amccomb

I had the same problem with a swiss meringue chocolate buttercream, which used only egg whites. It never got quite soupy, but was definitely not as stable and thick as I would have liked. I tried chilling it, bringing it back to room temp, and adding softened chunks of butter, but the more butter I added, the thinner it got! So I stopped and just went with it the way it was. Tasted great.

So, this week there were persimmons everywhere at the farmers market. They were those small mushy ones, not the large, shiny, firm ones. Anyway, I am trying to think of some things to do with them. I love persimmon pudding, but I want to try something new. Could I make persimmon butter or chutney? Any desserts besides persimmon pudding? Ideas, suggestions, tips, and recipes are greatly appreciated!

Wow! Sorry I couldn't help with the Purdue food topic, but I'm going to keep the apple thing in mind!

I have to agree that Casablanca and Little Tibet aren't the best places around (I feel the same way about Burmese Gems) but I have friends (with very good taste) who adore those places. I have to disagree about tutto benne. I've only been there twice, but both times the food seemed way, way overpriced - especially for the quality. And the menu was so unimaginative. Maybe it's changed since I've been there, but I gave it two chances and walked away really disappointed both times. I also disagree with Yogis. I don't think their wings are that great, I really prefer the big, meaty, saucey wings at Lennies with a dollop of chunky blue cheese sauce and crusty bread to soak up the vinegar-y wing sauce. Too bad the prices at Lennies keep going up. I also like the plate of roasted veggies at Lennies with the tarragon mayo. La Petit can be hit or miss. It's mostly the atmoshpere that's fun. The owner will come and sit at your table and tell you what his wife is making for dinner tonight. Then he'll pour you some wine and chat somemore. It's very laid back and I think they only open when they feel like it. El Nortino used to have the yummiest bean and cheese tamales, but they no longer make them. When you get the chicken tamales fresh, they are wonderful. We always get an assortment of different tacos. It's a sit down restaurant with a store upstairs, but we always get it to go. Have you tried Truffles? If you can hit a wine dinner there, you won't be disappointed. We have been very happy with the regular menu, too. We have gotten meat that has been slightly over cooked once or twice. We used to love Divino (now something called Rumblefish - same chef and owner) and we even had our wedding reception there. I'll never forget the rare duck breast stuffed with chorizo and potatoes, and the chicken stuffed with fennel dressing with roasted herb gnocchi that we had at our wedding. Unfortunately, we had quite a few issues with the owner with regards to how our reception was handled, so we are never going back. Scholar's in used to have these amazing wine dinners, but the last year and a half, the quality has REALLY dropped. There were some dinners there, before that time, that I will never forget. The pastry chef, Nicole, is really talented. She didn't get to design the dessert menu because the first chef did that, but when she got to do her own original stuff at the wine dinners, she had us swooning. She did the desserts for our wedding.

I don't know about Lafayette, but Bloomington isn't too bad! Sure, there's no French Laundry or Trio here, but there are some decent ethnic joints. Siam House and Esan Thai have good Thai food - a friend of mine from Chicaog who LOVES Thai food and has eaten at every Thai restaurant he can in Chicago prefers Siam House to all of them. Shanti and Bombay House have decent Indian food (I prefer Shanti). Falafels Flavors of Jeruselum has a limited menu, and the food is very simple, but tasty. Mikado has pretty darn good sushi for being in the middle of Indiana, and their Japanese menu is good, too. We've always been happy with it. We really like El Norteno for mexican. There are a whole slew of other ethnic places - Burmese Gems, Anyetsang's Little Tibet, Samira Afghani cuisine, Casablanca for Morrocan, Turkuaz Cafe for Turkish... Lennie's, Upland, and Trojan Horse have fun bar food. Bakehouse has nice sandwiches. Uptown, Scholar's Inn, or the Village Deli for breakfast foods are good choices. For fancier stuff, Limestone isn't too bad, Restaurant Tallent and Truffles are pretty darn good, Scholar's Inn is consistantly decent, Le Petit is fun for French comfort food.

My husband and I are heading to Champaign, IL to see a concert and we were hoping to have a yummy dinner somewhere fairly nearby. It could be within a half-hour from the location, which is: The High Dive 51 Main St Champaign, IL 61820 We prefer something more exciting than burgers and bar food - we love all ethnic foods, french, tapas, any asian or indian food, etc. We also like more upscale neuvo American or anything like that. We are not limited by budget, although wwe would prefer to not have to dress up TOO much - no jackets. Any suggestions for where we could eat? What about fun shopping (food related or otherwise) nearby? Any artisan foods - chocolate, bread, cheese, icecream, heck ANYTHING - nearby? Thanks so much!

Last week, I was in a hurry and tried to make batch of four different flavors of jam, but only one set. I didn't have time to do anything about it last week, but now I have some free time. Is it safe to open the jars, dump the jam back in a pot, boil it until it's ready, then re-ladle it into sterilized jars with new lids, and then re-process them? Or do I need to use them as-is or toss them?

As an update, I finished the upside down cakes last night, and I used the Cooks Illustrated recipe someone posted in another thread that I started Looking for great upside down cake recipe. The cakes turned out beautifully, and I stacked two 14 inch upsidedown cakes (to add some height and drama - they will be on top of this footed bowl) and drizzled some caramel sauce around the edges to draw attention away from the 'seam'. There will be a 'wreath' of orange wax flowers, bittersweet, and rosehips around the edge (not touching the cake). I had a little nibble of the cake, and it tasted really nice, but because of the cornmeal, it had almost a cornbread texture. I like it - it has a rustic feel that I think goes well with the presentation. I'm worried, though, that some people will find it gritty. Ah well! Lastly, I have come up woth some ideas to use up my freezer cakes. I am thinking of doing a spin off of the Exotic Orange Cake by soaking the white cake with a honey syrup, the adding the orange bavaroise between two layers, and the Vanilla cremeux in the middle and topped with my homemade Chardonnay Passion fruit jelly. Another idea is a Lady Baltimore-type cake with a custard filling with nuts and dates and figs, or maybe with chunks of chocolate, brandy soaked cherries or apricots, and nuts or maybe crumbled amaretti or macaroons. I could soak one of the white cakes with cream/evaporated milk/condensed milk and make a Tres leches cake and fill the layers with dulce de leche, or maybe pastry cream with nuts or fruit (mangoes or bananas or coconut or strawberries...). I was thinking of doing something with the chocolate cakes, too. Maybe a praline layer, or even just nutella. Or maybe using nightscotsman's recipe for homemade marshmallows and making a raspberry marshmallow fluff...or just a peanut butter mousse or buttercream. Any other ideas?

She is buying a slightly smaller one - When I bought the pans, she thought she was going to have quite a few more people. But, she is going to a local (Evansville, IN) bakery that does have pretty cheap cakes. The name of the place is The Donut Bank. Donuts are the main focus, but they have cakes, cookies, and a few other things as well. When I used to work there, my mom would come in and buy the individual cake slices (75 cents), which were square pieces of cake, iced on all sides with shell borders and a big rose on top, like a miniature cake. Sugar shock! But her favorite part is the shortening icing, so she loved it. She will be very happy with her cake, I am sure.

Heh. yeah, I'm a little annoyed, but I think she feels bad that I was stressing about it and that is why she is going with the bakery. She wants me to not worry about it, and to relax and enjoy myself. I have mixed feelings about it. On one hand. I am annoyed and really wanted to do this to expand my knowledge and skills, but on the other hand, I feel like my creativity was being stiffled by her strict requests, and I didn't feel like I would be proud to share my creation with with everyone with those restrictions. I stress about everything I bake, though - I always want it to be perfect. I still plan on using the cakes sitting in my freezer to further my skills, plus I will be able to make what I want, and to be proud to share it. I am also planning on building the final product like I would have built the wedding cake. In other words, I will be bringing a wedding cake big enough to feed over 100 people to work one day! But yeah, there is still a part of me that is annoyed.

Thanks so much for all of the advice so far! I really do want my mom to be happy with the cake. Funny that a couple of people mentioned under mixing. Each of the pans I used required a different amount of batter, so in some cases I was tripling the batter (figuring it was ok, since they were from mixes) and was afraid I overmixed because I was compensating for having more batter in the bowl to mix! But in the end, I had the same problem with the layers that took a single box as well as the tripled pan. The cakes were very moist, so I'm thinking my description was off. What struck me is I almost thought they were TOO moist - but they were done all the way through, so they weren't underbaked. The edges were the biggest problem - it was like the slightly browned edges were pulling away from the main body of the cake. I was tempted to just peel off the golden brown edges entirely, to even things out. :) Anyway, I called my mom to tell her I was having problems, and asked if she would really mind that much if I made the scratch cakes after all, and she decided to order from a baker, instead. In fact, she is ordering from the old bakery I worked at through high school. Heh. So, I guess I am off the hook. She is not dissappointed, but I am. I've made large cakes before, and made one wedding cake that turned out incredible, so I was hoping to do it again. And now I have a freezer packed full of mix cakes. Well, at least it will give me a base for practicing some soaking syrups, fillings, and icings! I just made some chardonnay passion fruit jelly which is VERY tasty that I think I fill use as a filling for one of the cakes. In the end, my mom will have her bakery cake with sugary icing flowers, so she will be happy, and I'm glad of that. Funny thing - the cake she is ordering will cost around $100, and it cost me over $300 to buy the supplies, tools, ingrediants, etc! Oh yes, and I am still making the groom's cake, which is a pineapple upside down cake which I am going to make FROM SCRATCH. Ha! :)

So, I've been thinking more about this upside down cake thing. I have a deep 14 inch pan that I was planning on using, but it still doesn't offer much height. I have considered stacking two upside down cakes and drizzling caramel sauce around the edges to draw attention away from the middle where the two cakes will meet. That will provide a higher fruit to cake ratio, and add a tasty sauce. What do you guys think of this idea? Stick with the traditional single layer, or try out the two layer version? Can anyone forsee any problems with the two layer version?

I am in the middle of baking my mom's wedding cake. So far. I have had nothing but problems. Some of this, I think, comes from using cake mixes - the cakes are too spongey and fall apart easily. I had sent my mom trial versions of the e-gullet Best White and Best Chocolate cakes, and she decided they were "too rich, dense, and sophisticated" (Bwah!? They were plain chocolate and plain white - how is that too sophisticated?) The people at work LOVED them, but my mom said she prefers cake mix cakes, so cake mix cakes it is. Unfortunately, Every single cake has fallen apart when I have tried to turn them out of the pan. Funny how the trial run 'scratch' cakes came out perfect every time! Anyway, I promised my mom I would torte the cakes and put icing between every layer. So far with my attempts (which worked beautifully on the trial run scratch cakes), if I slice a layer, the top layer falls to pieces when I try to move it to another surface. How can I keep this from happening? At what point should I slice them - when they are completely cooled? Frozen? Right now, I have the crumbling layers (my third attempt, and they are still crumbling) in the freezer, hoping that freezing them will make them stable enough for me to move the layers after they are sliced so I can fill with icing. Please give me some advice - this is my third night of trying to make these cakes, and I am losing major sleep because of this!

Do those of you who work in restaraunts do savory pastries as well as sweet, or do you mainly work on desserts? If you do savory work, what sorts of things do you do? I went to a dinner a couple of years ago, and the pastry chef made a savory pastry that was like...chicken baklava. There were layers of phyllo dough and nuts and cinnamon and other spices, but there were also tender chunks of shredded chicken. The dinner was scotch themed, so I am thinking there may have also been some scotch in there. The Pastry Chef said it was based on a traditional dish, but I can't remember the name or location of the original. Wow, it was so good, we still talk about it three years later.

Last year, for our wedding, we had a few really nice desserts created by a PC from a local restaurant (both my husband and I are secretly "in love" with her. When we see her out at a bar or something, we turn into teenagers, whispering to one another, "Oh look! It's the Pastry Chef! Go say something to her!" "No, you go!" We wanted everything fall themed and bite sized, and she made mini pear and currant frangipane tarts glazed with port, meringue shells with Grand Marnier pastry cream and carmelized cranberries and candied pistashios, tiny napoleans of persimmon creme brulee layered between spice cake, cinnamon marsala gelato, and cognac truffles. Some time in November last year, another local restaurant had an apple mousse that haunts me. It tasted like fresh apples, not like baked apples or applesauce or apple butter, which is what I would use in a mousse. I am still trying to figure out how they did it. Although the mousse was creamy and rich while still light and airy, it had this texture....like a slight crunch of fresh apples. I wish I could explain it better, in hopes that someone here could help me recreate it. Every Thanksgiving, my grandma makes pecan and date shortbread tartlets, which I just love. Something about them - crunchy, chewy, crumbly, flaky, gooey, sweet with just a hint of saltiness.

Now that the air is turning crisp, I've been looking through cookbooks and oooing and ahhhing over desserts with apples, pears, nuts, pumpkin, maple, etc. What are some of the desserts what make you think of fall?

Well, take this with a grain of salt (or two) because I am a home baker, but I have a flourless chocolate cake recipe that separates the eggs like that and then you fold in the eggwhites. The only differences - my recipe has chocolate and has no flour at all. So, if it were me, I would give it a shot. The worst thing that happens is you eat raspberry mousse with no cake. :)

I'm wondering the same thing about doubling cake batter. I am making a wedding cake soon, and the recipe I am using calls for 2 9 inch pans. For the bottom layer, I have two 14 inch pans. Do I need to mix each batch and then pour it in the pan, then mix the next batch and pour it in, and then the next, etc? Any ideas how many batches it would take to fill a 14 inch cake pan?

kiwi fool? Or a kiwi curd filling for a cake?

Hmm...neither icing I made had shortening, but I would be willing to bet big bucks that the place I asked at does shortening based icing. Darn! I was hoping I had another good tip! In all honesty, my mom would probably prefer the shortening "buttercream" to any that I made, anyway. They sell it by the five gallon bucket at this place, maybe I should just make my mom happy and buy it there.

You could do a swiss or italian meringue buttercream, which seems softer, richer, more fluffy, and not as sugary to me. It's still white, and still contains butter. Maybe you could make up a few batches of icings, and then cut up a plain flourless cake into small bite sized pieces, and let her try a bite with each icing. There is also fondant and marzipan as options. Anyway, I am in the same boat. I made a beautiful wedding cake for some friends - 7 different flavors of mousse (we called them charlottes - there was a thin cake bottom, the edge was like a fence of ladyfingers, and the mousse filling went inside) and the cakes were topped with fresh berries. There were 150 people at the wedding, and I think every single one of them came up to me to rave about the amazing cake. Now my mom has asked me to make her wedding cake, and I start coming up with ideas (mostly centering on chocolate, because she LOVES chocolate, and loved my wedding cake, which was chocolate with white chocoalte mousse filling and chocolate ganache, so much she ate the leftovers with her hands in the car on the way home) and she has shot down every one. She wants white cake with white bakery-style icing. Today I mailed her two slices of cake - a white cake and a chocolate cake from egullet, and iced them with different icings - an italian meringue buttercream and a regular buttercream. I just KNOW she will pick the regular one. I wish she would at least allow me to do some fun fillings! I've been making jam like crazy, and have some really wonderful jams and jellies that would make great cake fillings.

So, I went to the local "cake supply" store and asked them about how they smooth their icing. Their response - after the last icing application has "formed a crust", use a clean kitchen sponge, wet it, ring it out, and pat the cake. The residual moisture smooths out the marks. Lots of things to try out! Thanks for the ideas, everyone!

So, I made an italian meringue buttercream and a regular buttercream last night to ice the cakes I made as trial runs for my mom's wedding cake. The cakes, by the way, were "The Best Chocolate" and "The Best White" from egullet. I am mailing my mom slices of the cake to see which icing she prefers and to make sure she approves of the cakes. Anyway, my question is, how do I get the icing nice and smooth like bakeries do it? My icing was a nice spreadable consistancy, but I couldn't get it perfectly smooth. I had it on a turntable and used my biggest icing spatula, but it still had streaks all over it. It kind of looks like maybe the icing had tiny air pockets or something. ANyway, I would appreciate any tips for smoothing the icing! Thanks!

Will the upside down cake be ok just wrapped up in plastic wrap on the counter for one day? This is a groom's cake for a wedding, and I won't have access to a kitchen on the day of the wedding, so I was hoping to make it at least a day in advance. The further in advance I can make it, the better, but I don't want to sacrifice quality. I can probably try to bake the cake that day at a friend of the families house, if I have to, but with so much going on the day of the wedding, I was hoping not to have to worry about the cake not turning out.

Can I freeze an upside down cake? Will it affect the taste at all?