chromedome

I went with (averts eyes) boxed mixes, just to eliminate a few variables that I really didn't want to deal with. The portion of the "show" cake that was actually cake was a DH lemon mix, tarted up (quite literally in this case) with lemon zest and fresh lemon juice, and with more in the buttercream between the layers. I also brushed lemon-scented simple syrup onto each layer before assembling it. The buttercream was French buttercream, as mentioned upthread, from the Serious Eats recipe, with just a splash of vanilla. I made 4 slab cakes (only 3 fit onto my itty-bitty counter for the photo), just to be sure there'd be lots of cake to go around. One was chocolate, brushed with simple syrup that had a bit of espresso powder in it, and filled in the middle with whipped ganache. One was butter-pecan, with added pecans (in the cake) and caramel buttercream between the layers. The syrup had a bit of local maple in it as well. One was carrot cake, with fresh-grated carrot and crushed pineapple added to the mix. No syrup on this one, it was super-moist already. One was plain ol' white cake, with a layer of tart raspberry preserves in the middle. Plain simple syrup. They all got milk and butter added, rather than water and vegetable oil, and a splash of decent vanilla extract. So...still box mixes, but with a few upgrades.

It turned out that my pink gel had gotten a bit lumpy after sitting since last year, and gave streaks through my buttercream. Ordinarily that would have had me fuming, but in this case streaks were consistent with the theme we were looking for so all was well (and I knew enough to microwave my red with a few drops of water before using it). Finished result: The bride had already changed out of her dress (temperature was dropping quickly) before they cut into it. The effect wasn't as neat as I'd hoped, but it looked okay. I even dressed up the complementary slab cakes in a similar color scheme. If I'd thought to do those first, I'd have had a better handle on how to do the main cakes. Aye, well...for someone who does only a few cakes a decade, they came out reasonably well.

Thanks to all of you for your input. The question of color accuracy was me getting sidetracked on nonessentials, the original point of concern with me was just making the colors vivid. I have purchased ribbon for the bottom of each layer, having caught that detail at about the 200th inspection of the photo ( ). I'm aware that the buttercream will have a yellow hue from the yolks; French is my go-to buttercream, and familiarity was part of the reason for doing it this way. As MokaPot suggested, getting the colors "accurate" is the last thing on my stepdaughter's mind right now (you schedule an outdoor wedding in Atlantic Canada in September at your peril...). So at this point the cakes are all baked, the "dummy" layer is assembled, and I have my first gallon of buttercream in hand and at working temperature. I expect I'll be incommunicado for the next several hours.

I was thinking French buttercream. The temperature on Saturday is forecast to be 15C/59F, so that shouldn't be a factor.

Yeah, that's pretty much how I saw it going. The smaller top portion (ie, the real cake) will be white blending to pale pink at the bottom; the larger bottom portion (the dummy) will have a pale pink base and I'll do a darker pink, a red and the burgundy. Each of those will have its own full-strength band, but also be mixed into some of the pale pink base coat so I can kind of ease into it.

My stepdaughter is getting married on Saturday, and asked me to do the cake. It's not going to be anything that really challenges my (modest) cake-decorating capabilities...they spotted this cake on Pinterest and sent it to me as a model: There aren't any really difficult techniques at play here, and the flowers are Somebody Else's Problem, so my question mostly pertains to the coloring. I already have a pink and a crimson Wilton gel color, which accounts for two of the three. There's a burgundy color available to me, if it's in stock at either of the local stores, but I don't know how close a match that will be. Can any of you tell me whether it's a reasonable approximation of this? If not, my elderly copy of Bo Friberg's Professional Pastry Chef has instructions for making magenta from beets (which I have in my garden) but I don't know how I'd go about incorporating that into my buttercream. Also I'm curious how to get those relatively bold tints. I assume it comes from using a great gob of the gel in a relatively small quantity of icing?

Yesterday on the radio I heard about a gent somewhere in the US who spray-painted a length of sonotube to make it orange, then secured it to his porch railing with black duct tape to make a "candy chute." He'll stay on the porch, masked and gloved, and the little ones will hold their bags and buckets under the chute while he drops in treats from his elevated perch.

(We won't discuss the day I spent two hours repeatedly disassembling and reassembling a computer, only to realize that I'd stepped on the power bar and turned the switch off...)

I do that. Largely because I don't care for icing, but without it the cupcake doesn't want to slide down. With cakes, I carefully wipe about 80% of the icing onto the side of my plate before eating the cake.

Do you start with the hook immediately? Or begin with the paddle, and switch to the hook? I've had some doughs that didn't play nicely with the hook until/unless the paddle was brought into play. (...a PITA to clean two implements, of course, but there it is...)

For me, the eyebrow-raiser was his mention of 200,000 fish in a pen. I'm pretty confident that's the entire farm, not a single pen. I've toured a couple of the local operators. The less-responsible one, a global operator which shall remain nameless (and has been responsible for many newsworthy issues, including at least one mentioned in that excerpt), packed about 10,000 fish per pen. The more responsible one, my own former supplier (I still buy from them privately, now that my restaurants are closed) limits population density to 3,000 per pen. Their pens are also situated in areas of the Bay of Fundy with an excellent natural flush (the Bay has the world's highest tides) and those lower densities help them keep parasites, waste and illness to a minimum. Either way, 200,000 is WAY high.

I thought I had nothing to contribute on this thread, but I stand corrected...I share both of these. I eat most things from a shallow bowl/soup plate, when given the opportunity, and also prefer my salad after the main course. I also shocked my mother once by requesting chopsticks to eat my salad with. When she served ice cream for dessert she snorted "You gonna eat that with chopsticks, too?" so I did.

Everybody gets a pass on childhood favorites. "Adult me" makes a very fine beef-barley soup, for example, but every once in a while I need to eat Campbell's. (shrug) It is what it is. When I was a kid I thought Velveeta and Cheez Whiz were the Greatest Things Ever. Oh, and a similar processed cheese "food" called Squeeze-a-Snack, a little chub of squidgy orange goo with a dispenser in the middle. It was in a star shape, so the cheese-adjacent product within would pipe itself onto your waiting cracker as if it came from a piping bag's star tip. Sooooo classy.

Harvested my first ripe tomato yesterday, a Black Krim (sorry, no pic before it got eaten). So I missed my target date of having a ripe tomato by Labour Day, but not by much. It remains to be seen how many more I can coax from my plants (a mix of Krim and San Marzano) before the cold kills them. I'm going to be staking up a couple of those reflective plastic-foil "moon blankets" behind them to reflect the sun and maximize its effect, and will improvise a plastic cover at some point in the next week or two as the nights get colder. If I can keep fruit on the vines for a week or two into October, I'll be very happy indeed. Added another batch of greens to the freezer last night, bringing me up to a cumulative 6.5 kg or so, and will be back today for kale (as explained above, I pick kale and the chard/beet tops on alternate days). My late plantings of peas, kale and broccoli raab are coming along nicely, and the late-planted pattypans are beginning to fruit prolifically. It also looks increasingly like I'll manage to snag a few cukes from my late planting, after the original batch were demolished by slugs. I'll probably harvest my beets this coming week or two, to free up a bed for my garlic to go into. All in all, things are going as well as I have any right to expect after such a challenging spring.

I visit the Northern Bushcraft site frequently, but hadn't looked at the Ontario one. I've only just started to up my foraging game over the past year or two, so this still rather new to me. As for the Purdue link, its focus on famine plants probably excludes things that are more widely used. And yeah, the interface is definitely academic...

Yeah. I considered it a happy bit of serendipity, and filed it under "really cool stuff I find while legitimately working." This is, sadly, a much smaller file than the one called "really cool stuff I find while I'm allegedly working but really procrastinating for all I'm worth."

It turns out that Purdue University maintains a database of "famine foods," things that weren't/aren't ordinarily harvested or cultivated but could serve as survival foods in time of need. https://www.purdue.edu/hla/sites/famine-foods/

Just a thought, but you could probably find a local potter/artisan to make a custom one for you (to fit a knife of your choosing). That's how I eventually got the salt pig I'd wanted.

Similarly I had a customer laugh over the label on a bucket of meat-free mincemeat filling. She assumed it was because uninformed people thought that "just because mincemeat had "meat" in the name, people worried that their holiday mince tarts/pies would, in fact, contain meat!" She was very entertained over this...until I gently explained to her that mincemeat ordinarily does (or at least, traditionally did) contain meat, and showed her a few recipes. She was appalled. Here in New Brunswick, fwiw, old-timers generally use the neck from their season's deer (or a neighbour's) to make their mincemeat.

Straw and autumn leaves are two common choices for the mulch component. For the rest, you'd want soil or compost from a reputable supplier (nobody wants a reputation for selling you weed seeds). You can sometimes get a good price on the bagged, sterilized topsoil from hardware/department stores at the tail end of the season (ie, now) which is okay if you're working with a small plot.

As an aside, if you have a few nice big dandelion crowns growing in your lawn or garden, cover them with a bit of cardboard and weigh it down with rocks or what have you. In the spring, once everything has been growing for a few weeks, lift the cardboard and harvest the blanched dandelions. They'll be very mild and juicy, with a lettuce-like crunch. Totally different from the ones you harvest conventionally.

That's actually what I plan to do with my plot when I put it to bed this autumn (obviously, I'll need to work around my garlic which will overwinter in one of the beds). It's a technique that's been around for a long time; Ruth Stout was promoting it back when I was still in diapers. It has been rediscovered and remarketed as "lasagna gardening," as you doubtless know. It works well, and buys you a year of next to no weeds (after the first year, seeds will blow in and be dropped by birds, etc). If you're aggressive in mulching around your "intentional" plants, you can keep 'em down pretty well even after they start. I'll be using straw and couple of trailer-loads of (purchased) compost and topsoil, since I don't have a place to compost for myself. I have access to horse manure from a nearby harness-racing track, but that'll need a bit of time to mature before I can use it. It's a "next year" project for out at the country place, where they *do* have space, but once I've established two working piles I'll have one each year that's aged and ready to use. You can start in spring if that's the way things work out, but autumn is better because your mulch/compost and the cardboard will have a bit of time to soften up. Depending how much soil/compost you've added on top, you might not even need to cut openings. Deeply-rooted plants will just grow right through. If you put it down in spring, then yeah, definitely cut an opening for each plant.

I'm on the other tack...after a long summer's drudgery (trying to catch up from a poor first quarter), I'm just now beginning to restock against the resurgence we'll likely see when autumn and winter roll around.

My ex's family on both sides were Mennonites who'd been in Russia for the previous couple of centuries. Catherine had brought in the Mennonites, mostly from Germany, as a sneaky way to speed the pace of agricultural reform. She had tried and failed to get the peasants to adopt more modern farming techniques, but trying to coerce them was not working well. So instead she brought in foreign farmers who already used the latest techniques. It was a win-win...she got an immediate boost in productivity from the new arrivals, and the stubborn mouzhiks got to see first-hand what an impact updated methods could bring. I don't care how stubborn you are, no farmer worth his salt can watch a neighbour take a bigger crop off the same land for more than a few years without following suit. Of course they mostly remained in their own German-speaking enclaves, and their German-speaking churches, which made them an easy target after both World Wars (and especially the Revolution). Like the Jews who shared many of the same stretches of countryside (mostly in modern-day Ukraine and Belarus) a large percentage were slaughtered or driven out in the course of that turbulent 30 years beginning with the Revolution. A few hardy souls, including one branch of my ex's family, persisted. She has distant cousins in Siberia to this day, though most of the survivors emigrated to Germany when that became an option in the 90s.

Oh, I know. My ex's (maternal) family were farmers, and I've known many over the years. My father also homesteaded during my teen years, so I have an admittedly modest first-hand taste of it. I'm sure you've heard the popular joke about the farmer who won millions in the lottery: TV Reporter: What do you plan to do with all that money? Farmer: (scratches head) I dunno....keep farming till it's gone, I guess...