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....

i'll take option 2.....

There is a policy at school that we aren't allowed to bring our product home. They cite some legal issues but my lawyer buddies scoff at the notion. We put our cakes from yesterday on display overnight. At the end of class today, our instructor asked us to take them to the dumpster or take them home. He's a free spirit. Emily insisted on a slice before her calculus class tonight. I see many slices this weekend served with the darkest, strongest coffee that I can make.

By the way - dark modeling chocolate tastes like tootsie rolls. giggle

yabba dabba doo.....

We had to come up with a theme for our Devil's Food Cake and I went with the Flintstones.

Here are the details...

It's a 9" Devil's Food cake sliced into 3 layers with a crumb (thin) coating of ganache between each layer, on the top and sides. The whole cake is then covered in rolled "brown" fondant which was made by kneading vanilla and chocolate fondant together and rolling it very thin. The rope on the bottom and the frill on the side is chocolate fondant. The boulders and the Flintstone car is made out of modeling chocolate. The stand and the circular disk is pastillage which is formed from powdered sugar, glucose and gelatin and allowed to dry firm. (If you add cinnamon during mixing, you create Altoids). Fred's portrait is done by mixing cocoa powder and melted cocoa butter. Fun and completely edible.

drop and roll....

I don't know if I haven't noticed before but it seems like the oak trees around my house are producing a lot more acorns than normal. I think acorns is the right term for nuts from an oak tree. All day, including the night, I hear a "ping" as the acorn is dropped onto the metal roof and then the roll roll roll as it tumbles down the roof and then a short pause and then the gentle "thud" when it hits the deck. It's kind of fun to listen to it.

The deck was swept last week so this amount in the picture is one weeks worth - minus what the squirrels take and hide.

hapy anivversry.....

The project for today was an anniversary cake. It's a white cake that was sliced into 3 layers of 1" thickness each. A thin layer of apricot jam is spread on each layer and the sides. A very thin (1/16") sheet of marzipan is rolled out and molded onto the cake. The whole thing is topped off with a fondant glaze.

The structure of the cake is good, the marzipan roses look similar to roses and Happy Anniversary is spelled correctly. We actually had someone in class write Hapy on their cake. There is no edit key or scraping it off. I got confused in the middle of piping the double border. I forgot what was supposed to loop where so it turned out a little goofy. It's better than cake #1 but I still have a long way to go.

chocolate dream...

This has nothing to do with me but I thought it was cool so I'm posting it. One of the head pastry chefs from Le Cordon Bleu spent last week in Austin and he did a chocolate sculpture demonstration on Friday, which I attended. At the risk of stereotyping, he was exactly what I picture when I think of a pastry chef - French accent, full of energy, always talking, strong opinions, very demonstrative, very passionate and has a story for every situation. He came to our classes every day and it was a blast having him around. He peppered his sentences with "alors (a-lore)" which has many meanings but if I remember right ,"so" or "then" is the closest translation. After being around him for 5 hours every day, it was easy to walk out of the room speaking in a French accent... "You put this here and that over there...alors, I think it is perfect, yes?"

He did the majority of the sculpture on Thursday and did all the finer details during the demonstration. He shaped all the leaves and constructed the flowers during the demo and started adding them to the main body. Just when you think it was done, he'd add a flower or another leaf. It was like he was winging it as he went. "I think I will add a flower here and angle it this way and add this accent piece. Alors, I think it is OK, yes?"

chicken scratch....

My first cake in the cake block. It's a vanilla chiffon, 3 layer cake with Italian butter cream masking and filling.

Summary - the cake has nice square edges, the basket weave on the side is good (for the most part), the shells along the top and bottom are fairly uniform, and the butter cream roses and flowers are promising. What's up with that writing? I felt like I was in first grade in a one room schoolhouse and I was writing on a piece of slate with chalk. I'll be making some butter cream this weekend and practicing. I think I'll invest in a cake stand and start whipping out some cakes as well.

This adventure took about 90 minutes to do. There is a speed drill in 2 weeks where it has to be done in 30 minutes. It should look interesting