Category Archives: Baking and Pastry

Don’t Cry Over Fallen Cupcakes

 
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Have you ever had a bad baking day? If you have, you’ll know that they can be as devastating as a bad hair day from hell. Most people don’t bake only for themselves. At least, I don’t. I’ve always been very aware of the people I bake for, and I firmly believe that the touchy-feely idea that people can taste the emotions you had while making the food is true. So when I have a bad baking day, it’s almost always when the product is going to someone–or many someones–I care about. On top of that, these people usually know I went to pastry school and was a pastry cook, and so should be capable of making a decent cake. All in all, bad baking days are a dogeared and food-splattered recipe for extreme embarrassment in the cookbook of my life.

This past Saturday, I was making the birthday cake for a very dear friend of mine’s birthday party. I wanted it to be spectacular, because the birthday girl is pretty darn spectacular herself. I ended up deciding to do cupcakes, and I set out to do two different flavors as soon as I woke up Saturday morning, a chocolate cupcake recipe from The Modern Baker by Nick Malgieri and a white chocolate cake recipe from Pure Chocolate by Fran Bigelow of Fran’s Chocolates. I’d had success with the devil’s food cake recipe in Malgieri’s book twice last fall, and one of my chefs at pastry school used to work for Fran Bigelow and helped with the production of the photos and drawings in the book (if I remember correctly, the hands in the drawings at the beginning of the book are hers), so I trusted both books to have good recipes. Continue reading →

Vegas, Baby

 
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Wow. It’s taken me two weeks to recover from Las Vegas and write about something here, especially Vegas itself. It was my first time there, though, so I suppose that explains the odd exhaustion. That and I’d intended to write a post about the food there and felt like I had come home with much less material for a post than I’d hoped for. When I agreed to accompany Baker Bee on the trip, I had grand plans of making the most of the time that he was off at the CES convention and visiting every pastry destination on the strip, sampling and photographing along the way. Once I was there, all I found myself doing during the day was walking, walking, walking, and with all the walking I never felt like indulging in a pastry when I found one.  And that is when I decided to go online and read Vietbet Sportsbook review to see if I could play Vietbet on my phone while I was waiting for Baker to finish his work.

However, I will mention the two culinary highlights of the trip for me: the vegetarian crepe at Jean-Phillippe Patisserie inside the Bellagio and pretty much everything at Mario Batali’s Enoteca San Marco in the Venetian.

The crepe was not what I expected from the description, and I was slightly wary considering I hadn’t had a crepe I liked in Europe last summer, not even in Paris (I’m way too picky about crepe texture, apparently), but this one was heaven: a beautifully cooked crepe, soft like I like them, enfolding a potent thick, tomatoey sauce in which small chunks of several different Mediterranean vegetables also proclaimed their presence. Beneath that was a bed of melted Swiss cheese, and a lightly-dressed salad of mixed greens and cherry tomatoes (if I’m not remembering something wrong) on the side. This was beautifully presented–even the disposable plate and utensils were pretty classy, looking like a square glass plate and actual shiny metal flatware, despite their plastic pedigree. I really wanted to go back there and try the pastries with Baker Bee along to help taste a few of them–theirs were by far the most elegant, interesting, and meticulous that I saw on the Strip–but it was not to be. Next time. Continue reading →

Cuisinart Dough Blade

 
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We’ve had a Cuisinart food processor for years, and I’ve been using the standard blade for making pie dough for quite awhile with fairly decent results (I usually make an all-butter, 50% whole wheat dough, so it just can’t compete for texture with lard/shortening all-white-flour crusts). For some reason, we never really paid much attention to the “Dough” button on the device, and had all but forgotten about the dull “dough blade” that came with the food processor.

I wanted to bake a couple of pies last week for a party, so I decided to give it a try. Never again. The dough didn’t mix properly, and I ended up with large patches of too-moist mixed with large patches of completely dry dough. It was bad enough that I reverted to the standard blade for my second batch, despite some small hope that things might improve after setting up in the fridge for a few hours. As you can see from the bowl on the left in the photo, it didn’t help — the dough fell apart into too-wet and too-dry chunks as soon as I tried to break off a chunk to roll out. Because I needed both batches of dough for two covered pies, I ended up “rescuing” the bad batch by adding a little water and re-processing it in the food processor, mixing it into the good batch. Needless to say the additional processing resulted in crusts were not the best I’ve made (still pretty tasty, though), and I will be hiding the dough blade somewhere so I can’t find it and make the same mistake again. Continue reading →