Chocolates

Earlier this month, I took an Artisanal Chocolate Class from Andrew Shotts. I can't believe how much candy we made in 3 days.

Here I am with our display table.



These are a couple of pictures of the table from the side.





These are extra-bittersweet chocolates.

The flowered ones are filled with tea-flavored ganache.

And a few more assorted pictures.

Desserts

I finally had time to take some pictures at work. It has been so unbearably hot here that people just aren't eating as much, and we haven't done nearly as many desserts as usual.


This is our Chocolate Dome Cake. It has chocolate cake enclosing a chocolate mousse filling, covered with chocolate ganache. I serve it with an espresso anglaise sauce, and lots of fruit. We sell TONS of this cake.





Another extremely popular dessert is our Peach Crostata. It's a really simple dessert--just a buttery pastry crust, filled with sliced peaches. It's served warm with a scoop of vanilla ice cream, and I like to garnish it with peaches & raspberries.




Our Creme Brulee doesn't photograph well. I love this dessert. I think it's one of the best desserts we do.

This is a cake our chef adores. For some reason, it has never sold very well. Every time we put it on the menu, they try a new name for it, trying to get people to order it. This time, they have named it after our chef, calling it his favorite cake. Now, I sell out of it every night!

It is layers of vanilla genoise, with a white wine & sherry zabaglione filling, covered with meringue. I serve it with creme anglaise and fruit.

This week, we started selling a Caramel Fig Cheesecake. I made a yummy fig sauce to go with it, and I serve it with some brulee figs, and a few raspberries for color.

And here is a birthday platter I did tonight. I love making these.

Chocolate marble pound cake

Several times lately, Lea has mentioned how much she would like a pound cake. Ok, ok, leave me alone! Here's your pound cake! Are you happy now?

Salsa kitty

Gracie seems very proud of her jars of salsa. It's hard work for a kitty to can that much stuff.

Cupcake

I learned a new technique for frosting cupcakes, instead of the usual swirl of frosting. I think this one looks kind of like a rose. This was my first try at it. I could use a little practice.

Happy birthday!

One of my favorite ladies at my church turned 80 this week, and her daughters asked me to bake a cake for her. I had so much fun making it!



Jeanne often wears pretty pastel colors, and always has a bright, sunny smile, so I wanted a cake with pastel decorations that would look happy and cheerful. It's a carrot cake with cream cheese frosting, decorated with fun little fondant flowers. I brushed the flowers with a tiny bit of pearl powder to make them shimmer. They aren't so glittery in person as they are in the pictures.



Here's the cake:

And some details of the flowers:

Wedding cake

A couple of weeks ago, I got to help with a wedding cake at my church. The flower committee did all the flowers for the wedding, but they were a little apprehensive about the fresh flowers that the bride wanted on the wedding cake, so I agreed to help.



Disclaimer: I did not bake the cake, or ice it, and I had a lady from the flower committee giving me moral support and helping choose flowers. Still, I am proud of how pretty the cake looked.



The flowers around the base look a little more blue in the picture, but they were the exact same shade of purple as the tablecloths.

Chocolate!

At the end of May, I took a chocolate class at the Notter School of Pastry Arts . It was the most amazing thing I have ever done! I still can't quite believe that I made all these things.

Here are some modeling chocolate roses we made. Mine is the middle one in the front row. These will be sprayed with colored cocoa butter to color them red.

Here is the little showpiece we used the roses in. It's the first piece I made, and by far the simplest. After seeing the other things we made, this one looks pretty basic.

These are the petals for the second flower I made. You make them by dipping the tip of a knife in white chocolate and then dabbing it on a sheet of acetate. Then you put the acetate in a tube so that the petals will be curved.









And here is the assembled flower.

Here it is after Chef Notter airbrushed it with colored cocoa butter.

And the finished piece.

Now the third and final showpiece. You know the routine by now. Here's the flower. The petals are made from shavings of white chocolate.

Here are some of the components I will use for the showpiece.

And the finished product. I think this is the best thing I made.

Baked Alaska

We got a request for Baked Alaska for a couple's anniversary last week. Our pastry chef complained that she didn't have time for it, so I got to make it. I had some problems with the meringue, but overall it turned out well. The anniversary couple raved over it. Yay!



It has a basic genoise cake brushed with orange simple syrup as a base, and is filled with chocolate Jack Daniels ice cream and covered with Italian meringue. It was pretty tasty.

Truffles

I got to make truffles for Valentine's Day at the restaurant where I work. I made 200+ truffles (shaped the day before, dipped the morning of V.D.), assembled 100 boxes, put truffles in candy cups in boxes, and sealed them with stickers, all before starting prep for our evening service. It was a looooooong day.


Here's what the boxes looked like:

And the truffles:

And a picture of some truffles I made at Christmas:

And a completely gratuitous picture of Max: