Tuesday, February 16th

A special edition blog today, friends, that I have lovingly decided to title The Burn Blog... I went around the class today and compiled a current album of my classmates recent burns.

I hope you enjoy these pictures as much as we enjoyed receiving these physical-likely-to-scar mementos of how much we love to bake.

Here we have Vicki who I believe received this burn at work...



Monica got this bute last week while we were working on our finals.





You cant see Pharyn's that well, but trust me, its there...





... and ironically in the same place that I have mine!

My face says "Hurrah! Burns!!"




The award for today, however, goes to Erica Debrovsky who got this stunner at work...

And poor seems-to-seek-out-massive-disfiguring-burns Jessi got this one today while we were working with caramel...

Ouch!

Saturday, February 13th

Cakes is finished!

Here is the Dobos Torte, yet again. Chef loved the color I got on my caramel this time and liked my even layers.



And the good old carrot cake... Chef thought my carrots were cute and my cake and frosting had great flavor.

But I mean, hello, its carrot cake. I know a lot of people who would eat it off the sidewalk...




And here is me, Monica and Henry playing footsie (we have been a tad on the slap happy side), while waiting for Chef to finish grading, as we are not allowed in the classroom as she does so.

And lastly, a special Happy Saturday shout out to my favorite cheese loving friend, Trina!

On Tuesday... Wedding cakes... :-)

Wednesday, February 10th

Holler!

So... Here is my second attempt at the Alhambra cake...



And here is a close up of the flowers... Chef liked them but said that I need to create a bigger difference in size...




So yesterday we had the choice to make either an orange chiffon cake or angel food cake and I chose the latter... It isn't much to really see, as you know, but I thought that I would take it to my pharmacist at Rite Aid because I see them oh so frequently (and she mentioned that she debated between becoming a pharmacist or a chef), but as I pulled my cake carrier out of the car, the bottom of it fell off and the cake landed with a little "pooft" on the wet garage ground...

Needless to say, I picked up my drugs with sticky hands and instead of giving the fine ladies at Rite Aid a cake, they got a very sincere smile...

Today we made the Feuille d'Autunm... Its four layers of meringue layered with chocolate butter cream and finished with a chocolate collar and chocolate curls and fans... It was our first time really working with chocolate and it was interesting, a tad more challenging than we thought, and very messy... But it yields a rather impressive result...

That is, if I do say so myself...

Thursday, February 4th

T.G.I.T.!!!

Below is the Alhambra Cake: chocolate hazelnut cake layers soaked with a sweet rum syrup and iced with chocolate ganache... The cake is then glazed and topped with handmade marzipan roses (read: time consuming). We have to do this for our test on Monday so hopefully I will be able to get "Alhambra" piped EVENLY on the cake...



Close up of the flowers...

I'll give you one guess as to what type of cake this is...

No, Mom. It's not as good as yours!

Here is a close up of my handmade marzipan carrots. How cute are they?!!?

This was made today: A Dobos Torte... Layers of sponge cake with chocolate butter cream topped with a layer (the triangles) of caramel glazed cake... Tres time intensive... We have to do the Carrot Cake and this one for our finals at the end of next week.

Fancy, no?

Monday, February 1st

Today: Pineapple Upside Down Cake:



I received some devastating news today. The talented, lovely, funny, sweet, tattooed artist Justin Mentell was killed in a car accident this morning. I'm reeling and still trying to process. He will be very very very missed by a lot of people, especially me.

Friday, January 29th

Today, along with my racking cough, we had our first practical and had to replicate our Celebration cakes.

This is how we felt about them:



This is what we decided to do with them:




And this is how we dealt with our less than stellar grades:

Have a good weekend - and bottoms up.

Thursday, January 28th

YAWN.

I forgot to mention that in order to try and accomplish everything that we need to in a day, we have been starting class an hour early... I went to meet the lovely Trina for dinner (if you haven't already, take advantage of DineLA! JiRaffe was AMAZING!) this evening and upon arriving early for a change, I locked my doors and reclined to close my eyes for ten minutes. I literally could not keep them open.

Anyway, yesterday we finished our dreaded Celebration Cakes. Tasteless and covered with American butter cream, they were intended for us to get used to cutting even cake layers, spreading frosting evenly, working with butter cream and piping. So here it is...



And yes, before you start making fun of me, we were required to pipe our own names...

But check out my roses!!! Chef said that I went a tad overboard with them, but come on! How could I not?!




Yesterday we also did a Boston Cream Pie. This was SO good. I mean... can we discuss the chocolate ganache oozing down the sides of the cake?!




Yesterday we got a head start on our cake for today, the Triangle Cake with Dobos sponge filled with chocolate butter cream... And just in case you had any delusions about how much butter actually goes into butter cream frosting:



So here is how my day went today... Below is a picture of the Triangle Cake... Its Vicki's...

And here is mine:

A picture is worth a thousand sighs.