K8memphis

Define 'does not look well'.

This was such a great idea. I tried it. I made some white chocolate ganache with Baileys. I had about 16 oz of white chocolate and I used two of the mini Bailey's Irish Cream which are 100 ml each. I started it in the microwave but moved it to a double boiler so I'd have more control. Then after it cooled I beat it. Made a perfect filling but would have made a great icing too. Khaki color. Tastes wonderful. I filled a butter pecan cake with it. Fyi that was just under a cup of Bailey's

Oh pastillage??!! Well this invaluable posting by Chefette will be worth it's weight in gold.

Hmm, I've never constructed anything as grand as a building with marzipan. I make lots of stuff with fondant that I dry out in my warming drawer. If you have any kind of food dehydrator or a warming drawer I'd suggest that you test some stuff and see how well it dries for you. That of course will be key. You want that stuff to dry like timber. I add cornstarch to my stuff to aid in drying but like I said I've never used marzipan for a construction project. It's expensive too. How big you making this puppy?

Lemme say something else. You are a successful individual. Above average and excellent in many ways. However, alas, the ability to maintain straight A's is not a marketable skill as you've just learned. Giving yourself away does not produce a merchandising coup. Key phrase, marketable skill. Washing dishes at Olive Garden, marketable skill. Tossing burgers into bags at McDonald's or taking drive up orders at Taco Bell, marketable skills. Dishwashing for a caterer on Friday and Saturday nights after the wedding receptions are over and the trucks make their runs will kick your ass and make you very worthy of that pay check. There might be room to work your way up there a little if you can handle that kind of down & dirty thankless God forsaken labor. Taco Bell and McD's and Chick FiLayLay's will open the door and invite you in and they will pay you. You get experience there, you're not begging. You're working. That's capitalism. You'd be on the bottom rung of the food chain, but that's at least one up from where you're at now.

Harry, Just go apply for a straight job. Dude, be worth something, get paid for your work. See which restaurant needs a busser or dishwasher. Don't even mention the school thing. My son started as busser in busy foodie bar type place. At this stage of the game, experience is experience. Obviously you need more than to be willing. "WHO TURNS DOWN FREE LABOR?" 5 outa 5 so far.

Here's an idea to maybe and hopefully relieve some of that anxiety and give you confidence about your endeavor. Collect some recipes and do some testing. I suggest that you cut your formulas in half* so you don't go nutso with cake over load. I could not agree more with Annie and Jeanne. One thing I do different though is that I splash my cakes before I freeze them because I like to just grab them out of the freezer and slap on the icing & decorate etc. It's so messy to assemble cake. I like to have all that messy part finished before I get to the final finishing. It helps my head to know that they are resting comfortably in the box waiting for the appointed time for extreme makeover. Pour moi, I find that butter used to make my cakes will not relax enough after freezing so the cake can seem dry (even though it's a mouth feel thing rather than truly being dry) but I did not test out recipes to find one that would endure the freeze/thaw thing well either. I already had recipes that work great so I use those. And of course, you know you will forfeit crucial time there right at the dawn of celebrating a new family being born to pursue your own passion of creating and delivering and setting up your artwork. Getting 'in the zone' under those circumstances will be quite intense. Plan plan plan. Have at least one back up plan for everything. *When I do stuff like this I divide by the number of eggs. If a recipe calls for four eggs I quarter the rest of the ingredients. If it calls for three eggs I divide the remaining ingredients by three. That's how I do it but I overthink everything too. Here's one for starters: "So this is a great formula that is very common in cake circles--yes it does involve 'pre-measured' ingredients. You make yours any way you want. This makes a great wedding cake that will serve and stack great. One box Duncan Hines cake mix, one cup self-rising flour, one cup super-fine sugar, teaspoon vanilla extract, teaspoon of almond extract, cup of sour cream, three egg whites, one egg, one and a third cups of water and two tablespoons of oil." And I have a great recipe in recipe gullet for chocolate cake--I now put some gelatin in the filling. mmmm And the chocolate cake recipe on the Hershey's can is super too. To me the cake is a vehicle for the filling and icing. If your filling and icings are fresh and lovely you'll make magic cake. Not to mention all the love that goes in.

You don't have any salt in there do yah? Salt sometimes speckles up icing like that. Umm, did it perhaps crust a tiny bit then get mixed up again? That might do it. This usually happens in American buttercream icing huh. Funny that the blue color disappeared and the pink remained though. Pink is usually more fragile. Strange.

Just add a bit of cream to loosen the caramel up a tablesoon or two. But, Dude, I started a fire in my microwave doing that. I only use my stovetop for caramel melting.

Spread it on peanut butter cookies.

Ok in the highly unscientific taste test, my husband said the cocoa butter one (Kroger store brand) was more buttery tasting but he liked the fake Nestle ones better due to the vanilla flavor. He didn't know which was which. I knew which was which and I loved the smells pouring out of the Nestle bag mmm. The store brand had no sucha great smell factor, not any smell, hmm. However the store brand beat out the Nestle's in the taste test for moi. I mean they are going into a cookie, so it would be fine either way. It's not Iron Chef or anything. So it's a draw. But next time I'll drive a little father and get something a little more chichi and test again. We now return you to your regularly scheduled mesage board.

What's Tues.Morning? ← Little late on this answer but it's a clearance type store. So my reason to post is to mention an interesting development. I discovered that my store brand ie Kroger white chocolate chips were indeed made with cocoa butter and the Nestle brand there that stated it was Premium was made with palm oil business & lecithin etc. I went to that store because I thought they had at least some Ghiradelli's but no, just the Nestle and store brand. But doesn't that just blow you away? That the store brand has cocoa butter? Now for a taste test...

I'm not positive about the exact ones are that you are referencing. I just want to toss this out there. You can often use muffin wrappers for a zillion uses by making new folds (for example like North South East West) on the pleated part Thus increasing the area on the bottom of the wrapper. And/or cutting off part of the top of the muffin wrapper if it is too tall for the serving. Cut the whole stack at once or whatever may be half a stack at a time. I mean you can place square brownies in round muffin wrappers and have it look great. I mean I have three different sizes of muffin papers on hand all the time. And they can be folded to serve heart shaped stuff and etc. So that's what I do for individual servings where I want folks to self serve without ooey gooey slicing issues and fingers all over everything. You can get the pleats to conform to your serving. Probably not what you meant but this works also.

Maybe if you said they were chocolate eggs?

I mean how long do you want to keep them? Two weeks is a long time isn't it? I had some stellar chocolates that I watched Ewald Notter make in person and the loss of flavor just until the next day was astonishing. At two days of age they were not much like the fresh made chocolates, tremendous loss of flavor. And they were still real good just so much difference. I'm by no means a chocolate guru. Just some random chocolate thoughts. So maybe you are thinking of boxed chocolates sitting on a store shelf for a while? What about using a banana flavor oil like Lorann's. You can google Lorann Oil.

Gum paste is edible but not tasty like fondant can be tasty. It dries hard and crisp not wrinkly. No it doesn't shrivel. Flowers made from gum paste can be kept for years and years. There's perhaps a certain skill level to making nice gum paste flowers so if it was me I'd try to make some now in order to have enough time to perfect the process. Orchids are more advanced flowers to make. Or switch gears and go with fresh flowers. In my area, the only gum paste I would use is available at a specialty cake store. I would recommend not using Wilton brand gum paste or fondant. All the others that I've ever heard of are fine. The equivalent to magic strips is to just use wet toweling. I've used this for years and years. I use terry cloth towels folded in thirds and held with a t-pin. Just be sure you saturate the toweling completely. I've even used paper towels. But if you bake off nice thick layers you can just lop off the top even and forego the toweling altogether. Some people recommend baking at 325 degrees but I like the higher temps 350 to 375.

Oh I got a Keurig for my husband's office a couple Christmas' ago and they all love it. You can have such a wide variety of coffees and teas and hot chocolate too. I now have a commercial one in the bookstore that's plumbed in and I have over 25 varieties of coffee and tea--people love it. It doesn't come out watery or anything, it brews really well. I think there's a special way to prime the pipes in the Keurig. There was a bit of sputter at first, but not now and it brews great. It's perfect for our needs.

OK, now I understand where you are coming from. I was not aware of this mandatory "Living Wage," I was just saying living wage as in a wage someone could live on without assistance. Here, at least, it's below $14/hour. Maybe it's higher elsewhere. I agree, it doesn't seem fair for a dishwasher to be paid the same as a degreed cook. I do think the bottom level should be raised, though. Yeah, it might raise prices but again, we are paying one way or another. The way it is now many of the costs are hidden. ← The living wage requirement in Memphis is $10 with health insurance, $12 without. I'm thinkin' even in Memphis, ten bucks an hour isn't buying a lot of champagne and caviar... ← Then they toned it down. I've heard/debated Rebekah Jordan before and she was singing in a much higher key when I first heard of this about two years ago. I was shocked. Here's a quote from that same web page: "What is a Living Wage for Memphis?" finds that in a family of four where both parents work, each parent would need to earn at least $10.04 an hour to meet their basic living expenses. A single parent with two children would need to earn at least $15.64 an hour if working full-time. (University of Memphis, Center for Research on Women) Update on nephew--he was making just under $11 an hour with lotsa benies. He was washing the big ginormous pots at a military base somewhere in California, Camp Pendleton maybe. He is on disability now. He will get his own little studio with a kitchen in early March. This is all Living Wage stuff, government contracted work.

Darcie, what I'm saying is, how soon could any business afford to pay it's people $12 an hour plus full insurance benefits for unskilled labor as in dishwashing? The Living Wage movement which has been referenced in this thread is after big money they are calling "Living Wage". Not just what you and I would randomly think living wage is. Ok what I'm saying is that there are services already in place to help people like me when my baby was sick back then (one time I went 20 years ago), like my nephew because he needs help (the irony is that he makes too much to get government assistance to get him out of the group home--go figure). So as to new high taxes agh no the tax money is there and being used. The services are there. Could it be better for sure but we do help people already. Decent wage is fine great. Love decent wage. Living Wage literally means something that we might not all be aware of. On the surface of course it sounds great. However in truth which is why I do not support it it means pay unskilled laborers as much (or more) than a degreed pastry chef in most areas. As much as a degreed line cook. $12 to $14 an hour is what Living Wage gets in Memphis TN. It's not a negotiable number. It's fixed. That's awful high to me. You know if you can afford to pay your employees that much. More power to you if you can. But for lots of businesses that's too high. Drives up prices and the middle class people with skills who make that much money an hour just got sucker punched. We already all pay into the services that are currently available. Wonder what the prices would be like at Target if all the workers made $14 an hour?

Ok maybe this is where the living wage rubber hits the road. It's twelve bucks an hour with full insurance benefits ladies and gentlemen. That's why I sucked alll the air out of the room when I first heard about it. Then sucked all the air out again. Then it's fourteen an hour if no insurance package. I'm with y'all I think the wages you all have listed would be fine. But uh ugh, it's a lotta money for living wage. And that's why I am not for it, ie Living Wage. Of course I'm for everyone having enough and being comfortable. But how many more years will you have to work to provide that, Darcie B?? Well all I can tell yah about the health department and emergency room stuff is I sure as shooting high tailed myself down there with my baby, Chef-boy 20+ years ago, when he had an ear infection and needed some meds. I don't know how obscene, deplorable, morally bankrupt and etc that is to you. I was dang happy about it.

I think this is really nice and extremely commendable. Obviously can be back breaking for small businesses. I paid better than minimum wage when I had a business and I had some cool perks. However this is not good enough for Living Wage by Memphis standards and we do not have a high cost of living by any means either. It's $14 or $15 an hour without insurance and I think it's $12 an hour with insurance, not a subsidy either. What's wrong with the safe guards we have in place ie food stamps and rent subsidies like my nephew tried to get but made too much money? He still has a nice place to live. He's not on the street. Nobody needs to feel bad for him or his employers. Feel very good. Hey you can get primary care at (some) county health departments and some emergency rooms. Not so many heart transplants but you can get some primary care. Methinks most living wage proponents never met a payroll in their lives. I could be wrong but I have yet to meet one.

What kind of flowers are you going to make? There are some high humidity types of buttercream--sometimes flour or cornstarch is added to American type buttercream. But I just do a very careful delivery and avoid the heat as much as possible. I use Swiss Meringue Buttercream.

Here is where I said that I think it is ill-advised to publish it on the menu. I don't choose my restaurants by what's happening in their Human Relation Departments. I'm ok with restaurants doing whatever they will for their employees. I do not view health benefits as a right. It's real real nice to have. But skilled workers should be able to advance in their carreers and find work with pay and benefits commensurate with abilities. Dave, the Living Wage movement which I think you are referencing is most often tied to government contracted jobs that expire when the contract does. Yes I think there are jobs that do not warrant living wage. Shoot me. J-o-b-s not p-e-o-p-l-e. The good news is in America we can rise above our circumstances if we are not limited by our government's heavy hand. For example, Worker X is a dishwasher with health benefits and nice wages and he wants to advance into food prep. Another smaller restaurant might want to hire him so he can get the training he wants there to advance himself but he's gotta take a cut in pay and no benies either. Why should they risk training him and investing in him if he's just gonna turn around and fly off for better money somewhere else. Going backwards and forwards at the same time is tricky. Being under qualified and over paid locks him in where he's at. No? Like I said, the San Fransisco places need to qualify their workers if they are to invest more in them. Train the dishwashers to prep food. These are good ideas.

Rob is the best at directing us to our rich library of resources. Umm, yeah there's lots you need to know. Most especially build it well. I mean if you are stacking it be sure you have adequate support that is set in place to hold the weight above it. Do the last things first while you have plenty of time. Go over every detail of delivery now. Once the cake is done and ready to go is the poorest time to figure out the boxing and placement in the car. You can make all your boards in advance. The boards the cake will sit on. What kind of bottom board will you use? Flamboyant or flat or what kind. Should be at least four inches larger than the bottom tier. Make your flowers a couple weeks in advance. But I mean cake sizes can vary with the guest list so I'd advise making things maybe a month in advance-ish.

So just to clarify - only people with real skills should be able to afford food and shelter. Dishwashers, cooks, and other people who you feel are in this "useless class of people" should live on public assistance or in group homes. ← I never said this, that anyone was in a useless class of people. Please read before responding and do not misquote me.