JeanneCake

I've done wedding cake/pastries often at a local farm that has a tent set up next to the pond (it's lovely); and on many occasions, we use a regular 6' banquet table, covered in a burlap-kind of linen with cake stands and platters on risers. See if the venue will refrigerate the pies (there's going to be at least 20 of them, and I'm guessing you're doing 9" size?) until they're brought out for display; if they won't, you can put them in 10x10x3 inch boxes, and those into coolers with ice packs/dry ice. If it's being catered, my experience is that many caterers do not have refrigerated trucks onsite and if they do, they're tight on space because they're keeping their own food cool. Is the bride and groom having a sweetheart table for their own pie, and doing a pie-cutting/serving? (that's one pie that shouldn't be juicy or messy - you don't want them wearing a reminder of the pie for the rest of the night!)

What great ideas, thank you! Tying the strings and using mesh bags will definitely keep me from going nuts untangling strings

I don't have a laundry service at work; I do my own towels (but we use more paper towels and less side towels) and aprons because I have a huge capacity washer and dryer and both have a sanitizing cycle. We have only about 5 dozen white aprons with long ties, but the most I am washing at any given time is about 15- 18. I try to put in a few large bath towels that I don't care about (I get a little overzealous with the bleach if truth be told) so the apron ties don't get too tangled up, but they do and I am getting tired of all the untangling. Even if I untangle them after the wash, they're just as badly tangled when they come out of the dryer. Any ideas?

The white chocolate whisper cake from RLB is my go to recipe for when a client wants a slightly firmer cake than our usual vanilla cake. I agree with the others, is the best!

I don't know that you can get convection (fan blowing hot air) with heating only from the bottom; the fan is moving the hot air around/over the product in the oven. I have a Blodgett convection (commercial) and I'm not crazy about the way I need to rotate the pans so the ones in the left corner where a hot spot is don't color. There was a convection oven from a manufacturer in Canada - I think it was Doyon - in which the fan reverses every 2 or 3 minutes so that might be a better fit for you.

This is getting a little past the point of how does a business owner manage the use of bathrooms. I don't think EdwardJ went overboard by calling about someone parked illegally. They are two separate issues connected by the use of a bathroom earlier in the week by a guy who just needed to use the facility but didn't want to buy anything. He wasn't a customer. I see a lot of "bathrooms for customers only" signs especially in downtown shopping areas with individual storefronts. A store is open for business, and they're not selling free bathroom time. I am a small business owner myself; I appreciate that people have choices about where they buy the kind of goods I'm selling. Customers are fickle, one day they love you and the next they don't. More often, it's about the price of the goods and how much money they think the goods are worth. But this is beside the point. The illegal parking is a completely separate issue. The guy parked his car and left it for more than the posted time, and the guy was taking a chance he wouldn't get ticketed or towed. He got towed. That's the consequence for illegal parking. The fact that it happened to be EdwardJ who reported the illegally parked car is just icing on the cake depending on how you think karma was working that day.

Tried out a beater blade on our little mixer at work; and one of the staff wondered out loud if such a thing was made for Hobarts..... I looked it up and found one on Pastrychefcentral.com, and at $185 I want to make darn sure the thing works and is worth it! We do a lot of cake and cheesecake batters so there's a definite plus in not having to scrape the bowl every few minutes, but there are no online product reviews on that site, so I'm here to ask do you have one for your Hobart? Does it work? Well enough that you would encourage someone to buy one? How does it hold up in washing (the rubbery blades look as if they could becoming misshapen or shred)?

If they have a website, sometimes there's a resource page on it and there might be an answer there. Or at least a corporate chef department that has email addresses that you can contact directly. My sister (who owned a donut shop many years ago) used to buy Pillsbury stuff and she used their website a lot.

I hope I'm not breaking any rules here, but our very own Pam R has a passover dessert book that you should get. Her recipes posted in RecipeGullet for Pesach are excellent, and you're sure to find something to work with that wonderful-sounding mousse filling!

It's not an uncommon practice. One can always strike out on their own. I agree, and it doens't bother me at all. HE will know who made it. He (the chef) will also know HE didn't make it, and couldn't.....

Ask your chef to buy one of the flexipan sheets of bundt shapes and try the flipped flan cake method....

Wow. It's never about doing what's really right for the kids, is it? Was there no push back from the parents?

In the same category as muffins or cupcakes, whoopie pies seem popular lately; just as easy to make as muffins (make the batter, scoop and bake, they'll cool quickly and you could use a cream cheese frosting as the filling).

I loved this! Thank you for sharing. And for teaching me (without knowing it!) that I am beating my marshmallows too much! I noticed the corn syrup is not clear (corn syrup here is usually Karo brand, and the red label variety is clear); it looks almost honey colored.... Nice job!

Is it possible for you to use the ring mold to cut an already cooked sheet (hotel pan) of custard (your usual mix)and put it on the round of cake and then use the preformed sugar disk (or a florentine cookie kind of thing) on top? The stovetop recipe from Dessert University works pretty well for piping onto the top of the baked cake. Let us know how it works out With Pictures, please!

If you don't like her, you're going to hate anything she does. If you like her, you'll let a lot of things that might otherwise annoy you - slide. That would hold true no matter what celebrity or personality we know. I don't like or dislike her - I haven't watched a show with her in it for years but that's because I'm not watching a whole lot of TV in general not because I am trying to avoid the silliness that seems on whenever I do get to watch TV!; the accent is a little too thick for me sometimes, but I could take it or leave it. What I don't understand is why it's generating so much conversation. If you don't care for her, you won't buy her cookbooks; if you do like her, or her style of cooking and do buy one of her cookbooks, does that mean you'd feel duped or fooled because she has diabetes and that her cooking is responsible for the diagnosis?

s'mores are hot and are being offered by caterers around the country as interactive dessert stations or even centerpieces for events. Check out the caterbuzz blog post that offers many suggestions on s'mores variations http://caterbuzz.blogspot.com/2011/12/some-more-smores-or-is-it-smores-lots.html Loved the presentation with the sterno in the river rocks... but seriously who points a torch at someone holding a marshmallow! One of my accounts has been doing a smores station since the fall, and it's fun to make different marshmallow flavors. We've been doing a tart with graham tart shells filled with an enriched ganache and topped with mini marshmallows and torched before going out for display or passing; I really like the "interactive" presentation! I see more of those push pop things and wonder about that... is it messy? It can't be cheap, what with buying the pops and covers and a stand....

It wasn't until I was in grade school that I learned "gravy" could be something other than the red sauce we had all the time, and especially on Sundays!

Ok, who has a copy of Modernist Cuisine, lives somewhere in the East (south of Boston, because of the blooming crocus), has a wok, and eats Greek yogurt? All I can come up with is LindaK but she's here in the Boston area. Maybe she has a warm spot in her yard for the crocus....

I like pecans, dried cranberries and milk choc chips....and I started eating that when I was using that combo when I first started making coconut macaroons. It's the only time I eat milk chocolate or even like it (I usually prefer dark choc)

It looks like the kind of crocus that pops up in my front yard; but usually they don't come up until the middle of March; I was thinking someone further south would start seeing them now.....

That looks like a crocus poking through; my guess is that it is somewhere on the southern part of the Atlantic seaboard? Is Yoplait yogurt available nationally or just the Northeast? I've only just started seeing Yoplait Greek style yogurt in the Boston area in the last few weeks/months. Fage is distributed from New York or manufactured under license there?

I've made crusts from all kinds of cookies (pepperidge farms, oreo-type sandwich cookies, biscotti) even dried cake crumbs (using the tops that I level off after baking, drying them out in the oven). I'll bet it would work to even use the right kind of breakfast cereal if you've got that (granola type), Maida Heatter has a graham cracker recipe in her cookie book; you can roll it out as for sugar cookies and line the pan with it, or make cracker shapes and grind them for crumbs...

It does freeze well When you are pouring it into the mixer, with the speed at 8, you want to aim for the "sweet spot" (no pun intended) which is between the bowl and the beaters. If you pour in a thin, steady stream (right from the pot, you don't have to pour it into a greased glass measure first, but that's helpful) - about the width of a pencil - you'll be ok. Practice pouring with plain water in an empty mixer if that helps. You want to get as much of the syrup into the whites as possible; this will give you the maximum amount of buttercream at the end.

Rose Levy Beranbaum has a YouTube video of her making IMBC, where she dumps the meringue into the mixer bowl of beaten butter, rather than add the butter to the meringue in chunks and yes, you don't see the meringue collapse and get soupy doing it that way The minimum sugar syrup temp for this to work is 235 and you will get a very soft buttercream; the highest temp is 248 which will get you a firmer buttercream (but this is all relative); usually I pull the syrup off at 240. I beat the whites at speed 6 on a KA, then add the syrup at speed 8, let it run for about 30 seconds after it's all added, then bring it down to speed 6 to cool. It's ready when you can put the inside of your wrist against the bottom of the bowl and not feel any heat (just barely warm). You can beat the butter first, mostly because I don't want another bowl to wash, I don't.