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.

There are three types of ganache, which vary only in their ratio of chocolate to cream.

1. Ordinary ganache has a ratio of 1:1 (chocolate:cream). It is very liquidy and is generally used for glazing cakes.
2. Rich ganache has a ratio of 1 ½:1 (chocolate:cream). This type of ganache is used as a filling, much like buttercream.
3. Truffle ganache has a ratio of 2:1 (chocolate:cream). This ganache is used as the filling in truffles.

After making a ganache, any of these can be further flavored with other ingredients.

To make ordinary ganache, you’ll need:

8 oz semi-sweet chocolate

8 oz heavy cream

1. Cut the chocolate up finely
2. Bring the cream to a boil and remove from heat
3. Add the chocolate and set aside 5 minutes
4. Stir until smooth. Do not use a whisk because that will create air bubbles in your ganache.
5. Cool to room temperature.

The instructions are the same for rich and truffle ganache, simply adjust the amount of chocolate in your recipe.

First up, was a house done by Nancy Olson of Gramercy Tavern.

Olson Manor from the side. Don't you just love the frosting "snow" on the roof?

Love the skis leaning up against the side of the house!

On the other side of the house was a sugar pool! How cute is the pretzel railing?

This house was decorating on all sides. Check out the back with a canoe!

Next up, this awesome typewriter from Baked Ideas.

Such detail for every key!

And lastly, Tribeca Treats brought this house in honor of Occupy Wall Street!

You need to see close-ups of those signs to truly understand how great this one was.

99% Dark Chocolate...haha...

My elfin kids

Gotta have people waiting for the iPhone 5 in there!!

Which is your favorite of these 3? Let me know in the comments below!

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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!

Originally posted on Flickr by makeupwoman2000.

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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!

Originally posted on Flickr by Sweet Handmade.

Originally posted on Flickr by East Coast Cookies.

Originally posted on Flickr by East Coast Cookies.

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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.

If you’re looking more for small nibbles, how about some cookie bars. Something with a graham cracker bottom will surely fit right into the season.

Any spice cake is a welcome addition to a dessert table this time of year. Try your hand at a ginger-spice bundt cake.

Don’t like pumpkin pie? Bring pumpkin into your dessert in other ways. Check out our pumpkin-chocolate chip cookies, or try this pumpkin bread pudding! Feeling a bit more daring in the kitchen, give our Thanksgiving Pie inspired French Macarons a try.

Feel like you’ve mastered the basic Thanksgiving recipes and are looking for a bit of a challenge? Earlier this year, we did a chocolate mousse cake with hazelnut cake. How about making a pecan cake instead and layering it between layers of chocolate and pumpkin mousse? Martha Stewart had a great recipe for pumpkin mousse if you’re not sure how to tackle this one.

Or of course, there’s always simple cookies decorated with royal icing. Want to incorporate turkeys and leaves? Check out this great photo for some ideas!

So which way will you go? Are you going to opt for tradition or whimsy this year?

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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!

My dear Friend Cherryspoon’s Cake! Check out her blog post here: http://www.cherryspoon.com/2011/03/17/and-just-like-that-pastry-school-is-done/

You should recognize this one!

And just like that — goodbye school! I’m a chef!

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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.

After hour one, I had completed everything I was hoping to and was ready to start the ruffles. I measured my cake and figured out that I probably wanted each ruffle to be about 1” high, plus the stretch that it was going to get from me thinning it out.

To make the ruffles, I rolled out fondant to the appropriate length. Then I cut it into a 1″ strip. I thinned out the top edge of this strip, and starting from the top of the cake, attached the first strip to the top of the cake with some royal icing. I repeated this process for all 3 ruffles down each layer of cake. The ruffles all came together with surprising ease. I had thought it was going to take me two hours to finish them, but it worked well on the first shot and I breezed right through them.

Next up, I piped around the borders of the two layers with some royal icing pearls. When that was done I attached the peony to the side of the cake.

After that, all that was left was to figure out the top. I kept placing roses on top, but was never happy with the way it was coming out. Finally, I decided to take the roses off and placed a fondant dome on top of the cake, and then I stuck the roses into that instead. That seemed to work much better as it gave the flowers some height rather than them being stuck right on top of the cake.

And with that, my last class came to an end. All 400 hours of classroom instruction was over and it was onto graduation and internship for me. I was physically ready for graduation with my cake completed, but mentally, I was not. I couldn’t believe just how quickly it had all come upon me.

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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.

Now that my peony was done, it was time to finish up my roses, leaves, and filler flowers for the top of the cake. I knew that based on my design, most of my last day would be taken up on the cake itself and that I wouldn’t have much time to work on flowers.

In between working on the flowers, we obviously had to also bake our cakes! On lesson 97 we baked them and in lesson 98 we cut and filled them. It was very important to make sure our cakes were completely level so that our final cakes would look nice. On lesson 99, I covered mine with fondant, which I was really dreading since the last cake I had to cover had broken, but I guess practice makes perfect because the cakes got easily covered and I went back to work on my flowers.

Before I knew it, we were down to the last class. When I was initially told that I was going to spend 7 lessons making flowers, I wondered how it was possible that the time was going to pass, but turns out, making flowers takes much longer than you would have ever thought. Now I know why all of the wedding cakes made with tons of gumpaste flowers cost so much money!

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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!

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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!

Creating a rose bud

Rose buds are generally piped directly onto an iced cake, versus a full blown rose which is generally piped onto a piece of parchment paper and then stuck onto the cake.

To create a rose bud, pipe a backwards “S” shape with the petal-shaped tip. Then finish the flower by piping the sepal and calyx at the bottom of the flower with green icing.

Creating a rose

Full blown roses are traditionally piped on an icing nail on a piece of parchment paper. After finishing the rose, place the parchment paper in the refrigerator to harden and then gently place the rose onto your iced cake.

The base of roses are generally made from a cone of the same type of buttercream that you will use to pipe the petals, however, for a fuller rose you can also a Hershey’s kiss as your base!

Look at the rose that is in the top left of this photo – see how it looks taller than the other roses surrounding it? That is the effect you will get using a Hershey’s kiss.

After each creating a dozen or so roses, we threw together a batch of cupcakes and each decorated them using different techniques that we had learned in the past 3 lessons. All of the roses in the middle of the cupcakes were created on icing nails and then placed into the cupcakes!

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