JeanneCake

that's nothing! (at least to me it doesn't seem too difficult. I don't know the area so maybe. The gov't should buy the condo so they have the space for their program.) They should be thrilled that's all you're asking for!

If someone else were to come up and do this job in your place, the docs would have to pay for the accommodation anyway, correct? Or did I misunderstand the arrangement? This is the first time I've followed your adventures (mostly because I am home more, have a better/faster computer and am learning how to relax.....) so sorry if I got it wrong!

We make marshmallows for a client; they are vanilla, we toast them, dip them in chocolate and graham crumbs. I wish we made flavored ones because those are more interesting to me. If you are selling a premium hot chocolate mix, I'd want a really cool marshmallow to go with it. But probably only because I want to make a really cool flavored marshmallow or something mainstream like raspberry or orange, or black cherry, or even experiment with guava to see if it works.

Do you have a floral supply near you? Most of the venues here are forcing the use of flameless candles so a lot of florists are using them in various sizes (from the small votives to the larger pillar candles). At least there you can buy in bulk. I've found them at Home Goods/TJ Maxx/Marshalls so other retailers like Kohls or Target might stock them.

I have 1200 square feet of space, a 10x8 walk in cooler, a two door reach in freezer and a single door reach in freezer and a 5 foot pastry case. In the winter, my electricity bill is about 400-500 per month; in the summer when we are running the a/c it is about 900 per month. I shut off the pastry case when we are closed Sun-Mon-Tues. I have an 80 gallon hot water heater, well, I think it's 80 gallons, I'll have to check.

Sold! And Happy BIrthday to me :)! Thank you both, I can't wait to get it and try it out.

@gfweb, what's the clean up like when using the air fryer mode? I looked (online) at this last night and really like it; I wouldn't have given it a look without your suggestion so thank you. I know that if stuff splatters all over the inside, it will get less and less use because the clean up outweighs the cooking effort I will especially appreciate this at the holidays when I'm trying to get so many side dishes done and on the table.......

My birthday is Friday and I think I want to get an air fryer. I would love to make fries/potatoes, chicken wings, chicken cutlets and/or parts, and be adventurous as I get more familiar with this. Which one would you recommend - the Phillips XXL or the Breville? I am an experienced cook if that matters and I have a young adult at home who can snarf down several pounds of chicken if we leave it unattended LOL (in real life I am a pastry chef but that has no bearing on the fact that I can't make a decent pot roast unless it's in the Instant Pot and I am hopeless at pork chops). What say you all?

My husband and child like trying the new Oreo flavors, so I bought the Firecracker ones and the Kettle Corn ones. They didn't care for the firecracker ones At. All. No flavor, no zing, nothing. I myself tried the Kettle Corn ones because I am a popcorn fanatic and yeah, just one was enough. It wasn't bad but if I'm going to have an Oreo, it better be worth the calories.....

Could you try making a sesame brittle with them? I have no idea how it would taste but maybe the caramel offsets some of the bitterness; and if it doesn't, dip it in chocolate

@pastrygirl, pleasePM me that IG account, I wanna follow it just to snoop

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....