devlin

I'd be inclined to ask the couple about doing anything theme-oriented. Um.... Buddhas and the like for a Buddhist wedding? For me? It's no different from knowing a couple is Christian and marrying in a church, and so ask yourself if you'd make a Jesus cake.... I'm thinking probably not.

Thanks y'all. I'll go to my RLB and use frozen to practice a batch.

you can get a much brighter flavor from using either fresh (in season) or frozen berries. if you run them through a food mill or chinois you can get a seedless puree. or you can actually just buy the frozen puree which is seedless and use that (the frozen purees usually contain about 5-10% sugar). of course, labor is expensive and so are the purees, but if you're buying with a wholesale account for your business you might get a good deal on the purees. ← Those are great suggestions. And a perfect reason to buy a chinois, which I've been hankering after for way too long now. Thanks.

I could use frozen raspberries, but I was going for a seedless thing, so really wanted to use seedless preserves. I considered the sugar factor, and so took it from there. The flavor was good (a mousse), but I think I should probably have added a little more gelatin. So, yeah, it worked fairly well.

but without having to use the actual berry.... Can either a mousse or a bavarian incorporate seedless raspberry preserves without too much trouble? Or is there a reason the actual fruit is invariably called for in a mousse or a bavarian?

Dorie, if you're here, I've just started working with this fabulous book, just made the perfect party cake (wonderful!), although not the frosting as yet. But a question, does the frosting for this cake pipe well?

Quick question.... I'm wondering why you'd wonder whether there was even a tiny bit of commercial yeast in the loaf. Is there something about the look of it that suggests it might have any commercial yeast in it? Just curious about the question.

A note about malt powder.... Malt powder comes in two forms, diastatic and non-diastatic. The diastatic is strictly a sweetener, used in breads primarily (I believe) to enhance the caramelization of the crust, whereas the non-diastatic malt develops enzymes which digest starches into sugars and acts as a dough conditioner, contributing a somewhat sweet flavor and acts on the yeast to promote somewhat higher rises. Barley malt syrup acts in the same way as the the non-diastatic malt powder.

I've never heard of rolled buttercream either. Could it substitute for fondant?

No offense, but it's exactly that sort of comment that turns these conversations into mine fields and makes folks like me reluctant to even bother engaging in them. ← I meant it to be tongue in cheek - I really can't imagine anyone getting genuinely worked up over something like that. ← And yet, the thread referenced above would suggest otherwise. But thanks for the clarification.

Uhoh.... I'm sure they'll love them. But that's a good distinction too. It's one thing to offer that sort of thing to kids, who will probably delight in everything about them, including the staying power of the glitter, and a whole nother ballgame with adults.... Or anyway, I think so.... I could be wrong. But for a little girl's birthday party? I'm thinking raging success.

No offense, but it's exactly that sort of comment that turns these conversations into mine fields and makes folks like me reluctant to even bother engaging in them.

Honestly?... It's a thing that looks particularly unappealing in a food/dessert. I wouldn't feel compelled to put it in my mouth, or even to pick it up, especially knowing how glitter tends to hang around here and there which is pretty irritating.

I tried the no-knead-only-fold method this evening and the boule is in the fridge for the night... I'll post the results tomorrow. I'm kind of hoping it won't work, because the kneading is actually one of my favourite parts. ← I get that. For me, when I'm looking at three 20 pound buckets of dough to work in rapid succession, kneading loses its charm.

There's a recent discussion in the kitchen consumer forum about these: http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=14505&st=330 And to see them in action, links to youtube demos: Beater Blade

Just to second Annie, above. I didn't see any vitriol here, and although I suspect I'm one of the folks here the vitriol message was intended to target, no, no vitriol at all. Frustration, yes. Exasperation, finally, for sure. And also actual sort of affrontedness on the behalf of someone else regarding the little business about happiness versus burnt outedness that went on in one of those messages that felt fairly dismissive and frankly a little rude. So yeah, no, not entirely respectful exchange from your end of the conversation at all. If you want advice, then you have to take it as it comes, it seems to me. When I first started getting my business together in a sort of preliminary way, and even before, my husband used to come home from work, after I'd been working on my feet for hours, having stoked and tended the wood-fired oven all day, having mixed several massive and heavy buckets of dough (and in the beginning by hand), having worked it during the day, having shaped the 60 loaves, set them to rise and whilst waiting to clean the oven to actually bake them off, and he'd invariably walk into the bakery with a great big smile, and say, in all seriousness, "Hey! Are ya havin' FUN???" And each time, I could cheerfully have shot him. Because here's the way it works for me.... I never intended to be a bread baker. And right now I'm still in the process of tearing down and rebuilding my wood-fired oven because the guy who built it was a moron, and then I'm having to totally reconfigure what sort of business I want because realistically there really is no way to make much money at all making artisan breads and I know I have to do something in addition to the breads, and so, just as I've done in the past, I am working hard to learn something else as well, in this case, wedding cakes. I started out as a college English teacher. And then when my husband started being transferred all over hell and creation for his job, I decided (we decided together) that that was the better plan because he could make way more money than I could. But that meant I had to figure out what to do with my life all over again. And while I was in the process of doing that, I started to cook and to bake. And for some damned reason I still don't understand, bread turned into... I don't know how to describe it... a challenge, a thing I wanted to learn how to do better than anybody else... or no, scratch that, because the competitive thing only comes as a sort of afterthought, or in some moment of insecurity in the face of a thing you think MIGHT be better than yours,.. but so anyway, what I really wanted more than anything else was to make the sort of bread I dreamed of eating but couldn't find anywhere. And so I worked at it. I worked really hard at it. And I read everything I could get my hands on, and I baked bread til the cows came home. And then I began to wonder whether I might make a business out of it. And so I started to plan. Part of that plan was to convince my husband that it might be a viable thing to do. And that wasn't easy. Especially not in the beginning when the bread I made was better than a lot of bread, but not great. And even when he began to note that he thought the stuff was great, I was absolutely sure it wasn't. For awhile he thought I was just being insecure about my abilities. It took a long time to convince him it didn't have anything to do about insecurity. It had everything to do with knowing when a thing is right and when it's not. So, the questions.... Should I get a deck oven,... should I rent somebody else's space,... should I build my own oven and my own space,... who'd buy it,... or, where could I sell it.... And for how much? Stuff like that. I made bread and more bread and I took notes every inch of the way and I gave the stuff away and worked and dreamed bread. I still don't know why I was doing it. I can't even call it a passion. It's just something I felt overwhelmingly compelled to do. Was it FUN? No. I can honestly say hardly any of it was fun. It was hard. It was maddening. It was frustrating. It was embarrassing a lot of the time. It was all so totally elusive and scary. And I felt like a total fuckup and doofus most of the time. And it was work. And so every time my husband would walk in the door and say, "Hey! Ya having FUN?" Well I wanted to kill him. Sure, there were a lot of moments of tremendous gratification and satisfaction, and in small moments I had fun. Overall, though, it was scary because I didn't know why I was doing it and it was all overwhelming. And I didn't have anybody to teach me whether I was doing anything right. I was doing it all strictly by the seat of my pants. And it wasn't until I started making consistently very fine breads that my husband began to see what I was on about. That was, what,... four/five years into it, from the beginning of my experimenting. And now he's one of my biggest fans. He's finally stopped asking me whether I'm having fun because he finally gets it. And he's stayed up plenty nights with me as I've finished off the baking, sometimes til midnight and beyond, when he has his own job to get up to in the morning, because he is that dedicated to my thing now. And I think he finally gets that it's not "fun." But the whole of it, the thing itself, and especially the final product, THAT's fun. My clients are frankly absolutely sure that my bread is the best bread in the world, and these are folks who've travelled and eaten a lot of bread. And a whole lot of my clients are my husband's Italian colleagues who appreciate a good bread. What'm I saying? There are many times I wonder whether what I'm doing is worth it. There have been a few times I've wondered whether I should even bother rebuilding my oven. But then I think it would be like losing a limb. And it's not that I think that limb is a whole lot of fun, but it's for sure a thing I'm attached to and that feels pretty crucial to the way I live. Sigh.... What to say from here.... We all approach these things in our own way. I work best alone. I don't know that I would be a good fit in somebody else's business or kitchen. So there's that. I'm a total tight-ass perfectionist. And even as I wish I had someone standing in front of me telling me what to do and how to do it, if it's not possible, then I get on with it myself. And so here's some advice abooja, which is what you came here for.... From everything you've said, it appears as if you don't actually see yourself as a professional baker, as you suggested you wanted to be in your opening message. I don't know by now whether that's true or not. Only you can know that. If it's true, then bake. Bake what you love or feel compelled to bake. And then you're sort of on your own. Only you can know what you want to bake, and only you can figure out how to sell it and where. If you don't want to bake but want to be involved somehow in the food industry, then you have to figure out for yourself what that means. Do you only want a part-time job working a pastry counter in a bakery? Will it give you the money you want? Will it give you the satisfaction you want? Or maybe you should consider buying a franchise of some sort. One of the bread franchises. Something like that. The glaringly obvious thing that several of us have noted, though, is that even as you were asking for advice, it didn't seem to any of us that you actually had any clear notion of what you really want to do. And as you began to note that perhaps it would be enough to "dabble" in baking, well it was sort of hard to know how to advise you. When all the possible options offered to you were met with your assurances that, well, THAT wouldn't work, then forgive us, but surely it doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand that your attitude might be off-putting at best. There really isn't any room in the professional world of bakers for "dabblers." Dabbling really is for home baking. And that's fine. I dabble too. I also know for a fact that many professional people or artists or what have you don't think of their work as fun, and many of them/us don't think of ourselves as being happy happy happy, particularly. We do what we do because it's what we do and couldn't imagine doing something else. Or wouldn't want to. Most of us feel burnt out at some point or another. That's not a failing. That's just human nature. It happens. It doesn't mean we're not dedicated to what we do. It means we're human. So, best of luck to you. I hope you can figure it all out. [edited for a little clarity hither and yon]

To clarify regarding the friend who'd breastfeed at table with the blanket over her own head.... And now I'm wondering whether I'm clarifying anything.... Anyway, the blanket was HUGE and would cover not only her but the baby as well. It was like nursing under a chador. I seem to recall she did have a breast pump, or I think she did, although this would have been around the time they were only gaining currency with new moms. But yeah, that would have worked out better all around. Wow. Brings back the memories.

Golly, shades of Rahm Emanuel. [written before I noticed others saying exactly the same thing.... but good grief, what weird, and sort of scary dining companions....]

While I definitely still need a job, I'm now not so convinced that it needs to be in a bakery. There are many ways to skin a cat. I most definitely have no desire to be a pastry chef. My pre-thread fantasy never had anyone ever calling me that, nor did it involve large kitchens of the hotel and restaurant variety. I envisioned a small, local M&P (to use the lingo) where I'd be the grunt for a little while, perhaps work the counter, and eventually get to dabble in actual baking. I'm now fairly certain that, while this is a plausible scenario, I would have to accept it as a end unto itself, not necessarily a means to anything greater. I'm still not completely certain, but I don't think this, in and of itself, would satisfy me, monetarily or otherwise. As others have suggested, this is anything but "a plausible scenario." And it also falls in line with the discussions about why taking on apprentices and people with no experience,... in other words, dabblers... can be a totally losing proposition for serious business people trying to run a business. Forgive me if I sound harsh here, but nearly everything I read from you here sounds way too drifty, despite the patina of "goals" and thinking everything through and looking at all your options. Words.... Words and more words. As someone noted above, even though plenty of folks here with real experience in the business have offered help and wisdom, you are nearly completely dismissive while at the same time appearing to solicit advice. First you say you envision working your way up in some way, being "the grunt" somewhere, because you're just that serious about getting into baking. But now you've realized that wouldn't satisfy you "monetarily or otherwise." So okay, check.... One down.... Interestingly, two of the last few posters have presented two glaringly opposite experiences. One gal went to pastry school, worked her butt off for years in professional kitchens and has the scars to prove it. The other gal did not go to pastry school (at least, not long-term), worked her butt off in her own home and rented kitchens, got some notoriety on the farmer's market circuit, and now owns her own business. One proclaims to be burned out. The other appears to be quite happy. Please forgive the armchair analysis, but if I had to choose Door A or Door B, it wouldn't take even a millisecond of thought. I'm unclear, again, what your armchair analysis is.... You compare two people, one who "appears to be quite happy" and one who "proclaims to be burned out," and from that you have decided to choose which? The person who is "quite happy," presumably. Well sure. It doesn't take ten years of psychoanalysis to decide that if one had to choose between being burned out or being quite happy that one would choose to be quite happy. I'm at a loss, though, to figure out what exactly you learned from that example. But here, you seem to clarify that a little with this.... I know things aren't as simple as all that. One has to be extremely talented, connected (not in the mafioso sense, though I suspect that would help!), fortuitous, hard working, outgoing, etc, etc for it all to come together, and in all likelihood, I still might not even own a profitable business at the end of the day. But by DOING WHAT? So far, I haven't seen anything that's given me a concrete example of exactly what you would be doing. Truly. You talk a lot while saying very little concretely. But if I adjusted my goals and were willing to accept just supplemental income from baking, that might be doable. If I kept at it and got really lucky, or fell into some money, it could become more than that one day. I could live with that. Boy, what I wouldn't give for "falling into some money" or even just getting lucky, which I guess is the same thing, isn't it. But I have to start somewhere, and this is the troubling aspect, as I see it. Frankly, after reams of writing, you're getting to the crux of the issue.... Yes, you DO have to start somewhere. And clearly that IS the troubling aspect of it for you. So much so that you talk yourself out of starting at all. So much so that whenever anybody offers a response other than a generic "you can do it if you want to do it," which is essentially a response that falls into the category of success-by-affirmation, you put up road blocks and sigh and suggest that well THIS is not what you had in mind. Which gets us back to the beginning. Because after going round and round, it's still not clear what you do have in mind. Although the more you write, the more it seems to be "I want to own a place where I can run the cash register and dabble in the baking now and again but only if I can make money at it." Until now, I saw things as very black and white. Either I got another dreaded procurement job, sitting in a cubicle, or I worked my way up the ladder, for a pittance, as a baker. I could never see myself putting in my 9-5 during the week, then walking my cakes door to door on the weekends, hoping someone would buy them. It was always just the one job or the other. It was a horrible decision to have to make. Well, think of the starving children in Afghanistan.... I'm sorry, that sounds really sarcastic, and I guess it is, but the more I read, it's the thing that keeps coming to mind. When my husband wondered whether or not setting up a kiosk in the mall (in lieu of or in addition to) a farmer's market presence would be possible, I bemoaned the fact that starting such a business would be extremely difficult, at best, while also theoretically beginning a new 9-5 job. (These days, they're actually 8-5.) 8-5? It sounds as if you believe those are extreme hours to work. Do I really have to spell out anything beyond that? My husband has a "9-5" job that is more like an 8-8 and even more job. My baking days are anywhere from 10-15 hour days. I'm assuming that in your mind your apprenticeship would only fall within the parameters of what you consider acceptable hours.... I have no idea if the kiosk idea is even viable, but the point is, I'm now thinking that a more local job with somewhat more flexible hours, and one which does not require a grand new wardrobe, is more conducive to my starting a side business. Sure. Working the bakery counter at Wegman's, were I lucky enough to even get that close to the fun end of the store, could be my main income, and might give me the flexibility to do more baking. "Lucky".... and "might" -- just two words that sort of convey something here that you might want to think really hard about.... And I don't mean by that that you should hope that you will perhaps get lucky or that you "might" do something, but that these two words suggest a lot about the basic fallacy at work in your thinking. The job itself no longer has to involve baking or be a means to a baking job, but simply provide an income of some sort while I pursue other things. I confess I'm both totally flummoxed and more certain than ever about the sort of gestalt going on here. What "other things" are you going to be pursuing in your quest to be a professional baker while not being involved in baking or getting a baking job? What do you think? Am I being unrealistic? Unrealistic about WHAT? Here's what I am beginning to think, and again, apologies if it sounds hard, but I don't think you actually want to be a baker. I think you want to do something else, but I'm not quite sure what that might be. (sorry, edited for screwy html stuff)

Wow. Some really nice stuff there. Is it my imagination, or is sorta pricey?

As I used to say to my husband, who now says it to me, "There's a reason Roman slaves made the bread." And all those Masterpiece Theatre/Upstairs/Downstairs series? Oddly, it's never the nobility who're down slaving in the kitchen. I've never been able to figure that out.

Don't know whether these have been posted, but here're links to youtube demos of both the beater blade and the sideswipe blade. beater blade

I'm unsure as to what the extent of your experience in baking is. I know you say you've been baking all your life, but I'd been baking all my life before I started to consider it a possible profession, and I didn't really know anything to speak of. So there's that. But to address the issue of apprenticeships first. I understand where you're coming from. When I first started thinking about getting into baking, I really hankered after finding a place that might take me on as an apprentice. Like you, I didn't have money for culinary school and I didn't want to take on debt, and, like you, I had a husband who could afford to support us both no matter what I decided to do. My own interest was artisan bread baking, and so while I wondered how to get started, I got busy working on my own. That meant reading everything I could get my hands on about bread baking, and it also meant that I baked bread. A lot of bread. Essentially, I put myself through my own course on bread baking, and frankly by now I think I did a better job at it than if I'd gone to culinary school. We don't have apprenticeships in this country like the ones you're looking for. And though I lamented that for a long time, I also understand why people are reluctant to take on a baking apprentice. Or any apprentice really. Because people who come into a work place with next to no real knowledge about how a profession works and with no experience are pretty much dead weight. It means they have to be taken care of, "shown the ropes" at somebody else's expense. And when you think about that logically, it means somebody else is educating you for no pay. Essentially, you're asking for an education you don't have to pay for. On the face of it, it might not sound like a huge inconvenience to be allowed to come in and learn with no pay, but it is an inconvenience. It means somebody has to accommodate you in some way. Someone has to take time to even think about what to do with you. How to fit you in. How to show you how you can help. And that takes time. It takes time away from the actual work done by the people doing the work. And truly if you think about it, you're asking someone to give you something for nothing, instead of the other way around. If someone wants to train someone who'll stay for years, then that's one thing. But it rarely works out that way. Especially not in this country. So to ask how long you can expect to work for free as an apprentice before you know you're being taken advantage of, as you put it, is putting your cart way ahead of the horse here. Because in actuality, you're taking advantage of the person who would be allowing you to learn everything they have to teach you without you paying them for it. It's far more complicated than you realize. I get requests all the time from folks wanting to apprentice, and even though I was in their shoes once, I know now that to take on an apprentice in an environment like bread baking or in the restaurant industry would a major inconvenience and a drain on my time and my energy and my patience. Because they are essentially asking me to teach them for nothing. And so, ironically, they're asking me to work for them for no pay. As an aside, and truly no disrespect to anybody here, but no, don't walk into any small bakery or anywhere else, especially without a resume and not a lick of experience, and refer to your desire to work for free as "staging." I can only imagine the look on someone's face in response to that. If you want experience, you're probably going to have to take whatever anybody's willing to give you. So yes, I think that might mean taking a job at Wegman's or a supermarket bakery, and as gfron noted, it would be worth it for the experience you'd get in working with large equipment and working in a real-world work environment. I tried to get a job working in a donut shop in the small town we moved to for that reason alone and was disappointed when they never called me back. If you think that learning decorating skills will get you a foot in a door, then get the tapes out and start practicing. Just because a thing is pretty doesn't mean it doesn't taste good. Beautifully decorated cakes is a skill and an art. Just look up Wendy Kromer, Toba Garrett, Sylvia Weinstock. And although I don't know it for a fact, I suspect their cakes taste just fine as well. If your interest is artisan breads, then start baking. And start giving your bread away to anybody who'll eat it, your friends, your neighbors, your husband's co-workers. If you're lucky, you might have a product worth selling by the time the Farmer's markets open. If you don't need the money from a paying job, then why not consider a farmer's market? At least you'd have some income some portion of the year, and who knows what it might lead to.

You should be able to cook anything you'd normally cook in a gas or electric oven, but you have to learn how to control the temperature which takes some getting used to. Elevate your pans on bricks and grates, and play with using the door to control the heat.

Since I'm just starting to add wedding cakes to my business, I really don't want my very first cake to be blue. In fact I don't want any of my cakes to be blue. Period. I can't help it. It makes me crazy. Thankfully, I managed to talk the couple out of the blue cake.