happy halloween....

Here are my entries in this years Norris Drive pumpkin carving display. One is a tribute to buttons on a remote control (subtle but use your imagination). The other one takes advantage of a rather prominent nose feature - much like myself. giggle...

Happy Halloween

externship....

My classes are scheduled to wrap up on December 19. At that point, we do an externship that runs through the beginning of April. Where we do an externship is completely up to us as long as certain criteria are met. Some people take the opportunity to go to Europe or New York. My initial intention was to go to a big restaurant or resort but reality set in and I decided to focus my search to the central Texas area. I interviewed for and got an externship at the Driskill Hotel yesterday. It's one of the finer hotels in Austin and it has a highly regarded bakery. The hotel offers fine dining, casual dining and banquet experience. It also does a high retail cake business. It's an unpaid externship but I feel fortunate to get it. I wish I could start sooner - the holiday season is the best and busiest time to be in a bakery.

note to self....

I took one of the devil's food cakes, sliced it into 3 layers and covered it with chocolate Italian buttercream frosting. Stupid idea. They call it buttercream for a reason and butter doesn't like the Texas heat. It was like frosting it with whipped cream and as you can see, it doesn't look very good. Cake #2 will get ganache and fondant this weekend. Hopefully it will come out better.

devil's in the details....

Here's the start of my weekend project... If you remember back to my Fred Flintstone cake, it was a 3 layer 9" cake. It was way too much cake for a small family to eat. It also had chocolate ganache between the layers which made for a rich cake. Not that I'm complaining.

I bought a couple of 6" cake pans and used the same Devil's Food cake batter recipe. I put the small honey bear in the picture for reference. These bad boys are small but thick and dense. They'll sit in the refrigerator tonight and I'll slice them up tomorrow. I'm going to go with chocolate italian buttercream on one and ganache and chocolate fondant on the other. By the time I get 3 layers done, it may be as tall as it is wide. It should be interesting.

May the best cake win.... I'll need to find someone to take one of the cakes off my hands. As much as I would like to try, I won't be able to eat them both.

excuse me boy...is that the chattanooga choo choo?...

This week was sculpted cakes and the theme was toys. I went with the Fisher-Price locomotive. It has some issues but if you use your imagination, it looks like a train. It consists of 2 dense white cakes that were sliced in 3 layers with buttercream between each layer. From there we sculpted the cakes and covered them with rolled fondant. I stood my cake on its side and shaped it in order to give it some height. We air brushed on the color. I got all artistic and tried to give it a dirty, sooty look which my instructor didn't care for it. Toys aren't sooty! The railroad crossing sign looks like it was rushed to meet the deadline (I barely made it). The track is sitting on a bed of crushed oreo cookies. I wish I had time to put some detail on the main body but there it is.

i have found the enemy and it is cakes...

Or more precisely, the enemy is the act of piping royal icing. This cake was a 6 day project and it has more problems than I can begin to list. I'll just describe the cake for blog purposes...

It is a 6" and 9" tier white cake. Each cake is sliced in 3 layers with American buttercream between each layer and on the sides. The cake is covered in rolled fondant. The fondant is handmade, which is an adventure. The flowers are made from gum paste - totally edible but I would save my appetite for the cake. The dough is pliable when we're forming the flowers but they dry and are very brittle. The little sculpture on top is made up of pastillage pieces (unflavored Altoids). The squiggly lines are cornellis which is piped royal icing. Please don't inspect it closely. It represents my major area for improvement.

let it rain, let it rain, let it rain....

It was a really rough summer in central Texas. It was over 100 degrees for practically 3 months straight and there was very little rain. The city imposed mandatory water restrictions. We were allowed to water our lawns one day a week and the fine for homeowners that misbehaved was pretty steep.

There have been frequent showers the past couple of weeks and the temperature this weekend is dipping down into the 50's. I have a couple of rain chains rather than drain spouts on my rain gutters. They don't get much of a workout but they are nice to watch when it does rain.

I would normally complain about rain on a weekend but today I plan on making a crock pot of chili and enjoying this nice fall weather. Please pass the tabasco....