foodie lit roundup

Due to being occupied by my book club's latest choice, I have only recently read one foodie book. I know. Gasp.

That being said, A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table by Molly Wizenberg was one of the best books I have read in a long time. I liked it as soon as I took a glance at the inviting front cover and the book design. (I am a book nerd. I worked in publishing in grad school. I notice book design and check for the name of the designer, just so that he/she gets his/her name read by at least one person.) Anyhow.

The book was filled with short essays and punctuated (like any good foodie book) with recipes that have tie-ins to the stories. Wizenberg started writing on her blog Orangette and ultimately scored a book deal. I never knew about Orangette before I read the book, and now I am a devoted reader (see the link to the side of this post...). Her writing style was witty and beautiful, often touching. I will admit I shed tears as she described the last few days with her father as he lay dying of cancer. She described those awkward moments, the grief and sorrow as well as the relief for the end of suffering so beautifully, I almost forgot I was reading a book that centered around food. It felt more like a book that centered around the human experience with food as a solid supporting player. This was also true in the sections describing the development of her relationship with her husband.

I also loved that Wizenberg didn't write a memoir about how she came to realize food was her true passion and went to culinary school or became a chef. Instead, she realized that her passion was writing about food. It was an original idea, which still required a great deal of cooking and a giant leap of faith. The recipes are great and leap off the page. I tried the chocolate chip banana bread with ginger first, and it received rave reviews.

This book will make you laugh, smirk, cry, smile, grieve, and salivate. And then run to the grocery store for ingredients...

why I'm not going into the wedding cake business anytime soon

Our third Wilton Method class came to an end this week. The final cake was made from two double layer cakes. We could use pillars or stack them, and all of us chose to stack them. We'll save the pillars for another time.

We got to choose any design we wanted for our final cakes. I wanted to do a fondant covered cake and use an imprint mat to put a "graceful vines" pattern on the entire thing. The plan was to then pipe red buttercream frosting on top of the pattern, add a dot border around both layers in the same buttercream, and cover the entire top in red fondant roses with bright green leaves.

It didn't exactly turn out that way. The "graceful vines" didn't transfer to the fondant, so I had to just wing it when it came to the vines and flowers. Looks more like squiggles and stars. And I ruined my buttercream by overwhipping and adding too much color, so I had to use tubes of Wilton's pre-colored decorator frosting. And the heat and my exhaustion killed the idea of me making more than 5 flowers (or Mr. MacGregor's cabbages again). After about 18 total hours, this is what I came up with.


A better look at the top...


Now I know why people charge so much for wedding cakes. They are labor intensive in a way you don't understand until you're elbow deep in buttercream that has wilted and your fondant won't roll.

I will let Mark post his own photos of his cake on his blog, but you have to see the great cakes made by the other people in our class. They were so creative.

Marsha's incredible royal icing flowers and cornelli lace:


Amanda's dinosaur:


Claire's brush embroidery:


One more class left - Fondant and Gum Paste.

Stay tuned...

a rustic, free-form success

I've never really been good at pie crusts. I've always left that to my mom and my grandmothers. I think it's a truth universally acknowledged that no one makes pie like your mom or grandmas made it. Other pies just don't compete. It's true.

Now that I have access to a food processor courtesy of Mark, I decided to challenge myself to make tartlets. (This was partially due to my residual high from watching Julie & Julia and feeling like I could best any culinary challenge, I admit.) I wanted something fruity and somewhat nostalgic, and rustic free-form apple tartlets from a Cooks Illustrated recipe were the ticket.

As a side note, if you haven't watched America's Test Kitchen on PBS, you should. And if you aren't familiar with Cooks Illustrated, their periodical cookbook, you need to make each other's acquaintance. For my 26th birthday, my gramma T gave me one of their annual cookbooks. She got me hooked. The recipes are amazing and are informative and seem somehow to leap off the page.

Back to the story. Let's start with Sir Sous Chef and his ingredients (as well as my less than stellar food photography. I think I'm more about practicality than artistry here.)


Pulse cubes of cold butter and cream cheese....


with your dry ingredients in a food processor.


I am a total nerd. I love watching ingredients pulse in a food processor.

Pulse it til it becomes pebbly. I made that word up.


Add some liquid ingredients, like very cold water. My mom always told me that the water has to be super cold. She was right. Get it moist enough to be able to shape it into a ball.


I forgot to snap a shot of the dough in a giant patty. I cut the patty into wedges and refrigerated them for about a half hour. In the meantime, Mark used the food processor to chop apples. (It was almost as exciting as pulsing the dry ingredients.)


With some sugar and cinnamon...


I rolled each wedge of dough out into a rough circle and then made a circular layer of apples inside. After folding the edges up and pushing the edges , I got them on parchment paper and a cookie sheet.



After they bake for 15 minutes, you egg wash them and add more sugar to the apples. "More sugar" is another phrase I like to hear.


Bake until golden brown and of course, top it with vanilla ice cream. They were delicious and I was able to declare my food processor pie crust a success.


A rustic, free-form success.

what to do with extra egg whites

Mark made vanilla bean ice cream on Sunday to complement my free form rustic apple tartlets. He ended up with 6 leftover egg whites, which we couldn't bear to throw out. So what does one do with leftover egg whites?

Meringue cookies, of course. A double batch.

I made these for the first time for our annual Halloween party in the shape of bones. They taste like marshmallow cookies and they dissolve in your mouth in a poof of loveliness.

Beat 3 egg whites with 1/2 tsp. of cream of tartar until they thicken. Add 3/4 c. of sugar and 1 tsp. of vanilla extract gradually on high speed until "stiff [glossy] peaks form." That wording is in a ton of recipes, but I love it when those words come to life on the whisk attachment to my KitchenAid.


Mark and I experimented with different tips from my cake kit (which looks more like a tackle box, but that's another story) to see what shapes we could pipe. We tried to make small swirls. Let me just make clear that piping meringue in small plastic piping bags can get really sticky.


After what I like to call a 2-hour "slow roast" at low heat (225 degrees, which felt like high heat considering it was 92 degrees outside on the day we made them), we got 80 bajillion poofs of loveliness, however uneven they were.


*poof*

Wilton Method course 2 comes to an end...

I just finished the second Wilton course, which focused on flowers and the basket weave pattern for icing the sides of a cake. After having quite a bit of difficult throughout the course trying to get my roses to not look like Mr. McGregor's prize cabbages and making daisies with petals that looked full as opposed to knocking on death's door, this is what I came up with for the final project. The flowers are daisies, apple blossoms, and violets, and the birds are made from color flow.

I start course 3 next week. Stay tuned!

bakery review - nashville, tn

Mark and I spent a long weekend in Nashville this month, and thanks to Cupcakes Take the Cake, I found a listing for a bakery called GiGi's Cupcakes in Nashville. We were able to get 7 different cupcakes that day (since we passed on the carrot cake and the healthy power cupcake, and a mean lady in front of us stole the last "Miss Princess" cupcake).

Overall, we were impressed. We both enjoyed almost every type of frosting, even though we agreed it was unnecessary to pile so much on. I am of the school of cake thought where the cake is primary and the icing, simply a topping. Mark believes the cake is simply a vehicle to deliver icing to your mouth.

We tried the following: White Midnight Magic Chocolate Chip; Root Beer Float; Texas Milk Chocolate; Tiger Tails; Tiramisu; Wedding Cake; and Midnight Magic Chocolate Chip. They came in adorable green boxes.



Here are 6 (not including Wedding Cake). And the frosting falling off to the side was our fault - these had to sit in the car for awhile and seem to have relaxed in the bucket seats of our rental car...


The hands-down winner was Tiger Tails: yellow cake with raspberry filling, buttercream frosting, and raspberry coconut.


The combination of flavors was incredible. I wanted 6 more.


Coming in second was Tiramisu, I believe. It was a coffee and Kahlua flavored cake filled with cream cheese and topped with coffee and Kahlua frosting and Dutch cocoa.


This one was super moist. I was impressed with their cake, as often bakery cake dries out quickly - and I loathe dry cake.


As for the rest, we both agreed the chocolate buttercream was delicious, but the chocolate cake wasn't spectacular and tasted more like cocoa powder than chocolate. Root Beer Float was an unexpected surprise. The white cake was delicious as well.

All in all, we were both quite happy with the cupcakes, which turned out to be breakfast for the last few days of the trip. Make sure you hit up GiGi's the next time you're in the music city! And if you happen to be in front of me in line and hear me say I want a Miss Princess cupcake, I'd better get it this time. ;-)

sharing some cake love

Earlier this month, Sarah's little brother and sister (Brant and Robin) came to visit. I have known the two of them since they were toddlers who came to visit Sarah during Little Sibs Weekend in college. It was during those early meetings that Brant and Robin learned to call me Uncle Bobo, until recently when Robin discovered it was okay to call me Joanna. These guys wormed their way into my heart many years ago, so when they come to visit, I like to spend some quality time giving them the attention they deserve.

I decided to make chocolate cupcakes from semi-scratch (my way to describe a doctored cake mix to avoid Sandra Lee's term). I made a new frosting, which seemed to be a hit, out of chocolate syrup. 24 cupcakes in all. Sarah and I gave them free reign to decorate them however they pleased.

They each started with two "monster" cupcakes - in the silly feet silicone molds that Sarah gave me for my birthday a few years ago.



Time out for a taste. We had to replace Brant's spatula a few times...



Brant and his three spatulas continued to decorate.


Finished product? Pretty scary monster.


This one is just too cute. This is the same face I get when I get near a cupcake too.


Finished "monsters."


Some more monsters.


We decorated 24 cupcakes as a team.


Two of the best kids in the world with cupcakes. Doesn't get much better.


Part of the fun of baking and decorating is doing it with people you love. This is squinty me with the buggers.


And big sister Sarah.




Now that's what I call cake love.