Cakes, condos, and more raw adventures!

First off, I'd like to mention that I have finally moved into my new condo with my boyfriend. We've been living here officially for a week now and we absolutely love it. It's also got a much cooler colour scheme than that of my parent's home so my forthcoming pictures will look less dark and overwhelming. It also doesn't help that we're on the 3rd floor and south facing. Lots of sun! Which also means if I ever need to get butter soft for buttercream, the microwave isn't necessary... I have my 82 degree apartment to do it for me!

Secondly, I'm learning how to make my pictures look better. I don't have a fancy-schmancy camera so I'm relying on iPhoto to help me out, so bear with me as I experiment my way to prettier food photos!

It's always an adventure trying out new stoves and ovens, seeing how long it takes to heat up, how off the oven temperature actually is, etc.

First picture is of my signature cake - Chocolate Cardamom Cake with Muscovado (or Demerara, depending on what's on hand) French Buttercream and Caramel. I used to use a Genoise cake, which is a traditional French sponge cake. I had received feedback saying that it gets a little dry after a few days. This is true, as it barely has any fat to keep it moist, and it rises purely because you whip so much air into the eggs and sugar that it rises like a souffle. And like any baked good that only has air in it to keep it up, it gets dry eventually. So after a bit of research I found a new cake that I think will be a good replacement. It also happens to be HUGE.

This cake is around 3"-4" high. Lots of slices!

I have been feeling very unhealthy recently. I know, I know, I'm a pastry chef so consuming tons of refined sugar on a daily basis goes with the territory. Perhaps it is a bit of an oxymoron but I am very conscious about my health and maintaining a good balance of the good and indulgent. I used to do eat things in excess but now find them more enjoyable if I have them once in awhile. However, at work I've been sampling far too much and I do notice a change in my cravings and my skin. But I do have a sweet tooth, so what am I to do? Well, make raw chocolate mousse of course!

I found this on Rawmazing. This is the first time that I've been to their site, and I was so delighted with the result that I hope to find more raw desserts that satisfy my cravings. Instead of using a full 3/4 cup of cacao (different than cocoa... not refined. You can find this in health food stores at a pretty penny), I used 2/4 cocao and 1/4 carob, because I like the malty taste. I also used cashew butter instead of almond because that's all I had on hand.

I tried to feed this to my boyfriend pretending that it was regular chocolate mousse, but he could tell right away that it wasn't. Foiled again! He said it tasted very powdery and that if I could somehow dissolve the cocao/carob in the almond milk than that might improve the texture and taste. We'll see how that goes next time! I like that this has a lot of good things in it, yet it tastes so rich and indulgent.

I'm also in love with the robin's egg coloured tea cups that I got from my Omi. Perfect pretty mousse cups!

Today was one of my day's off so I went with my mum to a couple of kitchen stores to buy St. Patty's Day and Easter cookie cutters. Being the addict that I am, I bought a cookbook... Oops.

I put off buying this book for awhile, but then as I kept browsing through it I knew I had to get it. I hope to someday get into vegan and gluten-free baking. There was a glimmer of working in a vegan bakery at one point, but alas it wasn't to be, so for now I will practice on friends and family! I find it to be a huge challenge to recreate baked goods with no eggs, butter, and flour so I think this will be a good first step. Then I will take my knowledge and apply it to recipes that I currently have.

The book I really want right now is Raw Food Real World. Next time!

I messed about with a cropped version of one of 'mousse and me' photos, so I think I'll make a nice header out of that soon. I also have someone making me new business cards - I'm so excited!

Valentine's Day... and puppies!

A bit overdue, but here they are! My one big Valentine's Day cookie order. I really love decorating cookies. First of all they're easy to do, and you can have so much designing them. Royal icing is my best friend. I still need to work on my piping skills, but slowly but surely I'm getting better. I had loads of fun making these, and I received a lovely e-mail from the woman that I made them for, so I was satisfied :).

pr0n cookie!

As a pastry chef, Valentine's Day is a hoot because of all the cute things you can do for the shop - Linzer heart cookies, meringue hearts, chocolate pate hearts, pink macarons, etc. As a day I'm not a huge fan - I try to show those whom I love how much I love them on a ongoing basis, so I feel like having one to "prove" your love is a little silly. However, were I to pick a Valentine, it wouldn't be my boyfriend...

It would be this little guy, Wally!

Cookies! And new purchases

Before I go into my baking banter, I want to show off my new purchases of the day. Domus has a retail shop next to the restaurant where it sells everything from baking tools, to pretty towels, to the best knives, a whackload of espresso machines... it's seriously heaven for me. Well, little did I know that I was walking into a sale! Of course I went hog wild. Can I justify buying these things? Not really, especially since my Toronto blow out was not two weeks ago! Oh well, I call them investments ;D.

My biggest splurge - Nielsen-Massey products. Decently priced too. I'm super pumped to try out the rose water on some macarons.

'

Ok, this purchase isn't so bad. I hate using water bottles at work that I just have to throw out later, and I only have a small metal bottle, so I wanted this big one, because I love my water. It was only $5 too.

I'm actually getting paid back for this, so this is ok! I bought this for work as the one digital scale we have is crap and tends to go crazy and/or turn itself off after 5 seconds of being on.

A few weeks ago I made some cookies for a family friend's baby shower. They were a hit! Though, silly me, I was only asked to do 24 cookies, but for some reason the words "two dozen" translated as 48! I must have been exhausted. Ergo, being the perfectionist that I am, I did a bit of a rush job and thus I wasn't as happy with my end result. Apparently I need not have worried because I've never received so many compliments as I did that day!

(some of them got a little squished during the day)

I seem to have wormed my way into a very lucrative market - motherhood. There's so many events that you can bake for! Baby shower, baptism, first birthday, second birthday, pregnant hormones that crave cake... the list can go on!

I made a coconut cake this week for my old work, and it was a bit of an ordeal. I just happened to pick both cake, filling, and frosting recipes that worked against me. The cake too forever to bake, the filling took forever to cool and combine, and the buttercream did not yield enough to cover my huge cake, nor did it have a good consistency for working with. It all turned out alright in the end. I had some fun with the borders this time by changing from my usual round tip or star tip to my leaf tip. Simple but a nice change!

Back to cookies! I got a number of people wanting to order from me, and so far I've gotten one lady who wants multiple things from me, starting with Valentine's Day. You guessed it, heart shaped cookies. Here they are in their naked state.

Dun dun dun... to be continued! Next post I'll show them in their finished form.

New job and my wee adventure in Toronto

Well, I started a new job last week and it was quite an adjustment, to say the least. I went from working in a cake shop that pretty much has a small set of flavours, the only variety being pan sizes and shapes, to working in a catering company/take home food shop that changes things every single week. I also happened to start on a particularly crazy week, so with that coupled with a 7am start meant I was feeling turned very upside down!

I'm into my second week now, and things are slightly better. I enjoy my co-workers tremendously and the pastry head has been fantastic and very encouraging. Basically people trust me and don't treat me like an idiot, which is refreshing. I'm forced to use and stretch the skills I have acquired, and they also know that I love to decorate, so they let me have some free reign with that as well. I'm also a 7 minute drive away, so new job is proving to be a success. My schedule needs to be improved upon, but I won't make a peep until after my probation period :).

Going back to decorating, I think people have it all wrong when it comes to the kind of education needed for cake decorating - everyone assumes that you need to focus solely on cake decorating techniques alone. While that is helpful on some level, I do believe that it's visual arts that are far superior. Having taken art classes for the last 3 months I've already noticed an increased improvement on my presentation, my dexterity, and general ability to 'eyeball' things. My teacher is fantastic and I want to stay with him as long as I can, but what I think would really help is taking a fully comprehensive course in the arts, with a focus on sculpting, as that is something I have yet to master and my current teacher does not provide. Having travelled to Toronto this past weekend for a friend's birthday, I find myself wishing to live there and attend Ontario College of Art and Design. I have a grand variety of artistic interests - pastry, fashion, and classical art techniques, and I would love to study that. But I am just moving into a new apartment and my boyfriend is looking to start a career in Ottawa, so moving is not in the books, so one can only dream of a crazy life in the big city and in the mean time do the best with what is available here :).

But I'm digressing! Here are a few photos of late. I find my decoration lacking in something... I need to figure out something that makes an individual slice look good, since that is what the customer sees, rather than a whole cake.

Chocolate Genoise with Raspberry cream and Chocolate Ganache - I find I can never flat ice it really, really smooth. Ah well, it's tasting nonetheless!

Pumpkin Crunch Torte - this is apparently a HUGE favourite, yay!

Brunch at Queen and Beaver in Toronto - French toast with chocolate hazelnut praline and maple smoked bacon. Um, delicious? Yes.

Cinnamon Apple pancakes with vanilla creme fraiche. Fantastic!

Of course, the old standby - Full English! Minus blood pudding, but the bread was fried perfectly so that is forgiven.

And a blatant non-related shout out to my most favourite purchase of the weekend, my fur hat! The mink goes really well with my crazy leopard coat.

Back to work tomorrow, after a very unproductive day off. My schedule is very helter skelter at the moment, making for a very strange sleep pattern (6am wake up one day, 8am the next... my body's internal clock is struggling), but like I said, I'm still adjusting. At least I have the house to myself this week - my parents have gone off to Cuba! Lucky them, but they are bringing me back rum. I'm going to see if I can use a little bit in a baked good! Just a small thing though... Cuban rum is meant to be drunk, not cooked with.

Welcome, 2010!

Yes, I know I'm quite a few weeks late to be ringing in the New Year, but better late than never, right? One of my New Year's resolutions is to blog more. Take more pictures, actually post them (and not 10 months after the fact... I'm notorious for this...), and familiarize myself with more baking blogs. In my own work I hope to take on more challenging projects. So far this year I have two wedding cake clients and as of today a bridal shower client. I've got my first dose of challenging material right here - the client wants a bride wearing a Metallica t-shirt, and how that's to be interpreted is up to me. I'll hopefully come up with 3 different ideas that have three different price points and go from there.

Now enough yammering, on to the pictures!

Macarons - I think I made over 200 of these during Christmas for sale. A few were considered 'rejects', but luckily my mouth is not so discerning ;).

Vegan Vanilla Cake with Hazelnut-Praline Tofu Icing. A real pain to work with - if you look closely in the back you'll see the border sliding off! It was delicious though.

Maple Walnut Torte. Maple whipped cream is fantastic, especially on waffles!

Pecan Bourbon pie. More alcohol was added to give it just that extra 'kick'. The alcoholic effects all get baked off of course, but the tangy sweetness still remains.

Christmas log! Mine get better every year, in my opinion.

Mummified pupas, aka: my encounter with baking dried figs

I was going to post about the misconceptions often perceived when ordering a cake, but the draft was getting rather ranty to the point of being nonsensical, so I'm going to edit it for awhile until I feel it is at the perfect level of informative and vent-a-rific! I'm trying to use this blog partially as a teaching tool. Though few probably read this now, I'm hoping that in the future I will get more readers and that they can learn from my (frequent, haha) mistakes.

Anyway, on to the main subject of this post - dried fruit. Namely their pitfalls in baking.

The glorious thing about dried fruit is that you don't have to worry about it losing its beautiful plumpness and going bad and moldy. You can keep dried fruit for months, years even, as it has been proven in my household, where we are notorious for holding on to things longer than we probably should (NOTE: never fear, dear customers, as this behaviour does not ever translate into my baking. It is the only area where I am a stickler for freshness.)

Moving on, dried fruit is fantastic for many things - on salads, in curries, trail mix... the list could probably go on for a bit. What it doesn't really have a huge forte in is baking. Cookies are an exception because their baking time is relatively shorter than, say, a pie/tart. Unless there is a lot of liquid with the dried fruit whilst it bakes, you're going to end up with some burnt babies. There is a small window between having it warmed with the rest of the dessert in the oven, to it burning to a carmelized crisp. You have to really monitor it, and that was my huge mistake today. I set the timer and walked away. When I came back the fruit was crispy and not fit for selling. The fate of the tart is not a sad one, however - my family is more than pleased to indulge in my "screw ups"!

My first clue in baking the dried fruit should have been the fact that, well, they were dry enough to begin with. The high oven heat will only further this drying process to the point where there will be no more moisture to evaporate, and it will burn.

Below is the fruit of my negligence, no pun intended:



Mummified pupas. That was the first thing that came to mind. What could I have done differently to still obtain a baked dried fig tart? I could have mix all the sugar with the figs and added water, reducing slightly so that I have injected some moisture back into the fruit before baking, and also created a nice syrup that would help preserve this state during baking. I will test this next time and report back.

In other news, I made a raw tiramisu this week. Being a fan of the real thing, I scrutinized this dish a lot. The verdict? it was a nice thought, but nothing can replace the original. Especially when the replacement for the Frangipane cream calls for 6 ripe bananas. It's just going to taste like banana pudding with a cinnamon and coffee aftertaste! Pictures to come, though there really isn't much to look at. Next up, raw chocolate cake with raw chocolate ganache. Perhaps this recipe will be more successful.

Christmas is also coming up, and since I've gotten a full time job and thus am financially independent for most things, I am finding myself unable to be as fast and loose with my money this year. So everyone is either getting a box of chocolates, rum balls, christmas logs, or christmas cake. I still have to buy ingredients and chocolate moulds, but I'll spend a little to save a lot and besides, this is a much more personal gift anyway :).

Next post will hopefully contain more visually pleasing cakes. Lessons will take a backseat so that you can drool at my mad skills for a change, haha!

Website updates and even more cake adventures

My website is filling out more! Hurrah! If you've forgotten the address already click here for cake and tart love. Yes, I've finally gotten myself together and put up the majority of the cakes and tarts that I sell. Weebly is seriously the greatest website host in terms of layouts. As I've stated before, my HTML skills leave something to be desired so I could never whip up great photo gallery frames, pop ups, etc, etc.

I was incredibly busy with cake orders last week. I had promised a co-worker that I would make a vegan cake for a presentation she was making at school. The other ones were two baptism cakes for a friend of mine. Only three cakes, you say? That doesn't sound like a lot! Well, when you take into account that I have 10 hour days (1 hour commute each way to work, and then my full 8 hours work until 5:30pm), by the time I get home that doesn't leave a lot of time for relaxation AND cake making! Don't misinterpret this as whinging - I love doing it, I was just mildly stressed this week :).

Here are some of the baptism cake photos (I don't think you'd want to see every single angle that I took!)



The pink cake was a vegan fudge cake with vegan chocolate icing, and the ivory cake was a vanilla genoise with pear and vanilla buttercream.

One thing I've learned when working with coloured fondant is - if there is some cornstarch left over, do not, and I repeat DO NOT try to get it to disappear with water! Yes the cornstarch will go away but it won't dry properly and it will remain sticky and weird.

My piping has been improving with practice, but what I find really helps is to reduce the amount you work with. I used a cornet that was filled with probably a tablespoon or two of buttercream for the ivory cake, and I found I had farm more dexterity that way than filling up a piping bag and worrying about my small tips shooting out the end (I'm still warming to the idea of couplers).

Going back to the vegan baking, that's an area I'm really fascinated by. Being a Cordon Bleu graduate I'm supposed to revel in all things dairy and eggy, and my boyfriend constantly says that it's a "waste" of my talents working within vegan parameters. On the contrary! It's all too easy to whip up a buttercream and a wonderful sponge cake with good old butter and eggs, but what if you couldn't eat those for allergy reasons? Why should you be left out from having wonderful baked goods? If anything I find vegan baking all that more challenging. I'm currently striving to find ways to, for example, recreate a rich egg yolk laden French buttercream vegan-style. I've tried a recipe with the soy margarine from Earth Balance, but I'm not such a fan of that taste. Off to Loblaws for me to find more vegan butter substitutes!

Another adventure I'm going down is gluten-free baking. Eggs can easily be replaced by foods like apple sauce, but how do you get a cake to taste like cake with no flour? I remember a customer coming into my work wondering if we made gluten free cakes, and although we don't I offered her another place she could go, but apparently all they do is mousse cakes and I can still see the disappointment in her face knowing that finding a gluten-free cake that tasted like a gluten-full cake (what a mouthful!) is pretty near impossible in this city.

I really hope to start a line for vegans and celiacs. I want them to feel like they're getting in on the action without having to sacrifice their beliefs or compromise their health.