as soon as I get in the swing of things...

well, I was finally starting to feel more comfortable and confident in Chocolates and Contemporary Cakes, and then I realized the semester is almost over!  I have my practical exam in Contemporary Cakes next week, and then Chocolates the week after.  I'm super nervous about the Chocolates one, especially because I picked a recipe I have never made before.  Don 't worry, I am going to practice that one at home first. 

The practicals this semester are way different than last semester.  Rather than showing up and being given an item to make from memory, we were given certain parameters and get to plan our own menus.  For chocolates, we have to make one truffle, one bonbon, and one molded chocolate, incorporating all three types of chocolate (dark, milk, and white) and a fruit and a nut at some point.  I decided to make milk chocolate and amaretto truffles rolled in toasted almonds, dark chocolate bonbons with white chocolate raspberry filling, and soft caramels dipped in dark chocolate for my molded chocolate.  It's the soft caramel recipe that scares me because I have never tried this specific one, and I have had trouble with other soft caramel recipes at home - I seem to always take them off the heat too soon and they turn to mush.  That would be a major problem for my exam because they have to be firm enough to cut in perfect squares and dip in chocolate - part of the grade is based on appearance.  But I went through all of the other molded chocolate recipes and just couldn't get excited about any of the others, so here goes nothing!

In Contemporary Cakes, we had to draw a card with the "inspiration" for our cake.  About half the class drew classic cookies (chocolate chip, oatmeal raisin, etc) and the other half was candy.  I drew Twix, and I'm actually pretty excited with that choice.   We have to have a crunchy base, a sponge cake, an insert, and a mousse, and of course a garnish.  Since a Twix has three very specific components, it makes it kind of easy to choose what my different layers will be.  And I am really excited about my idea for the garnish, I just hope it turns out how I am imagining it in my head!

Anyways, here is a little catch-up of what I made in class since my last post.   In Chocolates, it has been more bonbons and molded chocolates, and then last week we started learning taffy and nougat.  However, cutting the recipes in fourths like usual made them too small and everyone's taffy and nougat turned out rock hard, so we are going to redo them next week. 

My first molded chocolates - Orange butter ganache coated in dark chocolate

My "toucan" bonbons - white chocolate with two layers of ganache inside - passion fruit and mango

My pecan and peanut divinity - too dry, but still tasty!

My hard-as-a-rock molasses taffy

Bonbons with Refresh tea infused ganache - didn't think I would like these but they were DELICIOUS!

In Contemporary Cakes, we have been coming up with our own recipes based on inspirations that Chef assigns us.  For the first one, he just gave us two flavors and we had to have a crunch base, a cake, a fruit insert, and two bavarians (mousses).  My flavors were passion fruit and coconut, so I made a coconut Japonaise (meringue) for the base, passion fruit bavarian, passion fruit gelee, jaconde (sponge cake) soaked with coconut rum, and coconut bavarian.  Then I topped it with more passion fruit gelee and garnished it white chocolate designs and toasted coconut.  I was very pleased with the appearance of this cake, but the flavors weren't my favorite.  I'm not a huge coconut fan anyways, but both bavarians didn't have much flavor, and the gelee had WAY too much gelatin and was super rubbery.

My cake diagram

The next week was all classic cakes and pies - apple pie, German chocolate cake, lemon meringue pie, etc.  We had to take the classic recipe and make it "contemporary."  I drew carrot cake and I couldn't have been more excited.  One of my favorite classic cakes and I have been stuck on the carrot-cream cheese-lemon combo since our wedding (it was the top tier).  My partner and I decided on a graham cracker crust (fancied up with some cinnamon, brown sugar, and walnuts), two layers of carrot cake, a cream cheese mousse, a lemon curd insert, a lemon mousse, and a caramelized jaconde on the outside.  We garnished it with lemon curd, candied pecans, and grated carrot shards (ok, Chef made the carrots for us because we didn't have the equipment at school....).  I loved the way it looked, especially when he cut it open and we could see all the layers an different colors.  I also loved the way it tasted, although the lemon overpowered the cream cheese mousse a little. 

In fact, I loved it so much I just can't seem to get off of my carrot cake kick, and I made carrot cake cupcakes filled with lemon curd and iced with cream cheese icing yesterday for Trev's work meeting.  I think lemon curd might be my favorite thing I have learned in culinary school so far - it is so easy and sooo yummy! 

I also made a berry trifle yesterday for Trev and I for the 4th - angel food cake, strawberries, blueberries, sugar-free vanilla pudding, and whipped cream.  It was so easy (I may have used a few shortcuts) and I think it is a perfect summer dessert - light, refreshing, cool, and of course utilizes some of those berries I can't resist buying when they are on sale.  To me, the 4th is just not a cake holiday - and I never realized it was to other people until I started working at Publix.  I think the only time I really ate cake growing up was at other kids' birthday parties - my mom served fruit in the summer, cookies and pumpkin pie for the holidays, and cheesecake on our birthdays.  I still am not a fan of regular birthday cakes (shh, don't tell my boss, but I can't stand our buttercream at work!), and although I have obviously come to love a lot of other kinds of cake, there are just some holidays when I am astounded by the amount of cakes and cupcakes we sell.  I feel like a broken record every time a holiday rolls around..."I didn't know this was a cake holiday!"

Alright, I've got two practicals coming up and a test in Cost Control next week, so it's time to get back to the planning and studying!  Thanks for reading :)

this is really happening.

some days my life really makes sense, and I know exactly what my plans and goals are, and exactly how I'm going to get there.  And other days, it all still seems really surreal to me.  This time last year, I was sitting in an office on a construction site, going over lines and lines of spreadsheets every day.  And now, I am halfway through culinary school, working in a bakery, and starting my own business.  I still can't believe it's really happening.  Some days it really hits me how much things have changed in the last year.  On top of all the career-related stuff, Trev and I have also gotten engaged, married, and bought our first house in about the last year.  Some of this reflecting is probably brought on by a recent trip to where we got married, but most of it is everything I have been doing lately to try to get my business off the ground.

And I use the word "business" lightly, because it's not at all official, legal, or legitimate in any way.  But I figure I have to start somewhere, so for right now, business cards, stickers and a sparkly new business email address are as far as I have gotten.  I plan to make it official eventually, but I had intended to wait before I even got this far.  But my plan to start getting my name out there by sending treats to Trev's work meetings, etc, has worked better than I ever expected, and I have already been getting some interest, so I figured I better go ahead and make it look like I'm the real thing.  Fake it till you make it, right?

It was very exciting when my business cards and stickers arrived in the mail (yes I designed them!), for about the first five minutes.  Then I started to have a confidence crisis.  Who do I think I am?  I know that no one else will believe in me until I do, but it is really hard to take myself seriously sometimes.  But once I got over feeling like a poser, I decided to just ignore all those doubts and go for it full-force.  What's the worst that can happen?  Well, for one, the stickers turned out way too small to read...so once these run out, I will have to work on a new design.

Oh yeah, and despite the fact that I feel like I already spend all my extra money on kitchen and baking equipment, it turns out I'm still not really equipped to make big cakes, and we may have to start looking for a bigger mixer.  I feel awful about this because when Trev surprised me with my Kitchen-Aid for Christmas a couple years ago, it was pretty much the best present he had ever gotten me and I was super surprised.  And so I feel really guilty and ungrateful telling him it isn't quite big enough any more.  But as he reminds me, when he picked that one out, baking was a hobby and neither one of us had any clue I was going to do this for a career.  This is a good time to mention that I have pretty much the most supportive, encouraging husband who believes in me ten times more than I do and I am sooo grateful for that.  There is no way I could do any of this without him telling me all the time that I can make it, and pushing me to put myself out there.

Okay, enough mushy stuff and back to the real news!!   I have already had two real, paid-for cake orders, and they weren't even from people I already knew.  The first one was from the wife of one of Trev's co-workers, and the second was from a lady I met at the hair salon. 

The first cake, for Mia, was a quarter sheet yellow cake with fudge icing.  She is an exchange student from Germany and I was told she likes Minnie Mouse, the beach, and acting.  I was really happy with how my royal icing Minnie came out. 

The second was a 9" round cake, vanilla with vanilla frosting (this is another big challenge for me...I would love to keep my standards really high and only do exciting gourmet flavors and elegant, artistic decorations, and maybe one day I will have enough of a reputation and client base to be able to do that.  But right now, I feel like I am not at a point where I can turn down any work, and so I may have to make a lot more vanilla cakes than I would like to for a while.  I at least did an Italian buttercream instead of an American one, being the frosting snob I have become lately, but I haven't heard back whether they liked it or not....).  This one was for a seven year old's birthday and the theme was Spongbob.  So I whipped out the royal icing once again (I know, I am really going to have to learn some more techniques for this type of thing) and made a bunch of Songebobs, Patricks, and jellyfish.  Oh, and one more comment on my amazing hubby - I cut my finger really badly when I was assembling this cake, and so he stepped in in a huge way, finished slicing the cake layers, helped me finish making the buttercream, getting it colored and into bags, and cleaning up everything.  I ended up icing the cake with one hand while I held the other one above my head to try to slow down the bleeding....one more reminder I have a long way to go before I am a professional! 

Well, now I guess the only thing is to sit back and hope for more orders!  I want to make more than cakes, but I think that is probably one of the main things people will order for a while.  I am going to keep handing out my business cards at every chance and slapping my stickers on the boxes of treats I send to work with Trevor. 

Meanwhile, in school we have been doing more and more bonbons in Chocolates class, and lots of mousse cakes in Contemporary Cakes.  Two weeks ago, my bonbon flavor was mango, and this past week I made two - praline milk chocolate and honey hazelnut.  We also got to airbrush them last week, which was exciting, but unfortunately I didn't luck out with flavors that have very exciting colors to go with them, so mine were all neutral earth tones.  I did really like the way mine tasted though, especially the honey hazelnut.  I filled them with ganache, but then I also put a whole toasted hazelnut in the center of each.  So yummy! 

Praline on the left, honey hazelnut on the right

In Contemporary Cakes, my group made a Calvados torte two weeks ago.  It was tasty - chocolate cake with brandy poached apples, chocolate mousse, and caramel chocolate mousse, surrounded by caramelized jaconde and finished with caramel glaze - but the best part about it by far was the garnish.  We crumpled some phyllo dough brushed with butter and sprinkled with sugar on top of  a piece of tin foil and baked it to make the big fan.  Then we made mini apples out of marzipan and dipped them in caramel and then hung them from skewers to create spikes on top of them.  I loved this effect.  During this process, we had a lot of leftover caramel, so we used it to make the big piece in the back.  This is my favorite garnish so far. 

Outside and inside of the Calvados

The other groups' cakes - Jamaica on the left and Chocolate Duo on the right

The other groups' cakes - Efendi on the left and Carola on the right

Last week my group made a banana cake, but we haven't garnished it yet so I don't have pictures. And this week we got to design our own cakes based on two flavors we were assigned - more on that soon!

what does sexy chocolate look like?

Ok, sorry I have been sooo lazy about blogging lately!  It's not like there isn't plenty of exciting stuff going on to write about, I am just sooo exhausted from it all that it has been really hard to climb the stairs to the office instead of flopping on the couch when I have a few hours off between work and school....ohh, the first world problems of my life.  Just kidding, I am still having a great time, and we are going on a much-needed vacation in exactly 5 days, so I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.  Oh, and I may have allowed myself to bring a glass of wine up here to motivate me - please excuse any spelling errors :)

The past couple of weeks have been a roller coaster at school AND work.  I am having major ups and downs at school -  still really excited to be learning new techniques, but this semester is BY FAR the most challenging for me yet.  I am having a hard time not getting frustrated when I can't do something right the first time.  And between tempering chocolate and making mousse after mousse, there have been a LOT of things I can't get right the first time...

Speaking of tempering chocolate, we have made bonbons in Chocolates class the last few weeks.  I am so pumped about these because this is one of those techniques I really wanted to learn at school because it is just too complicated to teach myself at home.  And tempering chocolate has always sounded complicated to me, but I never realized quite how vague the instructions would be.  For example, the title of this blog post is a direct quote from the teacher when one of us asked how we would know when the chocolate is ready.   My strengths are in black and white, math-based techniques, and this is definitely not one of them.  So far, we are learning the tabling/marbling technique of tempering (see picture below), and next we will learn the seeding approach.

I decided to take one for the team and volunteer to be the first person to go home completely covered in chocolate.  I was washing dishes with the industrial sprayer and had the bright idea to point it directly into a ladle full of chocolate...yay!  I have now learned the best method for getting chocolate out of chef whites!

The first week we did dark chocolate bonbons, and when we finally finished them (there were definitely a handful of disasters and do-overs), they were delicious!  Some of the flavors of the centers were rum, praline, coffee, caramel, peanut butter, raspberry, and lemon-mint.  I liked all of them except the lemon-mint, and the caramel and raspberry were by far my favorite. 

My dark chocolate caramel ganache bonbons

Smorgasbord of bonbons for tasting + the insides of mine

The second week was milk chocolate and white chocolate.  The milk chocolate flavors were cherry, banana, pistachio and passion fruit.  I liked the pistachio and passion fruit, HATED the banana.  Apparently "true chefs" know that the best banana to cook with is one that has completely turned black, then was peeled and frozen until it fermented into a black mush.  I don't know about you, but that is just about the least appealing thing I have ever seen, and I don't even like bananas to start with.  The white chocolate flavors were pear, coffee, lingonberry, and mango (mine). 

Please ignore the permanent crease in my hat and the cracks in my bonbons...

 Moving on from my exasperating/exhilirating adventures in chocolate....
Contemporary cakes has gotten slightly better each week.  Last week, I finished the cake I described in my last post - the mint chocolate mousse cake with the mint creme brulee insert.  It came out super short (we even double the mousse recipe, so I have no clue why this thing is 1/4 of the height it is supposed to be...), and I didn't love the flavor.  I mean, it wasn't bad, but it just tasted too much like fresh mint for me.  I love fresh mint in some things, but for a cake it is just too much like chewing on raw herbs.   Another group's Whiskey Hazelnut torte was the only one I really loved - it had these amazing layers of salted chocolate (obviously my favorite!) between the chocolate whiskey mousse, and then the beautiful and tasty candied hazelnuts for a garnish.

My cake (on the right), and some of the others

And then this week we finished the cake we started last week.  We were replicating the recipe that the teacher won Pastry Chef of the Year with in 2006, so I couldn't wait to taste it.  It had a pecan japonaise (meringue) bottom, caramel mousse, fudge cake, caramel ganache, vanilla mousse, mangos foster (mangos flambeed in amaretto with brown sugar and cinnamon), and more caramel mousse.  His original recipe also had bananas in with the mangos, but there weren't enough to go around, so my group went with just mangos.  Okay by me, since I'm not a huge banana fan, as I mentioned earlier.  Needless to say, it was delicious.  And I didn't think it could get more exciting after reading the recipe until I found out how we were going to garnish it.  We used a power sprayer, the kind you would paint a house with, and filled it with chocolate to spray the cake.  And one of my awesome friends was great enough to take a video of me spraying - see below!  It made this awesome, fuzzy chocolate finish.  Which looked amazing on my cake until I stuck my fingers in the side of it like a bowling ball and cracked the chocolate all apart.  THEN we made flowers out of white chocolate and painted them with luster dust spray.   So much fun! 

Alright, and on one last catch up note, a few things I have been making at home - Andes mint fudge for Trev's work meeting this week (although he forgot to bring it two days in a row, so we ate a little more than planned at home), and blueberry-strawberry crumble, just because blueberries were on sale at work last week AND Haagen-Dazs the week before and I just couldn't resist....

summer school

Well since I last posted, I have started my summer semester at school. This semester I am taking Chocolates & Confections (yay!), Contemporary Cakes & Desserts (yay!), and Food & Beverage Cost Control (blech).

So far Cost Control is pretty much as expected...boring, pointless, and not even close to a challenge.  But, I have to take it to finish the program, so I guess I will just have to grin and bear it.

I really like Chocolates class so far, but that's just obvious.  The first week, each group made a different kind of truffle - my group made Bailey's truffles with toasted coconut.  The other flavors were brandy with cocoa powder, blackberry liqueur with cocoa powder, and coconut rum with toasted pistachios.  Yum!!  I never realized how easy truffles were to make!

Bailey's Truffles with Toasted Coconut

Brandy Truffles with Cocoa Powder

Coconut Rum Truffles with Toasted Pistachios

The second week, each group made another truffle and then one other item.  My group made caramel milk chocolate truffles and candied almonds.  Some of the other recipes were cashew & pistachio fudge, pralines, almond torrone, and mocha truffles.  For the candied almonds, we cooked them with sugar on the stove until they caramelized - this was the easy part.  Then we had to dump them on the table and separate each one by hand while they were still hot (ouch!).  Then, once they cooled, we had to go stand in the cooler with them for what seemed like at least an hour - brrrr! - and toss them in melted chocolate, a cup or two at a time.  We tossed them until they were completely dry and separated before adding more chocolate.  It was quite a process, and by the end my shoulders were sore, my fingertips a little burnt, and my nose was numb, but our chef said he sells these for $2 a nut at his other job.  Two dollars for ONE ALMOND!  I guess that would make it worth it....

Tossing, tossing, tossing...and more tossing

The finished almonds

Almond Torrone

Cashew and Pistachio Fudges

Walnut Pralines

Mocha Truffles

Caramel Milk Chocolate Truffles

In Contemporary Cakes, I am feeling a little overwhelmed.  A lot of people in the class have had other classes that I haven't taken yet, and I was more than a little intimidated on the first day.  He gave us two recipes for our mousse cake (we needed 6 components) and told us we could pick whatever we wanted for the other four.  Well, I didn't bring any of my other recipes to class, so I started to panic immediately.  I ended up choosing recipes from the book, but they are pretty basic and boring flavor-wise.  I just wanted to get the thing made, and we didn't have time to try to come up with any exciting flavors.  We ended up making a pate brisee, a genoise, a Cassis simple syrup, a white chocolate ganache, a vanilla pastry cream, and a white chocolate mousse.  Not very exciting in the flavors or colors.... oh well.


 My group was the last group done (by a while), and our ganache never set and so it didn't make it into our cake.  So I was definitely feeling frustrated and worried about the rest of the semester by the end of that class. 

The second week of cakes went a little better.  When we unmolded our cake from Week 1, it looked a lot better than I expected.  We used some raspberry gelee to decorate it, so that added some much needed color and flavor (although I still didn't like the white chocolate mousse).  And when we cut it open, only one of our layers had moved to the side!  Definitely not as bad as an outcome as I had expected after how much of a disaster the first week felt like.  And garnishing the cakes was really fun because we got to pick from all kinds of different decor items that I have never used before. 

My group's cake

After we cut it

All of the cakes from Week 1

The second cake my group made was a Chocolate Mint Mousse Cake, and I can't wait to taste this one.  It has a chocolate biscuit (sponge cake) layer soaked in mint simple syrup, a mint creme brulee insert, and milk and dark chocolate mousse.  Things went a lot smoother making this one, except that when we made the mousse and poured it into our mold, it wasn't nearly enough, so we had to rush to make another one to add to the first one before it set.  Oh, and apparently there is a picture of me picking mint in the rain in my chef uniform on some facebook page somewhere - a lady came along and started taking pictures of me after I had been out there for about 20 minutes.  Turns out you have to pick a LOT of mint to get 50 grams worth. 

So anyways, I feel a little better about Cakes class now, but I am still feeling a little overwhelmed.  But I can't wait to taste the mint cake next week, along with the recipes the other groups made. 


I know this has been a long blog post already, but I have been slacking off on writing lately and I have a few other things to catch you up on!  Remember that chocolate festival I went to?  Well I entered a drawing and "won" a free wine tasting party at home.  So I invited some friends from school and made a bunch of goodies to go with:  amaretto truffles with toasted almonds, vanilla cupcakes with coffee-flavored Italian buttercream, chocolate cupcakes with peanut butter mousse frosting, and chocolate cupcakes with cream cheese icing.  Plus I had to throw in some fruit and cheese:

All in all, it was a great time!

Also, Trevor has been asking me to make some goodies for his work meetings on Thursdays.  So far I have made cream puffs and cupcakes (practiced my royal icing skills to make the Waffle House logo and a Notre Dame leprchaun for his birthday cake, see below). 

But this week was a quarterly meeting where they always have a big birthday cake for people whose birthdays were that quarter.  I was a little nervous because I had never made a cake this big (okay, maybe a 1/4 sheet isn't that big, but still, I was nervous to try something for the first time when people were actually depending on me).  I made red velvet cake with cream cheese icing.  They pretty much gave me free rein when it came to decorating, so I had a little fun with it.  Trevor said everybody liked it, except that it was still a little frozen in the middle.  Whoops!  We always freeze our cakes at work and tell people to let them thaw for about an hour, so I figured if I took it out a couple hours ahead of time, it would be fine.  Usually I don't freeze cakes, but I had school 8 am to 8 pm the day before and I did NOT want to wait until the morning of in case something went wrong, so I made it on Tuesday.  Well I didn't think about the fact that this cake was much denser than the cakes we use at work.  But they ate it anyways, and I now I know for next time!  I don't mind learning through trial and error, but I just wish it wasn't in front of other people....oh well.

And last, but certainly not least, I made Trev's birthday cake.   I made carrot cake with lemon curd filling and cream cheese icing (I feel like I have gone through a case of cream cheese in the last couple weeks).  I didn't do a great job icing it because I put too much lemon curd in between the layers and they were sliding all over the place while I was trying to ice the outside, so I had to cut my losses and call it a "rustic" look, ha!  But I was really happy with how it tasted and especially happy with how my royal icing leprechaun turned out.  Even if he was backwards because I forgot to mirror the picture before I printed it...oh well! 

festival of chocolate 2012

well I love myself a good festival anyways, so when I heard that there was going to be a chocolate festival in Orlando last weekend, I was super excited.  And even more excited when a friend from school said she could get us tickets!!

It was everything I hoped it would be and more.  There were about 25 booths of different bakeries and chocolate shops from around the area, a pastry school competition, chocolate sculptures, chocolate and wine pairing classes, a liquid-nitrogen ice cream booth, and even a candy-wrapper fashion show.  And most importantly, lots of samples.  I ended up going home with two packs of bon bons (chocolate cayenne pepper, chocolate amaretto, chocolate salted caramel, and white chocolate key lime were some of my favorites!) from two different booths, some caramels, chocolate face clay and chocolate massage oil from the chocolate spa, and something else I'm forgetting....  I also got a chocolate caramel orange popsicle and a chocolate raspberry petit-four while I was there, but they didn't make it home...

I even tried to participate in the cookie stacking competition, but even though I waved my arms harder than anybody else in the crowd, I just didn't get picked.  Probably for the best though because I would have won and broken the tiny heart of the little boy that took the prize, and then I don't think I could have slept at night.  We watched most of the pastry school competition (Valencia didn't have a team), and were mostly unimpressed.  A lot of the components were made ahead of time and just plated.

And of course, I took lots and lots of pictures. 

Unfortunately my pictures of the fashion show didn't come out all that great because we were kind of far from the stage and I was taking them on my phone...but I had to share my two favorites (#3 on the first row and #4 on the second row) and then some of the most ridiculous.

All in all, I had a great time hanging with some of my school friends who share my passion for chocolate and just gorging myself on sweets.  And I definitely plan to go back next year!