Chocolate

Hello!

As a child, I loved chocolate. After being in school, I've grown to dislike chocolate...immensely. Well this term, my 5th term, is ALL about chocolate (and sugar). Our first week started with learning how to temper chocolate, which was completely new to me! I've never really understood why chocolate is tempered and how to do it, but once I learned, it makes a lot of sense and it's incredibly easy to do!

The first week, we made chocolate covered strawberries and little tuxedo strawberries that were absolutely adorable.

SO PRECIOUS! These are great as party favors at weddings or as dessert at weddings!! They are so much fun to make.

As the term progresses, we are going to be making a chocolate box, a chocolate showpiece that has to be at least 12 inches tall. We have to make pastillage showpiece, a cocoa painting, sugar showpieces, and marzipan fruit! 

It's definitely going to be a very long and very stressful 10 weeks!!!  But I'm excited to learn new tricks and ideas that can for sure be incorporated into desserts and cakes! 

Next up: Chocolate Box! 

Umi-Zoomi Cake

Hello all,

I recently did a Team Umi-Zoomi birthday cake for someone's daughter.

This was an interesting cake for me because I had never really worked with fondant before, so this was a first (well besides my ACF cake) but this was FOR someone who was PAYING me. 

I made marshmallow fondant because of the taste and because it is way easier to make than regular fondant! 

I started with making the characters, Milli, Bot, and Geo. They ended up coming out pretty accurately. And I realized that the green guy (without eyes and a mouth) could be made into a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, which I thought was awesome for future reference. 

Once I had my little people made, I continued on with decorating the cake: 

For this, I added a ruler across the bottom of the cake, as a border, and I added shapes to the sides to give the cake some texture and visual interest (and because Umi-Zoomi is all about shapes).

The shapes and the ruler came out WAY better than I could have imagined. I was beyond excited with how they turned out. So then, I moved on to the top of the cake: 

I added Milli, Bot, and Geo to the top of the cake and then had to write Happy Birthday Sophia on it..like so:

I was definitely quite proud of how this cake turned out. It was a lot of fun and I really enjoyed being able to make a cake that made a little girl's birthday that much more special! 

-B

Cakes

Hello,

Its been quite a while! 2014 sailed in and feels like it keeps sailing by. It's already April. I'm in my 5th term now at school. I've completed over half of my program. I completed a culinary course last term which was a lot of fun! Learned some new techniques and recipes. 
I participated in Wake Tech's American Culinary Federation Competition. I made a single layer celebration cake. It was my first "real" cake that I've made. I got to work with fondant and really liked how it eventually came out.

 the beginnings of my cake! Covered in fondant! That was quite a feat, especially never having done it before! 

I started by placing half of the circles on the bottom of the cake so that I could get the balls to stick! 

It took forever to get all of the circles on! But I was definitely happy with the final product! 

The premise of my cake was a "spring celebration" so I added tulips to the top.

The final product at the competition. I also added flowers made out of royal icing because I needed a third technique.

Overall, I felt that I did an amazing job for my first cake. Obviously there were mistakes and they were definitely pointed out by the judges but I took this as a learning opportunity. I had a lot of fun making the cake and decorating it. I enjoyed the experience and would definitely consider doing it again! 
How it's on to an Umi-Zoomi birthday cake for someone's child! :)

Happy Thanksgiving

I hope everyone has a blessed and Happy Thanksgiving! 

(updates coming soon)

-B

Bread!

School has been in full swing for the last two and a half weeks and I've been crazy busy. We have made so much bread in the last two weeks that I may permanently be off bread for a good few months when we're done.
Some of the breads that I've made:
Cuban
Soft Rolls
Hard Rolls
Rosemary Semolina
Amish Pretzels
Foccacia
Challah
Baguettes
and plenty others that I cannot think of off the top of my head!

Olive Foccacia on the left and right sides. Challah in the middle (circle) and two braided in the background. Amish Pretzel is the little guy in the front

Same as above but a better view of the pretzel. He wasn't exactly pretzel looking.....!

Rosemary Semolina (made with Durum flour which is typically used to make pasta, very dense bread) bread in all different shapes! 

It's been an amazing experience so far and I can't wait to keep learning and hopefully be able to capture more pictures! :)

-B

Birthday Cake

My daughter's 5th birthday was last month and instead of buying a cake, like I've done previously, I decided to make one!
So between the two of us, we decided on a rainbow cake! We had so much fun making the cake!
I found a bunch of different variations of the recipe online and I took them all and combined them.
To make the rainbow aspect of the cake, I used GEL food coloring. The gel food coloring made the colors of the cake especially vibrant and honestly, beautiful!

I started with Duncan Hines WHITE cake mix. I only use Duncan Hines when baking cakes, unless I'm making my own batter. However, Duncan makes THE BEST pre-made cake mix. THE.BEST. Little one modeled a little and helped a little!

I split the batter into four bowls because I used four colors. If you use more colors, split the batter more. 

 We started with teal and Little one mixed it in. All of the colors came out incredibly vibrant and beautiful!

Teal! :)

                                                                                     we also had pink! 

\A little bit of purple!!!! 

And a healthy dose of orange!

After mixing up all of the batters with the different colors, I split each bowl and put half into each cake pan. I did one color on top of the other. I DID NOT mix them. If you mix them, it will come out ...well, not attractive looking. They will cook on top of each other and not blend together. 

(obviously this was a double layer cake) so, two cake pans ready to go into the oven. I followed the package directions (always a good thing) and popped those bad boys into the oven. We couldn't wait for them to come out of the oven! 

These bad boys came out of the oven and looked quite delicious and colorful! 

I frosted the cake with a whipped topping that Trader Joes makes. It's a little blue box that you stick in the fridge to get cold and then whip it up. We added a little pure vanilla extract and confectioner's sugar to it to give it some more flavor. It's not super sweet which is good because we don't like super sweet. 

To make the "5" I cut out a five from wax paper and placed it on top of the cake. Little one put the sprinkles all around the cutout and ta-da! This is how it looked when I took the "5" off!

The inside of the cake was the best part! I could not wait to cut into it and see how the rainbow worked out. 

And it was beautiful! I couldn't believe how great it came out. I was quite surprised and ridiculously happy that it came out so amazingly.

YUM! :) 

I would definitely make this cake again. It was easy to make and came out beautifully. 

On a side note, Term 1 is down, Term 2 starts in two weeks. I am done with Math and Accounting, got A's in both of them!!!! (surprised myself there). I start a baking class when Term 2 starts up and I'm excited to get started on baking. I cannot wait to see what we're going to bake this term! Hopefully I'll be able to take pictures of what all we bake and put them up here! 

Until next time,

-B

Bake!!

I started classes a month or so ago. Sadly, I'm only taking math classes for this first term. The pastry classes don't start until August and I would definitely rather get my math out of the way.

In the meantime, I've been baking a few things here and there.
I made grilled peaches today and drizzled a little bit of honey on top of them, super yummy! 

Grilled Peaches!!!!

They were quite yummy, even babygirl enjoyed them! :)

Honestly, most of my recipes come from Pinterest. I have found some amazing desserts and dinners on Pinterest! 

Like the next few:

I made a peach upside down cake a few weeks back! It was....AH-MAZ-ING. 

                                                           Beautiful!
If you want the recipe, I found it here (thank you Pinterest). It was really simple to make. The hardest part was peeling and cutting the peaches! :/ 

I made a Jello Poke cake. Momma LOVES it. I used black cherry jello and vanilla pudding, but it would be super fun to change up both the jello and the pudding flavors.  This cake is a great summer party cake, it is so light and fluffy and almost melts in your mouth! Yum. 

Jello Poke Cake! 

This blog is all about baking but I like to cook sometimes too. Baking interests me more because of the precision of it. Cooking to me can be willy-nilly sometimes with a little bit of this and a little more of that, and I'm not too great at doing all of that. Baking is easy. It's all there in front of you and I like that. 

But I did grill some sweet potatoes with a cilantro lime "rub." I didn't use three sweet potatoes, that was way too many. But I would recommend making more of the salt and lime zest "rub," I felt like there wasn't enough even for the two sweet potatoes that I used. But they sure did taste good! 

Hanging out on the grill pan.

I can't wait to bake more and start my pastry classes in August! :)