Dessert-o-licious

I find that many people are intimidated by baking because they’ve always been told that they need to be very careful to measure everything exactly or their cake, pastry, icing, etc will not turn out correctly. While this is true, there is no need to be intimidated. Baking is all science and math, and like math, it is essentially a serious of formulas. Once you get the formulas down, you can create anything your heart desires quite easily. I am starting this Baking Basics column to help show you some of these formulas and basic recipes that once mastered will open up a world of possibilities for you.

Ganache, a silky combination of cream and chocolate, is one of the easiest recipes up a pastry chef’s sleeve and can be used in a multitude of ways. Ganache can be used as frosting in a cake, as the filling to truffles, or poured over a cake to form a glossy chocolate finish. It can be made with any kind of chocolate, though semi-sweet is customary.

Continue Reading »

Tags: baking basics, chocolate, ganache, recipes, technique

As the weather here in NY starts to cool down, I’ve got one thing on my mind and that’s Gingerbread Houses! Luckily for me, so did City Harvest who teamed up with pastry chefs around the city to set up Gingerbread Houses in the lobby of Le Parker Meridien on 56th street in Manhattan. There are 7 houses on display there. Here are some pics of my favorite 3.

Continue Reading »

Tags: decorating, holidays

Originally posted on Flickr by jillfcs.

Trying to change it up a bit from the more usual “Turkey” cookies, check out these great pilgrim cookies from Flickr! Or do both, like the photo above from jillfcs!

Continue Reading »

Tags: cookies, decorated cookies, holidays, pilgrim cookies, pilgrims, royal icing cookies, Thanksgiving

Originally posted on Flickr by thebearfootbaker.

Cutting out cookies in various shapes and decorating them with royal icing for to give them a festive Thanksgiving feel is such a fun idea for desserts this year. We have been scouring Flickr to find you the best looking Thanksgiving cookies and will be posting them here to give you some great ideas!

Continue Reading »

Tags: acorn cookies, cookies, decorated cookies, flickr fridays, holidays, leaf cookies, pumpkin cookies, royal icing cookies, Thanksgiving, thanksgiving cookies, turkey cookies

Cooking a Thanksgiving meal is always a stressful undertaking, but don’t flake out when it comes to dessert! Of course, you can always choose to just go ahead and buy that Trader Joe’s pie again this year, but why not try your hand at baking something to finish off the meal? With so many great options for both the novice and experienced baker out there, have fun with it and go a little crazy! Feel free to think a little out of the box with your desserts, or you can go traditional, but with you baking it, your guests will be sure to be pleased no matter which way you go.

You can always make a traditional pie. There’s a reason why apple and pumpkin pies remain such Thanksgiving staples, they’re easy to make and sure to please. And lets be honest for a moment, they’re such institutions that guests practically expect to be getting a slice at the end of the meal. Just be sure that if you’re going to make a pie, please make the crust yourself. The pie will be so much better off for it and your guests will definitely thank you. Maybe try mixing it up a bit by adding some cranberry into your traditional recipe and making a cranberry-apple pie.

Continue Reading »

Tags: events, holidays, Thanksgiving, thanksgiving desserts, thanksgiving pies

Well, now that all 400 hours of classroom instruction were over, all that was left to do was graduate and head off to our internships.

  The room was all set with our cakes, portfolios and treats we had made specially for graduation. We all waited anxiously to welcome our friends and families into our ceremony. The ceremony was short and sweet, with each of us receiving a book and a toque blanche, or white hat and then spending time looking at each other’s cakes and saying our goodbyes.

Check out all of the cakes from our graduating class!

Continue Reading »

Tags: Institute of Culinary Education (ICE), pastry school

Wow, we’re at the last class. Crazy.

I came into class with a plan of attack on how I would finish my cake. I was so nervous about all the work I had left to complete that I came in an hour early to get in some extra petal-dusting time.

I knew I had to finish:

1. Covering my board
2. Petal dusting my roses, rose leaves, and peony leaves
3. Attaching gumpaste ruffles to the outside of my cake
4. Piping the borders of my cakes
5. Attaching my peony to the cake
6. Figuring out how I wanted the top of my cake to look

First up, covering my board, something nice and easy to get me into the swing of things. Then I would finish petal dusting my flowers, hopefully all of this could happen in the extra hour I had bought myself by coming in early. I hoped that by the time class was supposed to actually start I would be ready to ruffle my cake. I wasn’t really sure how I was going to achieve the look I wanted, so I knew I had to allow myself at least 2 hours to get it just right.

Continue Reading »

Tags: cake, cake decorating, Institute of Culinary Education (ICE), pastry school

With only 7 lessons until the end of school, it was time to get down to business on our wedding cakes. We started off making generic flowers, everyone was required to make 1 full blown rose and leaf, 1 calla lily, 1 five petal blossom, 1 azalea, and 1 mimosa, regardless of whether or not we were going to use them on the final cake. This was also the time to start thinking about what our final wedding cakes were going to look like so we could make the required flowers in appropriate colors, should we choose to use them on the wedding cake. We were told to make lots of filler flowers and leaves, you always need way more than you imagined, plus they’re really helpful for covering up any loose wires or other flaws that you might otherwise see.

Instantly I knew I wanted to make a light green and pink cake. I love the color combo and have always wanted to use it on a cake, so now was the perfect time. I just had to figure out how to put that together into a nice looking cake. While I was figuring out what the design should be, I started on the required flowers, but made sure they were all made in green or pink so that I could use them on the final cake if they looked nice enough.

After searching for some inspiration online, I finally came up with a cake design and got to work. I knew I needed to make a lot of roses and wanted to make a nice, big, pink peony to be the centerpiece. Well, I found out that making peonies is quite a pain staking process. To make one, each petal needs to be individually rolled, cut, thinned, wired, and dried in a form that will give the petals some movement. Then, after the petals are all dry, they each need to be individually petal dusted. Once all of the petals, plus the center are ready, you can assemble the flower. To do this, hold all of the wires together and wrap together using floral tape.

Continue Reading »

Tags: cake, cake decorating, Institute of Culinary Education (ICE), pastry school

Now that we learned all sorts of piping techniques, it was time to learn how to cover a cake! After all, in 2 lessons time we were going to start working on our final wedding cakes and we had yet to roll out a piece of fondant! We started by covering a styrofoam cake round in marzipan…this was really tough. The marzipan kept drying out and cracking and everyone’s cakes looked pretty wrinkly…you won’t see this girl covering a cake in marzipan again!

Then the next class, we finally got out the fondant and covered the same styrofoam cake round in fondant. Again mine kept cracking and ripping. I think I was rolling it out too thin, but with a lot of perseverance and a ton of Crisco to fix the cracks, the cake was covered! Next we learned how to make fondant ribbons and attached one along the bottom of our cake round. Finally, we finished it all off with chocolate plastic roses, leaves, and curls! By far my favorite part of the cakes! Even though at the end of class we had to flip the rounds over to use the Styrofoam as a base for our gumpaste flowers, I took my rose, leaves, and curls home and hopefully will find a use for them one day!

Tags: cake decorating, decorating, Institute of Culinary Education (ICE), pastry school

After finishing up with our Marzipan fruits, we moved right on into learning how to pipe borders, rose buds, and full and half roses. So much time was spent on learning how to make shells, reverse shells, rosettes, fleur-de-lys, rope, garlands, ruffles, swags, bows and star flowers. After every class I would leave with my hand cramping from all the pressure I had been applying. But after two full lessons of piping, we were ready to attack the rose! I think everyone can relate to what it’s like to stare at a rose on a cake or cupcake and wonder how on earth it was created in buttercream. Finally, I was going to get to use a new tip in the large set of tips I had to buy at the beginning of the course.

We started learning the rose by learning rosebuds. These are actually deceivingly difficult! Because I had spent some time making roses out of marzipan and bread in previous lessons, I felt like these would be easy for me, but it turns out that making a rose bud is nothing like making a full blown rose, so I had no context for it. It took me what seemed like 100 tries to finally get a good rose bud created.

After we nailed the rose bud, we moved onto half roses. Half roses are just extensions of rose buds, but with two or three additional leaves piped. And then finally, onto full-blown roses!

Continue Reading »

Tags: cupcakes, decorating, Institute of Culinary Education (ICE), pastry school, piping, tips, tutorial