, my landlady told me I had to move, and all I could think was
"CRAP."

so the cake became about Halloween while doing some serious downsizing.....using up the stuff i already had (precoloured fondant, icing, marshmallows, cake things)
So I decided on a graveyard scene....I made pumpkins, tombstones and bones ahead of time out of leftover gumpaste and I actually fashioned some nifty ghosts but they didn't make it onto the final cake...I did play with them tho lol
Anyway at this point, I was pretty much dreading making this cake because of all the baking involved in the midst of clearing my apartment. I came up with a good system however. Everytime I used an appliance/bowl/whisk, I would wash it, dry it and throw it into my old TV box (which is now my bakery-in-a-box)
I baked all 5 cakes which came out gorgeously leveled and went to find frosting to "dirty-ice" them (lol cake boss) and in my "downsize" mode I grabbed the leftover magical strawberry filling that the cake elf whipped up last time and decided that would have to do.
"It's a chocolate-covered-strawberry cake now"

However the strawberry filling was not whipped or cooperating with me at all......and I was about to just ice it as one big hunk o cake until i opened my fridge and looked wayyyyy down into the bottom corner.....
"shut the front door"
There was a teeny tub of decorator's icing I had bought for roses back in course 1 (don't worry, it's shelf stable) Lucky me! So I poured all my remaining cocoa powder (yay downsizing!) into the frosting tub and whipped like crazy (I packed my kitchenaid away already..darn)
So I had 5 cakes all frosted and filled with delicious fudgy gooness ( I used a little of the strawberry....I liked the chocolate strawberry cake idea ) and ready to be fondanted.
Downsize mode again......My cake was going to have purple in it somewhere.....I bought that massive tub of purple fondant and I was not carting that sucker to my new room.
I used up the rest of the chocolate fondant to make bat like creatures and rats.....and lo and behold, I found my elusive edible pearls (i already bought new ones...don't you hate that) so suddenly my starless night became starcrossed lol.
Heres what I ended up with when all the cakes were covered.

hahah i was playing with the ghosts, till I realised they made a dent in the top of the cake....oops!!
(kinda wish I could have left the cake one tier....but i had to stack it for class)
I am so proud of my fondant smoothing improvement.....I had to go buy a new fondant smoother because sticky fingers obviously dropped the class.....clever little minx.
Anyway i digress I have learned with fondant it's less about the texture of the fondant and more about the smoothness of the cake underneath....like clothes I guess...
lesson learned: buttercream is like Spanx for a lumpy cake......

Anyway so we were instructed to not stack the cakes yet and bring them to class unstacked.
I must have been on crack or something when I picked out the pans I was going to use because I honestly thought there would be much more difference between the layers. My first two tiers ended up only being like one inch difference all around. When I stacked the cake, you could see the cake board pretty clearly. This made me sad cuz i had put so much thought into how the cake would look at the end, but I couldn't do anything about it.....so I worked with it and made a skull border. Sigh, lesson learnt....measure twice cut once.....
Thanks to Darian, the 9 yr old boy who comes with his mom to my class cuz I used some of his bone sprinkles for effect....and thanks for my cupcake :)


Here's the finished product.....


I also discovered, this cake, unlike all my others looks better in person than it does on camera. It's not a photogenic cake because I wanted it to be sloppy and drippy and smudgy for halloween...and it does....in person.....but on camera it just looks.....well sloppy, and drippy LOL

Anyway, I made it very kiddie looking cuz I'm donating it to a childrens home.
(Mom says take the zombie hand away lol)

Anyway so here's the last one:


Sigh......I shall miss you Wilton.
I started off just thinking I would only have time to finish 1 course and here I am 4 months later....still loving it :)

Where do I go from here? LOL I've found myself googling culinary schools that have baking and pastry programs and I just got off the phone with Orlando Culinary who politely told me that they do not offer certificate programs to international students and the A.S program in Baking and Patisserie is (wait for it)
$37,300

so after that, anything she said was Charlie Brown teacher-speak....mwohmwohmwoh

So I guess till further notice culinary school is deffo out of the question. But I started googling stuff I could do......The Diploma in Baking and Pastry Arts at home is covered by the government tertiary education initiative, so that's a good option. Only issue is the actual curriculum is pretty lame. Or so it seems......is it a case of poor description of the program? or do you actually get what you pay for? I don't know. And of course the website is down. LOL

But I have also seen a lot of advocates against culinary school...a lot of famous pastry chefs argue that it's a waste of money an you come out just as unqualified, but with a little more book knowledge.....I'm so used to being in school, it just seems natural to study in one for any career path.
A lot of chefs have no formal training...they learned from the school of hard knocks, which is just as, if not more valuable in something as hands on as the culinary field. It took me a while to wrap my head around that one.
But it makes sense.....if it tastes good, its not going to kill you and looks fabulous, then why does it need a degree behind it? It's a whole different ball game.
I love the recreational classes because they force me to do what I think is the most important no matter what:
practice, practice practice.

God willing, eventually I will be where I need to be and where I'm supposed to be.....until then I'm in Dessert Decorating/ Candy making class on Thursdays :)