JeanneCake

There are red flags going up for me all over this story.... it took me nearly a year to open in my current space and the projections were that it would take 6 months max. I looked at it in March, the lease was negotiated and signed in September but in April I had hired an architect, in June we were looking at contractors and I had the final revision of plans ready for the Heath Dept to review in Sept. Then the architect screwed it up and it took another 3 months to get plans signed off on and then construction took another 10 weeks. I had no fewer than THREE pre-opening inspections from JUST the Health Department so the fact that this person just slapped a new sign on an old business makes me 1) annoyed, and 2) slightly jealous. Change in ownership (at least here in MA) REQUIRES a re-inspection of a food business. And seriously, if you are going to serve food to the public, you should take it seriously that you don't keep perishables or potentially hazardous foods at RM TEMP, exposed to whatever the wind blows in. Even if she's selling Twinkies for crying out loud, cover them up! I am letter-of-the-law strict about food safety, I cannot take a chance that someone will get a food-borne illness (I worked too hard to get where I am to lose it because someone is careless) and it irritates me to no end that others don't take it seriously. I'm a little cranky today is all....

Yeah, or let's send someone there to really check the place out. As far as I know in my state (MA) food has to be protected from the public by a guard. Once at a charity Taste of the Town event, the health inspector forced all the participating restaurants to attend a meeting (and she took attendance!) where she explicitly said food had to be protected by a guard. One of the restaurants was forced to rent a cafeteria sneeze guard from the local restaurant supply which completely ruined the appeal of their table. I ended up doing chocolate dipped marshmallows and put them under cake domes and then I never did the event again. But yeah, I wouldn't want to buy anything that was just lying around like that. Those sliced wood platters are not food safe either; it looks as if that cake is assembled right on it but the other (sliced) ones look like there was a board under it but still...... and what's up with the plates right next to the display - maybe it was from an event they did ? (because I am hoping this isn't the way they do things - walk up and we'll slice a cake for you or give you a cupcakes or....)

Happy birthday @Darienne, and Ed, and @kayb! Hope they were wonderful! Husband and child both prefer ice cream cakes because of the chocolate crunchies and if I could buy just those I think they would be more than thrilled Despite everything that I make, I don't have a particular favorite so I don't usually do a dessert on my birthday. However, this year, I asked our local fishmonger (who makes a really nice lobster dip but only for holidays, it's not available otherwise) if he would make some (he said he would) and that will be my birthday "cake" :)!

Her cakes have a fine crumb, yes; the Hellman's not so much (not bad, just different). The Hellman's cake will give you a light, moist crumb; not a fine texture, more of an open crumb. But the cake that your description called to my mind was the one in TCB where RLB talks about her mother's reaction to eating it - something along the lines of eating a chocolate bar. Both copies of the book are at work so I can't look it up to tell which cake it is.

@paulraphael do you have a copy of The Cake Bible? Or Heavenly Cakes? Both are by Rose Levy Beranbaum; the first one has several different types of chocolate cake recipes (all with butter, and the Hellman's recipe too) and the Heavenly Cakes book has a chocolate passion recipe which is excellent too. I don't have a particular favorite among them, they are all good. I also like the chocolate cake recipe in Colette Peter's (cake decorating) books but that one also calls for coffee which you may or may not choose to use.

@ChocoMom! This is the Wowie cake!!! My mom didn't do the 3 pools thing, she just mixed it up and poured it in a and we cut and ate it from the pan. I use this exact recipe now for our vegan chocolate cake; and if you sub out the cocoa with an equal measure of hazelnut flour (or almond flour) you can make a non-chocolate version and it's really good! We do the almond flour and add spices (cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg) for a vegan spice cake. Yum! My mom's receipe came from the Boston Globe's Confidential Chat page, which was what social media was in the days of handwritten letters (pre-dating even typewriters!). She cut out the recipes and then taped the ones that we liked into a steno pad. Before I left my parents' home I painstakingly copied EACH recipe so I could keep my own copies. I keep the steno pads in my bedside table, along with a few precious books I would not want to replace - A Woman of Independent Means, My Enemy the Queen, and a few Maeve Binchy books - so if the smoke alarms ever go off, I grab these and out the door we (kid, cat, husby) all go.....

My memories start with a Humpty Dumpty on a wall cake that I made in Home Ec class for my little sister's birthday. My mother says I was never all that interested in "real food" - only what was for dessert. In our house we didn't have cake for dessert much; but I remember my mother making what was called Wowie Cake and Texas Sheet Cake (both chocolate cakes, both wonderful). The Texas Sheet Cake was my favorite. It does not surprise anyone in my family that I am a pastry chef and own my own bakery now....

In my little town, food businesses are required to have publicly accessible restrooms. Because to get to mine you'd have to go through the food prep area, my health inspector made us get a variance to prohibit public use of our restroom. I'm not about to say no to someone who needs the bathroom. (We also aren't a restaurant or cafe, you come in, pick up your order and go.) My case is very different though; we don't have lots of people asking and the bathroom is easy to maintain. @Thanks for the Crepes I hope you are recovered now and doing much better!

After reading the article, I found myself wondering had I fallen and hit my head... what the hell did I just read? Broken moral compass indeed, I think she's lost any sense of morality. Exactly how do you think you're going to hire staff that will trust you after this move?

@Jim D. look at cake decorating tools and you'll find very tiny cutters

I think Rose Levy Beranbaum suggested boiling hazelnuts with baking soda, the water turns brown, you strain it and the skins come right off, then you can toast them. I did this once, it works but it's easier to get skinned hazelnuts from my distributor now so I don't bother any more....

Usually I buy from Pfeil and Holing, I look on the website, get an order together then call it in; they have so much stuff their inventory may not show accurately and sometimes you get disappointed that something is out of stock when you really needed it. It doesn't happen often enough to be a problem for me but I know it can happen so I plan ahead! Pfeil and Holing will be on skeleton crew the first two weeks in July so I always buy more than what I think I will need in June so I don't have to worry. Mostly I buy cake drums ,masonite, food color, disposable pastry bags, cupcake liners, edible ink cartridges and paper, some of the CalJava flowers, and bakery incidentals; I only go through Global Sugar Art when I need something I can't find anywhere else and I buy from CalJava when I can't get specific flowers from P&H//// Other places to buy from: Global Sugar Art (NY), Cal-Java Online (in CA so closer for you), I don't do a lot with Country Kitchens/Sweet Art so can't give any details there. You can spray the pillars and plates, once the spray paint dries it is "technically" non-toxic but not sure about food safe. If you buy an 8" drum (they don't come in 7" rounds, or you can cut a 7" circle from foam core and cover it) can cover it with gold paper. The gold drums you can buy are bright so that will work for your color scheme.... ask anything else that occurs to you! Happy to help :)!

you want something like this - the pillars push directly into the cake below and usually the pillars are something like 7" high or 9" high. So go with the 7 height, you'll push 3 or 4 inches of that into the 9" cake (which is all you really have because you have a cardboard in the middle of that tall 9" cake) and have another 3" for the gap between the 9 and the 6 rounds. Put the 6 on a cake drum if you can, then all you have to do is put a loop of tape on the plastic separator plate and put the cake on and you're done. I personally do not care for these particular clear pillars but it shows what it looks like: http://cakedeco.com/cgi-bin/webc.cgi/st_prod.html?p_prodid=7498&p_catid=266&page=3 The craft store might have something similar, you just put the pillars into the plastic plate and push the whole thing into the 9" round. I use the pre-cut coast tubes from P&F for my cake supports but use the wilton plastic tubes that you can cut to fit the height of your cake. I'm always shooting off the stubs of wooden dowels all over the kitchen so I don't use them anymore!

So let's talk about that 6" top tier for a second - how are you putting that on the 9" tier? I would build the 9" tier exactly as RWood suggests, and then I started to wonder what was going above that 9inch tier and how.... You also want to get a very sturdy cake drum (or thick masonite covered with paper) or even an acrylic disk. You don't want this cake to flex at all, and normally for 4+ tiered cakes, I double drum them and put ribbon around the side to hide the seam. Other people hot glue multiple boards together then cover with paper (not my first choice), or foamcore (buy it from The Dummy Place in Chelmsford MA) and even with the foam core I might double it....

Anyone have any info on this? Bake Magazine blurb

I would like to help troubleshoot for you. Can you share your recipe with us? What kind of egg whites are you using (from a carton, from shelled eggs, Eggology)? What kind/brand of butter? What speed on your KA is it when you add the hot sugar syrup (and what temp are you cooking the syrup to?) and what do you turn it down to after all the syrup is added? Is this the same speed when you add the butter? When I have failures with IMBC, it's usually when the syrup is added (the whites collapse). It normally goes to "soup" when some amount of butter is added, then it comes together (emulsifies). Sometimes if it hasn't emulsified by the time I've added most of the butter, I just stop and let it beat (with the whip) for a minute or two and it comes together enough so I can continue adding the remaining butter.

@pastrygirl - I ordered the case to arrive before Thanksgiving and it turned out RD never placed the order with the manufacturer - so it was delayed. I ordered the larger case but because RD never followed through with the MFG, there were no larger cases available so in order to get something I had to settle for the smaller case. When I called RD to check a status, I got the runaround and then they tried to say it was the MFG holding things up. So I called the MFG and got the true story that RD had asked if they had the larger one in stock (only 1) but they didn't respond to the MFG for 3 days so the MFG sold it to someone else. Then I had to fight with them to refund the difference between the larger and smaller cases. When we were trying to arrange delivery the freight company didn't have the right paperwork and if I didn't get the right paperwork (which had to come from RD) the case would be delayed for another week. When I called RD to ask why the freight company was calling me and not having the right paperwork, RD hung up on me. Mind you, the freight was free, but the aggravation wasn't. I didn't have the case for Thanksgiving and it barely made it in time for Christmas so the entire season was lost. I have enough wholesale work that it didn't affect my numbers but it meant I didn't do a grand opening until Easter So I will not go through that hassle ever again. I would rather pay a few hundred dollars and not have to go through the hassle of where is it, is anything broken, is it the right thing, is it going to get left at the end of our plaza's driveway or will they bring it to the door step.... I need another freezer but I would rather buy from the company I bought most of my other equipment from because they will bring it in, set it up, put casters on it and wheel it where it needs to go. And if anything goes wrong, they will fix it without arguing with me. That is worth the $ to me!

If you have a technical high school near you, you might approach the culinary staff to see if they have strong students and/or equipment that might help you with moving the equipment into your space. I bought a refrigerated case from Restaurant Depot years ago and the freight company brought it to the front door, but not inside. It was on a pallet so my contractor brought one of those dolly things and brought it inside after having disposed of the packing material (another thing to think about, because your dumpster company is likely to charge you if there is packing material in your trash) and he ended up setting it up for us. But the school was willing to bring over a few strong students and a few instructors to help because I had a co-op student from their school at the time. It is also worth investigating if your local restaurant dealer will negotiate a price on the equipment if you buy it from them. I ended up paying for delivery and set up but the peace of mind that they were responsible for getting it in there and setting it up was worth it. I didn't have to worry that the Webstaurant Store or Big Tray would leave me in the lurch should anything go wrong. I would also never buy any equipment from Restaurant Depot again. Ever.

Intrigued ... so I went and checked. Here's the only comment I found about EZTemper and yes, @pastrygirl, kriss showed up when I did a search on that name so quite possibly he has blocked you (how rude!)

This place calls them dividers: https://www.brpboxshop.com/3141.html

I would characterize myself as an obsessive student when it comes to cake/pastry/dessert. I WILL make something 10 times to get it right and I will take notes about what worked/didn't work, tweaks, etc. But this is my job so I have to. The flourless chocolate cake I made last week has to be the same as the one I made last year for the client who comes in once a year for his/her birthday treat. It helps that I have that kind of drive, though. Actually I like calling it "passion" better As for real food, I do not have the same "passion" so I make what the family will eat and they go through stages: baked fish with crumbs, chicken/ziti/broccoli, various combinations of pasta/sauce/meat, the meatloaf (minus the Accent stuff) from the Ann Landers' column, the Instant Pot pulled port recipe from a book I got a year ago, and now that I have an IP, pot roast. In the summer, if it can be grilled, it gets grilled and pasta salad with Wishbone Robusto Italian dressing is de riguer. It annoys me to no end that the husband will not eat leftovers. There are only so many meatloaf sandwiches one can eat in a week. I am an adventurous eater, though so I am happy to eat new foods as well as old favorites.

or sprinkle something on them - like cookie crumbs, chopped heath bar..... you definitely will need a helper for this! And what if you were to put the ends of the skewers into a block of styrofoam covered with waxed paper to catch the drips, so long as your skewers are straight at the ends and not decorative?

I need to go buy some green Peeps and figure out how to make them look like leprechauns!

OMG those Peeps!!!!!

have you changed the brand of corn syrup?