chefpeon

If it were an Emergency!/Adam-12 episode made today, the belly shape they would have given him would have been probably a pain como or a baguette, complete with the slashes in the top of the loaf....... Back then, artisanal bread was Wonder Bread.............

Oooooh.....brilliant BriP.Guy!

Man, that's a tough question. I'm fairly sure that transfer sheets won't release onto sugar pieces, because the transfer sheets are cocoa butter designs, and you need cocoa butter (chocolate) to stick to cocoa butter. I hope some other pro on here knows if there's a way to get patterns or artwork onto a sugar piece?

Well I suppose the artisan bread maker will tell you that you can enjoy the crispiness of a properly baked loaf better when it's cool, and I do know that when you eat something that's fairly warm, you do miss out on subtle flavor nuances. I'm one of those people that likes to let my food cool down to nearly room temp before I eat it......it truly tastes better that way. Except bread of course. I have been known to tear into a loaf like a caveman when it's hot out of the oven!

That bottle of gorilla glue had nothing to do with affixing the mosaic to the center cake I hope....

I've never experienced or known of the phenomenon of hot bread bellyaches. And I've eaten a lot of hot bread in my day. However........ I do know that raw bread dough gives you a heck of a tummy ache. Think of all that yeast workin' in your stomach. Yeah baby. Uh, not that I've actually eaten raw bread dough.

The weekend has already approached and you're probably well into it. Let us know what you did. First I will say, there's nothing wrong with canned pineapple. In fact I prefer it in most instances when I am baking. Not EVERYTHING that comes out of a can means it's awful. Take pumpkin puree for instance. If you bake a pie with the canned stuff and compare it to a pie made with fresh drained puree you've made yourself, bet ya can't tell the difference. But that's ANOTHER thread. In regard to topping coconut dacquoise with rum caramelized pineapple, depending on how juicy the pineapple is once you're done caramelizing it, it can turn the dacquoise into dacqsquoosh if you know what I mean. I would top the dacquoise with some sort of moisture barrier before I put the caramel pineapple on top. Like perhaps a thin layer of rum buttercream, or just dipping the tops of the dacquoise rounds in white chocolate. Then I think you'd be good to go.

It's my signature dessert. What else do you expect from an anal retentive pastry chef?

I can't even bring myself to photograph food here in America, and I've really wanted to in some cases. Ok, digital camera companies.....listen up! I don't think it's beyond today's technology to make a decent miniature digital cam and disguise it as a fork! Right? Or a spoon, or a salt shaker, or hey, what about a credit card? Inapperçu, non?

Heck, I don't even mess with that. If I have leftover batter, I can save it to make a marble cake later (but not too much later), or I always bake off cupcakes. It's great to have a stash of well wrapped frozen cupcakes around when someone shows up and wants you to pull something out of your butt on short notice.

Ditto that. No sense making something more complicated than it needs to be. I've never found a batter or dough that wouldn't work just because I used a pan that wasn't called for in the recipe.

Actually, what I would do rather than search for actual haunted gingerbread house patterns, is to look at an illustration of a haunted house, and then just go about recreating that illustration in gingerbread and candy.

Is there much of difference between Succes, Japonaise and Dacquoise other than the type of nuts that are used? Japonaise is typically made with ground almonds, but you can substitute any other ground nut if you want. If I used ground hazelnuts in Japonaise, would that make it a Succes? Or a Dacquoise? Or would it just be Hazelnut Japonaise? Does Succes merely refer to the final dessert that you end up with when you use nut-meringue layers? Basically it seems to me that Succes, Japonaise, and Dacquoise are all essentially the same thing, unless someone can enlighten me otherwise.

Would those cases even pass the health dept. inspection here? I would think not, since I know that unwrapped food cannot be displayed without some sort of covering, such as a sneeze guard or whatever. I think cases like that look really cool, but have too many drawbacks. Too much temptation for customers to touch things, and you know they will. No protection from dust particles or bugs. And I would imagine they are not the most efficient at cooling and would draw more energy, but that's just a guess. If that type of case is supposed to be self serve, then there's another can of worms I'd rather not deal with.

As they say, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder".

Not to disparage the quenelle, but personally, I've never found it to be very attractive. I think "football blobby thing" describes it quite accurately. I've never really understood what the big deal is. I like to do anything BUT that shape.

Speaking as a professional I will respond to the "tips" to which you refer: Professionals just bake the cake as a whole and split it with a serrated knife into as many layers as desired. The wax paper trick is something an inexperienced home baker might try. Professionals don't have stale cakes, because they wrap them well and freeze them from the get-go. Huh? Professionals use buttermilk when they need "sour milk". Whether it's soured slowly or quickly, I'm fairly sure would be an extremely slight discernible difference in a baked good. Bad and misleading information! Although the above may be "substitutions", the baker should be aware that the said substitutions affect the final texture and overall outcome of the baked good. Mostly for the worse, because the use of the original ingredient is essential to the palatability of the final product. It's no wonder home bakers can be easily discouraged with all that misinformation out there. There are some good baking tips, yes, but when one is offering up a baking tip, they need to be careful it is presented in the right context.

How quickly I forget. Your world and my world are so different. I suppose being in one of the biggest foodie cities in the USA, your competition is fierce. Over here, I literally have no competition, so yeah, I get to have my way pretty easily. Sometimes in my small town isolation, my naivete becomes magnified.....

I'm a strict "parent" and I practice tough love with my clients. Orders must be in by a certain time or I can't accommodate...no exceptions. However, I give them every chance in the world. If a client has not ordered and the deadline is say, 5 minutes away, my favorite phrase to use on the phone is, "I'll be glad to wait while you put your order together for me." Works every time. I see it like this. I am other vendors client too. I HAVE to be organized...it's the nature of my job as a PC. I know that if I don't have my orders in to my vendors by a certain time, I won't get my product. If I don't get my product, I can't do my job...it's that simple. I know they have deadlines for a reason, just as I do, and I totally respect that. Here's something to think about too.....I don't think that holding people to deadlines is such a crime as long as you do it nicely. If they are so unorganized that they can't place an order that they obviously need, then they have a much bigger problem. I'm not about to make a pain-in-the-ass client a bigger pain-in-the-ass by enabling their organizational problems by accommodating late orders....it doesn't do anyone any favors, that's for sure. Say one of your clients misses a deadline, and they call after you've closed for the day, and leave their order on your answering machine. (yes, it's happened to me). Do I believe you should try to fill that order? Hell no. Believe me, it only takes one time for a client not to get their order, and they'll never make that mistake again. If you do accommodate, what reason do they have in the future to get their order in on time? They figure if you'll do it once to cover their unorganized butts, you'll do it again. So what if they get all upset and decide to pull their business from you? Are they actually going to find another vendor who will put up with their crap for long? Will that other vendor find better products than you make? I bet not. If you make a good product, I think that having fears of losing business because you actually hold people to deadlines are unfounded.

Put some "wings" on chocolate truffles and you have "quidditch balls". Wings could be made out of chocolate or you could use sliced almonds to simulate wings also.

Ask schneich. Apparently he uses the product in pastry cream.

Well, I'll say that I freeze pastry cream in Napoleons all the time, and when thawed everything is AOK.

Unless your fondant is like 3 inches thick or something, you don't have to do any "modifications". A layer of fondant on a cake is no heavier than a layer of icing, and in some cases it's actually lighter.

OA isn't really about diet plans or ways to eat. It's more about empowering yourself to overcome an addiction to overeating. It closely follows the same 12 step plan as Alcoholics Anonymous. OA doesn't endorse any kind of diet. Individuals personally deduce which foods trigger overeating, then try to eliminate those "triggers" from their menu so they can get their eating in control. Everyone has different "food triggers", hence the variation in what people decide what they can and can't eat.

This is the first time I've ever experienced a bad taste from baking powder, for sure. I know it's from the sodium aluminum sulfate in the baking powder I use, but I also suspect the brand is to blame too. It's from one of my suppliers....Sysco, and I've never used Sysco brand until now. I also noticed the ingredients on the label list a lot more than just sodium aluminum sulfate in there....there's a lot of other crap too. I have a feeling that if I switch to another brand of baking powder (like Clabber Girl) I probably won't have any more problems either.