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....