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:

Marriage proposal

No, I'm not getting married. But here's a dessert I sent out last week. I hope you can see it; I didn't have my camera, so I had to use my phone to get the pic. It's a chocolate truffle cake with "Will you marry me?" piped in chocolate at the top.

I was a little concerned that I might be committing myself to something I'm not ready for, but our GM wouldn't let me pipe a tiny chocolate disclaimer at the bottom of the plate.

Merry Chrieaster!

That's what we are calling the holiday that is being celebrated in this holiday display.

Oh sure, we have stockings...

and Santa in his sleigh...

but then we have bunnies dressed like Santa...(I made the reindeer!)

Easter eggs pretending to be some sort of Christmas egg...Do you see the white Liberty Bell with the red bow? Merry Independence Day! Look below that. It's the Eiffel Tower! Joyeux Noël!!

I love the gingerbread barn, but what the hell is that rooster about?

Merry Christmas!

Chocolate, chocolate everywhere

Our chocolate class has been working on a big Christmas display for our school. Unfortunately, our program doesn't have a lot of money, and the only molds we have are Easter-related--lots of bunnies and chickens. So we're making what our teacher refers to as a Barnyard Christmas display. I prefer to think of it as a Great Big Hoopty Barnyard Easter Christmas.

Oh, I can't wait to get pictures of this holiday pile-o-crap. We have a couple of big choc bunnies that will be painted, so they look like they are Santa & Mrs. Claus. There will be a gingerbread barn, and a cut-out rooster that is taller than the barn. There is a tabletop Christmas tree which we have made ornaments and packages for and which will, inexplicably, sit in the barnyard.

But my absolute favorite thing is a mold of the Eiffel tower. It's too big to be an ornament, but our teacher insists that we use it somewhere. Hmmm....where does an Eiffel tower fit into a Barnyard Christmas?

I think the monstrosity will be assembled later this week. I promise pictures the moment I can get them!

Last class of candies

Last night in our chocolate class, we did our last candies. We used caramel and ganache that were poured into frames and then cut into squares. We dipped them in chocolate and decorated the tops.

I enjoyed making acetate transfer sheets for my chocolates, but they are tricky. Maybe with some practice I could get them right. In the picture, you can see that I didn't get the transfer sheet with the L on it pressed down enough, so the top looks funny.

And as always, our teacher kept the best candies to show off to the the other faculty, so these aren't quite right. Some of them have "feet" sticking out, and other imperfections. But overall, I'm extremely proud of them!

Clockwise from the top left, there is a caramel decorated with a dipping fork, a ganache center with a handpainted transfer sheet decoration, another caramel with a sprinkle of Fleur de Sel (a sea salt that is also in the caramels) and another ganache decorated with a transfer sheet.

More filled candies

We did candy molds again this week. A few of my classmates had some trouble last week, so we worked on it some more. We had some delicious ganache fillings. My favorite was a star anise/pink peppercorn ganache. Mmmm!

I did some with mint ganache filling (the one with the dots), some with lavender/vanilla ganache (the stripes that look green, but are actually ivory), and some with the anise/peppercorn (with the gold sparkly dust.)

These are so much fun to make! And I could eat my weight in them, unfortunately.

Molded candies

Molds are fun! Tonight, each person in our class made a different ganache filling for our candies. We had ginger, Indian spice, bourbon, mocha, tarragon & grapefruit, orange & tangerine, lavender, plain dark chocolate with vanilla, and some caramel from a previous class. Once the ganache is made, you are ready to make candy.

First, you temper your chocolate, then brush the mold with chocolate. Once that has hardened, you pour the mold full of chocolate, and tap it on the table to release any air bubbles. Then immediately turn it back over & empty the chocolate back into your bowl. Leave it turned over until it starts to harden, and then scrape all the excess chocolate off.

Once the shell is completely hardened, pipe in your filling. Let it harden, then pour chocolate over the whole thing to seal the bottom. Once it starts to harden, scrape it off. Now you just wait until the candies are ready to pop out of the mold. Easy, huh?

Aren't these beautiful?

Look at the shine this chocolate has. I am proud of how well-tempered it is!

Truffles are trufflicious

We made the most beeeeautiful truffles tonight! We made several flavors: dark chocolate with cognac, dark choc & orange, milk choc with vanilla, dark choc & cherry...there may have been more.

First, you make a ganache with chocolate and cream. You form this into the round truffle center. Then you dip the truffle twice into chocolate, and roll it in some sort of topping. We used toasted coconut, chopped pecans, powdered sugar, cocoa, shaved chocolate. Or, you could leave them plain. We don't like plain.

Some of the truffles in the big box were made by my classmates.

I made all of the ones in the small box.

These are incredibly silky and creamy. They're every bit as delicious as they look! I want to make truffles every day.

1st chocolate candies

So far in my chocolate class we have been practicing tempering chocolate. Tempering is kind of tricky, and extremely important. It is what gives chocolate a pretty shine and a snap when you break it.

Tonight we made our first candies. We made rochers (sugared almonds covered in chocolate), knackerli (chocolate patties with nuts and dried fruit), pecan clusters, turtles (I made the caramel for these), chocolate-dipped candied citrus peel, and chocolate almonds. Oh, they are so tasty! Unfortunately, I didn't have my camera at school, and our teacher kept the best of the candies, so I got some pix of the candies she let me keep once I got home.


These are some of the knackerli.




Another shape of knackerli.



Here are some of my rochers, and some almonds in the foreground. You can also see some of my turtles in the background.