Baby Cake

This cake I did for a client. They had a  red whale invitation that they wanted me to base the cake off of. It is a classic yellow cake covered in light blue fondant, with the whale being yellow cake covered in Swiss butter cream. Swiss you ask? It is one of the more stable butter creams able to hold up better than the traditional stick of butter and pound of powder sugar butter cream that we all know. It took a lot to dye it red. The hardest part about this cake was getting the rope pieces that were fondant, not to crack. Over all the customer was happy.

Happy Eating.

Castle Cake

This cake was done for my daughter's birthday. It took about 10 hours or so of decorating and about 2-3 hours planning. It was the first time I used fondant to cover a cake completely. Definitely a learning lesson about how to put fondant on a cake. I know now that its better to use a simple syrup than frosting. Always put doll rods in a cake that is more than one tier. That was a big learning lesson as the cake collapsed in the back. It did survive the birthday party. The towers are plastic decorated in fondant and royal frosting. The spire is also plastic with fondant and frosting. I would charge $65 or better for cake like this for a customer.
Made me realize that I wouldn't mind do more of these cakes, just need to work on getting rid of some of the plastic parts and replacing them with cake or chocolate. I can be contacted by email: lmzaehler@ymail.com if you are interested in cakes. I only service the Salt Lake City area at this time. To friends back home, I can tell you how to do this. Its easy.

Happy Eating

Rocky Moutain Region

So we did the Region that Utah is in this week. To me the food was ok. Not really impressed with the cuisine here. We did something called Navajo fried bread. Its  what reminds me of the elephant ears at the county fair back home except there is no cinnamon and sugar on them . We put chili on ours. We also did a cake called Tres Leches. Mine exploded for some reason, so I have a picture of a classmates up.  I am still trying to figure out how I exploded the cake. Tres Leches is a cake that is soaked in three different kinds  of milk. Regular milk, evaporated, and condensed. It is then decorated with a sweet whipped cream and fresh fruit. We also did a few different southern dishes like stuffed chilies.

Salsa Verde and stuffed empanadas

This is quail. Really good. I didn't think I would like the quail.

 Tres Leches

Navjo Bread and corn salsa.

Baking a Charlotte

In pastry class the assignment was to make and plate a Charlotte Ruse. I have posted pictures of other classmates final project. I was not happy with ours or the way it was done. That being said, a Charlotte is ladyfingers that surrounds Bavarian Cream usually topped with fruit. It looks very pretty when its done. Very tasty too. The other picture in here is a team mates attempt at plating Flan. I found that I am not a fan of it. It is very easily over cooked and when that happens it looks bad and taste like scrambled eggs. 

The only thing we were told is don't use a garnish unless its in the dish. The mint does not belong here.

The end of quarter is coming, so soon I will have more pictures to post. I have a lot of events coming up and will have some photos from that as well.

Chef Tom

This past weekend I spent on a film set. I got to see how "movie magic" with food happens. It was pretty cool. I got to make the food the chef was doing on camera. It was basic stuff but I still had a lot of fun doing it. The house was owned by the guys from the Spike TV shoe Flip Men. The place was huge. 3 kitchens, a basketball court and a dance studio. Pretty cool. Chef Tom was the chef doing the taping for a new I pad app that's coming out. He is a local celebrity. He appears on Channel 4 (ABC) as their food person.
Anyways, He would show them how to make something like creme brulee and I would be making the same thing in the upstairs kitchen and it was my final product that was taped. Really cool. I had two other culinary students with me too. They were fun to work with. Here are a few pictures of what we did this weekend.

This was a piece of raw salon he had used. I cooked it and served it to the crew when Chef Tom was finished.

This is my creme brulee after the food stylist got threw making it pretty.

Lousiana Week in American Regional

In American Regional, we were cooking food from Louisiana. It was interesting. Very spicy, but the food turned out great. Too bad, I have a stuffed nose and couldn't smell half of it. Jambalaya, and gumbo and bread pudding with whisky sauce. Yummy food. If you want any of the recipes just ask and I would be more than happy to post them.

Bread Pudding with Whisky Sauce

Fried Cod with Smothered Okra and Grits

Gumbo

 Jambalaya

Plating desserts

This week we had to plate desserts. Restaurant style. It was a good learning experience on what to do and what not to do. I had put modeling chocolate in a brush stroke on the plate. I should have used a sauce and done it that way. Modeling chocolate isn't really edible and is used more for chocolate art than eating. Fruit should always be glazed when on something to be plated. There were a lot of good points and bad points.  Over all a good try for the first time having to do it.
We also were attempting to deconstruct an eclair. Not so good. Our plate was finished on time, but I would never serve it in a real setting. I thought it was sloppy, and not even close to what we were suppose to do. Some of the plates below are mine and other people in my class. The turtle cheese cake plate is mine.
Over all it was a good learning lesson. I think that in the future the plates need to be better planed out. So more pictures to come in the future when we do more plates.

Turtle cheese cake

This is the plate I would never serve.

deconstructed eclair

peanut butter cheese cake