Christmas Cake 2

Booyah! The Christmas Cake, AKA "Watching the Snow." The lighting's a little weird (the picture with the truest color is the full cake with no figures on it - see the last picture); I need to figure out where in the house I can get enough light to take good pictures when it's dark out.

Here's the cake from above:

Watching the Snow! Get it?

Mmm cake and potato chips...

Here's my favorite part of the cake:

I really like the little reindeer's antlers. I couldn't believe that the head held together when I attached them.



Another shot of the top... just look at that snow fall =)


The first slice! That's nine layers of cake, guys.





I really liked how the cake looked just after it'd been piped: clean, uncluttered...


I really like this design; I'm keepin it on file for future reference and possible replication.

My next post is probably going to detail my process. Fun stuff!

How They Do in Madurai

Well, I was finally able to get this video off my camera after over a year of trying! All it took was looking up instructions for accessing the camera through the applications folder and, um, using the Image Capture thingy to um, get the video... into my movies folder. Or something. Hooray!

I took this while checking out bakeries in Madurai, the city I lived in when I studied abroad in 2007-2008 in South India. In it you will see a young man, the bakery's top cake-decorator, totally destroy this cake. This is a guy who has seen and iced many a sponge, and judging by the speed and accuracy with which he works, I speculate that each cake is nearly identical to the last.

It was too big to fit on this blog so check it out on youtube!

Neat! Well... interesting anyways. The Western-style pastry making its way into South India is by and large very cookie-cutter type stuff, like something you might find at a North American chain grocery store. It doesn't taste too great either; note how the icing he spreads on the cake has been sitting out. There was no refrigeration for icing in this particular bakery, which leads me to believe that the frosting to be vegetable-shortening based. That's what it tasted like, too! Waxy.

Good thing there's lots of amazing North Indian sweets that are also commercially available!

Omg! So delicious!

And if you play your cards right, you could find yourself in the kitchen of a Tamil woman who might prepare some traditional southern sweets for you like payasam, pongal or my favorite, kozhkattai. Awesome little coconutty dumplings, a favorite of Pillaiyar (AKA Ganesha)... Mmmm.

A neighbor of my dance teacher's in Madurai preparing payasam.


Payasam is like a sweet soup, oftentimes prepared with vermicelli noodles and almonds.

Alright, next up: an update on the Christmas cake. I'm going to make some white chocolate plastique for playin with.

Christmas Cake I

Aight, I'm constructing a Christmas cake for the fam and today I started out baking the cake bases and mixing the filling/icing. The first type of cake I put together was a slight variation on a recipe that appeared on the Obama Foodorama blog. I got really excited about this honey cake recipe because I had all the ingredients for it on-hand (that never happens) and also it was created by Chef Bill Yosses, the Executive Pastry Chef of the White House and MY FORMER BOSS!!! That's right, I interned under that guy at the Citarella restaurant (now closed) in high school, and he was awesome! He wrote me a killer letter of recommendation that I used to get into Wesleyan early admission. Hopefully if/when I get into a graduate program and start doing food stuff I can get in touch with him to thank him for his letter and see if I can finagle my way into the White House for a tour of the kitchens or something. I know, wishful thinking, but... I really want to meet Michelle Obama. Really bad.

Okay, so here's the honey cake:


The changes I made were to replace half a cup of the flour with almond meal and add some peanut butter. It smelled like toasted pb and h sandwiches when it came out of the oven. Win!

I realized that this wasn't going to be enough cake for the epic structure I had in mind, so I decided to make a banana-pecan cake as well. I got the recipe out of Susan Purdy's The Perfect Cake and made only minor changes to it (ran low on butter and replaced half of it with yogurt, ran low on sugar and replaced most of it with brown sugar.... ehh, it'll taste fine). It came out like this:

For the filling and frosting I decided to go with a light chocolate buttercream. I thought it would be perfect to tie together my banana-honey-nut cake flavors (yeah, it's looking like this cake might be a little weird/busy, but I won't knock it til I've tried it). I didn't think to take the butter out last night to come to room temperature and we don't have a microwave for some reason, so I stuck the two cold sticks over the hot oven and let them warm up in a little melty puddle of their own buttery effluvia. Mmmm, I have a way with words.

I sort of made up the buttercream recipe, as I am fond of doing. It's a hodgepodge of random things I had around, and it went like this:

4 egg whites
1/2 loosely packed cup light brown sugar
1 Cup (two sort of melty sticks) unsalted butter
9 oz bittersweet chocolate
7 oz white chocolate

Melt the bittersweet chocolate over simmering water. Remove from heat and mix in the white chocolate until melted into the bittersweet. Set aside to come to room temp.

Place the egg whites and brown sugar over the simmering water and stir until the sugar dissolves and the egg mixture is almost hot to the touch (I know some people use thermometers and such, but I can't get the stupid temperature reading part fully immersed in shallow liquids so I find them useless when dealing with such a small amount of egg white. I know there are special lasery kinds that wouldn't give me such troubles, but we ain't real fancy round these parts–hence the not having a microwave thing).

Whip the egg white/sugar mixture until it makes stiff peaks, and gradually beat in the butter spoonful by spoonful, letting it incorporate fully each time before adding more.
*If it looks like the buttercream is separating, that's totally normal, just keep beating it until it smooths out.*

Finally, beat in the cooled chocolate.

It looks like this:



and it tastes like this:

Yeah, BIG happy

Okay, more will be posted as it becomes available!

Happy Hollandaise! Oh no, I'm turning into my dad!!!!

Been a little while! Ryan's 21st Bday Cake

Ta-dah!

This is a little late, but in November I built a cake from my very good friend Ryan. She turned 21 so I wanted to create something regal to celebrate the momentous occasion. Red was in order, and I was also feeling orange and gold; warm colors to compliment the Indian motif I'd found in a book about Mughal miniature paintings.



A couple views from the top. Man, that bottom coat of fondant looks really good... This is one of the first times I added dye while kneading the fondant instead of just painting it with powdered coloring and lemon extract after covering the cake. I usually work with marzipan, which tastes about a million times better than fondant, but it was nice to work with an icing that was pure white; I had much more control over how my colors turned out.

I can't get over that creamy orange fondant! This is the Mughal motif; I think it's going to be a recurring theme as I figure out how to smooth it out a little.

Most of the recipes I used for this cake were from The Well-Decorated Cake by Toba Garrett. The fondant came out really nicely, very smooth and not terrible tasting, but I was not happy with the cake itself, which was pretty dry and surprisingly flavorless, even for a vanilla cake (requested by the birthday girl! Ryan, I did the best I could but I gotta tell ya, I'm a chocolate person =/). I can't be too critical though, my dislike was probably mostly a matter of personal taste. I'll have to try the recipe again maybe adding a little, I dunno, extract of something. The icing was okay; I tweaked it a little bit, starting with a vanilla buttercream and then adding white chocolate and a little cream, essentially a white chocolate ganache, to give the filling a little more body. Overall, a very meh tasting cake. I remain a die-hard fan of nuts-n-chocolate; vanilla, I reserve you for fluffy desserts that do not rely on having the integrity to remain intact during a New York City cab or train ride...

Closeup on the inside... man, so blond! But that fondant looks awesome.

I have to say, my favorite part of the whole cake process has got to be watching somebody else cut the final product. It's so perfect and whole, the manifestation of hours of work, days of planning, months and years of learning and experimentation, all for one glorious moment of anticipation before the knife slides into the fondant, the royal icing begins to crack and crumble, and the destruction begins. I have made it a habit of insisting that someone else cut the cake, partially because it can be hard to bring myself to administer the death-blow, but also because I enjoy watching others grapple with the responsibility of creating that first incision. It often takes someone, knife in hand, longer than a full ten seconds to even figure out where the cut should be made. Hilarious! Ryan was pretty good though, she jumped in there and sliced like a pro.

Ryan enthusiastically prepares to dismantle my masterpiece.

On another note, there is something I feel I'd really like to work on with my decoration. My cakes are five-footers, by which I mean they look awesome from five feet back. However, once you get a little closer things get rough. For starters I think my royal icing consistency is consistently off, and I think it's because I over-whip it. I should probably add a little more liquid too.

Also, how do people cover piped royal icing borders like shells so perfectly with luster dust? I always have spaces of white that I can't reach with the paintbrush... Damn it Margaret Braun! With your flawless... everything.

Well, with that said, laterz! I've got some sweet pics of some cake punching that went down at my former place of work the day before my last and I will post them in due time.

Keep caking!