Dessert for Grown-ups

A chocolate cake with a bit of red wine sounds great, doesn't it?

What if it was then soaked in sweetened red wine?

And then glazed with red currant jelly?

And topped with whipped cream and kumquats?

I don't know how to put into words how delicious it turns out.

And the rest of the class is jealous.

To make sure the next dessert is just as awe-inspiring, start with lemon confit.

Pile on doughnuts filled with mascarpone and kumquat filling and coated with citrus sugar. Serve with a cup of coffee rimmed with citrus sugar.

Once again, you have earned the envy of others.

Dank cakes

Here we have carrot cake with cream cheese icing, which I'll be making again for Iris's first birthday.  Minus the nuts.  The recipe also calls for pineapple to make a really moist cake.  I have to check that she's had pineapple before.  I don't want to send this kid into anaphylaxis on her first birthday.   

We made chocolate angel food cake.  After baking, you have to cool angel food cake upside down to keep it from falling.  I hope no one is disgusted by the state of our table.  I am, a little.

This is the best angel food cake I've ever had.  Usually they're really dry, but this was so soft and moist.  I know people hate the word moist, but it's the only adjective that works when describing baked goods.  I'm not going to say "That cake was really damp."

We also tried this pumpkin roll with cream cheese icing.  I say tried because Chef said that it didn't rise correctly.  We actually had to try twice, but neither one worked out.  But it was edible.  I ate it.  Dusty doesn't like cream cheese icing.

Chocolate Orange Cake

I grew up on Betty Crocker Super Moist cake mix.  Making a cake from scratch, it's difficult to achieve the American Dream of soft, melt in your mouth cake.  The closest I've tasted was the Surprise cake recipe that uses mayonnaise.

Chiffon cake is definitely not super moist, so you have to brush sugar water on it.  Even then, it's still a dry cake.  I'll try to keep my disappointment at a minimum.

The law of synergy didn't work for me here.  We had delicious orange diplomat cream for filling, and a rich swiss buttercream frosting.

To ice a cake, pipe a bunch of frosting onto the sides and top.  Spread out the icing on the top, and then the sides.  The top will need to be touched up after you finish the sides.

For garnishment, we cut orange peel into flowers, then candied them.

Then Theresa piped the edge with the "reverse shell" border.

We also spent a little time this week with bubble sugar.  Mix a little colored isomalt with plain isomalt, and bake it between two silpats.  The air trapped inside the silpats creates hole in the sugar, and a marble effect with the color.

So cute I'm gonna puke

We made more tarts, and my group decided to lay the fruit out in these lovely flowers.  We made a second fruit tart that had a brontosaurus on it, but I didn't take a picture.

We also made an amazing Linzer tart.  It's spicy dough filled with raspberry jam.  Very good for a cold winter morning.  I ate it every breakfast this week... in the dead of summer...

And another frangipane, this time covered with pears instead of apples.  The pears were canned, and the juice soaked into the almond filling making it soggy.  It didn't matter.  Frangipane is not my favorite tart.

Pate a Choux is a cafe downtown

Eclairs and cream puffs aren't doughnuts! Who knew? They're pate a choux, a pastry dough that is piped out and baked until dry and hollow.


This cream puff (profiterole) is filled with cinnamon pastry cream and drizzled with a flat icing. Which is better? Cinnamon cream puff or cinnamon bun? I can't decide. I know that they are both amazing.


The eclair is filled with vanilla pastry cream and glazed with chocolate.


And this is a paris brest, a pate a choux ring cut in half and filled with almond cream. It should have been baked with sliced almonds on top, but we didn't know.....

The next day we made more of the same, plus swans with chocolate pastry cream and whipped cream.

People who live in biscotti houses shouldn't throw coffee

I hate biscotti. It's hard and goes with coffee, and I don't drink coffee. But we made it anyway.


Since biscotti are pretty much little bricks, we decided to present them as a log cabin. Chef wasn't amussed.


We also made palmiers, a cookie made by buttering puff pastry, pouring sugar on it, folding and repeating.


When baked, the puff pastry puffs and they look like palm leafs.


And this is a breakfast cake called . . . uhhh . . . potica. Had to go all the way out to the car to "remember" that one!


Potica is a dough rolled with walnut filling, then shoved in a bundt pan. You should probably avoid the bulging growth that this one has, though.

But look at that inner beauty!

Custard Overlap

There has been some overlap between my Intro to Baking and Intro to Pastry classes lately. It seems like one is the opposite of the other. We made custards at the beginning of Intro to Pastry, but here we are making them at the end of Intro to Baking. I actually thought I had learnt what the difference between baking and pastry was, but no. We are making pastry in my baking class. And you'll see in a future post that we are baking cakes in my pastry class.

Whatever. It all tastes good.

Creme brulee without the brulee.

We also made an awesome banana bread pudding with rum sauce.

And a cheese cake.