JeanneCake

Duff Goldman owns a company called Charm City Cakes (website in Baltimore, MD. He's been on a few of the Food Network cake competitions in the past year or so. His participation on those shows was pretty heavily edited to not present him in a great light (one cake fell over at the end and he was also shown brandishing a screwdriver; then in another one, he was putting a blowtorch into the mixer bowl to heat up some buttercream and the judges didn't like that). Anyway, because he fits the demographic the Food Network is going for (males 18-35), the powers that be gave him a show, Ace of Cakes. It was great, IMHO. I was more than a little curious about it because how much would he allow them to show? He's not about to give up any secrets! But if you go to the food network site, you can see how he introduces his staff (I SO want a Mary Alice person asnwering my phone!!!). Would he come off really well or goofy? They sort of followed along for a week - he had 21 or 24 cakes going out that weekend (maybe it was more, they only showed a few). One was a Jeep replica that one of his assistants was making and Duff was having a bit of a fit about not having any modeling chocolate and lo and behold, the Albert Uster delivery comes through. The other was a shell/beach theme - he airbrushed a tiered cake in a sand color and put shells on (he airbrushes a lot in this episode) then he did a replica of the building in the center of the Preakness race track and showed how he had to deliver it through the parade of horses and across the track. I loved the part where he says "I'm here to deliver a cake" about a hundred times to various security guards, etc. How many times have we done that?! Things that surprized me was - using wooden dowels. I stopped using those years ago (one because I had a thing about where were they before? Just how sanitary are these things anyway! And, two, it was easier to get the plastic dowels that you can cut with a knife. But Annie showed me a link to a source for bubble tea straws that work just as well if not better and are CHEAPER!); and it seemed that he uses those Coast plastic plates with the wooden dowels to stack cakes. And airbrushing was the tool of the day in this episode. I use mine for flowers almost exclusively and sometimes for when I need a navy or black color for a cap on top of a cake. I wish he had mentioned pricing for a few of those cakes. That would go a long way to educating the general public about these are not cheap and not everyone can produce work like that. Meaning: you're sure not going to find this at a supermarket and maybe not at your local neighborhood bakery. I can't wait for next week's episode. See if someone can tape or TIVO it for you - I'd offer to do it but by the time I send the tape, the season'd be over!

What'd ya think?

I haven't read the recipe yet, but I used to have problems with soggy oreo crumb crusts. If you use too much butter on the pan, that can also contribute to a soggy crust.

I have an order for a replica of a local, beloved baseball park to be made entirely of cake - and they want the lights to work (the stadium lights). I have not done anything illuminated in/on a cake before so if you have any ideas how to accomplish this (safely!), I'm all ears! The cake part is easy. It's the lights that are baffling me. I have about 6 weeks to figure it out.... Help! There should be at least 3 (there are 7 stadium lights total, but 3 is ok with the client) working lights. I was wondering if I should get some of those battery operated candles (the ones you use for windows at Christmas) and outfit it with an appropriate outer covering (no, I don't have any ideas for this yet. Most of the modeling is going to be done in colored chocolate and I think this little bit of heat would probably melt if I covered the outside of the candle with chocolate. And wouldn't the bulb be too big? The actual light part I'm not sure how I would do - sheet gelatin might melt so maybe I'd have to use a laminated piece of plastic over the bulb?? and, no - it's not for a bar mitzvah

One of the stories I got a kick from many years ago came from one of the Silver Palate books. It tells about the authors trying to decide between going to the beach or making an elaborate dessert finale for some "very important people" expected for dinner that night. They went to the beach after making a sauternes soup with fresh raspberries. What about a chilled port or sauternes dessert soup, served with a roasted fig half brushed with more of the soup to make it glisten and some crushed macadamia nuts?

The recipe for the Normandy tart (it's an apple custard tart) from Paris Sweets is a Pierre Herme recipe. I used it for a restaurant client as part of their Easter buffet brunch and of the 15 11" tarts they ordered, nothing was left (their order included flourless choc cakes, linzertorte, pecan tarts, this apple tart, mini pastries and something else I can't remember). They did have a few of the Linzertortes and pecan tarts left, but the staff said people inhaled the apple tart and wanted more. So yes, the Pierre Herme recipe is a good one...

I love brown rice! I can get the short grain variety in the supermarket now and we don't even eat white rice any more; except when someone requests the spinach-rice that usually accompanies the meal in the steak restaurants around here. For that, I have to have advance notice because I don't even buy white rice any more! What I have noticed is that I can get brown or white in a Japanese restaurant, but for Chinese take out, I can only get white rice. It took about three years of asking but now at least our favorite local Chinese take away now offers brown rice! Thanks for the pilauf recipes above, they sound great...

Many years ago when I was having trouble with hives I visited an allergist to whom I posed that question: what's with all these allergies? He said that a lot of people generalize their symptom as "allergy" when it could be more accurately described as a sensitivity. This is not to say that people who eat peanuts and have an anaphylactic reaction are not having a problem; it is when people have an upset stomach after eating ice cream that shouldn't be characterized as allergy. But either way, they still have a problem they're trying to avoid and I'm trying to accommodate them. I do have to roll my eyes when someone makes a big deal out of taking a pill just before eating cake samples (for pete's sake, take it before you get here!! ) I'm having the same issue in business - when someone orders a cake, I'm getting all kinds of "does it have nuts in it" when I didn't get that question even 5 years ago. I've had to give up using certain products because I never know whether or not someone with a peanut allergy will ingest it - case in point is one of my favorite coffee extracts (available to the trade) lists peanut oil in the ingredient list. So I have to be aware that someone eating a mocha icing or cake from me when I use that product needs to be alerted to the fact. I feel like people with a peanut allergy have a life threatening thing compared to someone who is lactose intolerant and I'm not willing to take a chance on that. And I've had chefs call me during a shift to ask me to list exactly what is in a cheesecake or tart because a customer is asking so they can order a dessert without worries. I think it's like autism; we know more about it now than we did 20 years ago so we're better able to diagnose it and everyone wants to know why there are apparently more cases of autism diagnosed every year. And now, the average consumer has more information at their disposal comparatively speaking; 20 years ago all you had was the local library and the reference librarian as a source of data.

Thank you, everyone! The Wacky cake recipe is what I remember my mother making.... thanks Canucklehead and Shaloop for the recipe and link. The Hershey cake calls for A/P flour, and soda with all the other ingredients so I'm sure that's why that photo looks a whole lot better than what I got! Anyway, it's so nice to have other reliable options now to offer people.

Don't I wish I remembered Lact-aid! Would have saved me a lot of grief. (this order came in on Tuesday and it's a quiet week - no weddings!! so I needed something to torture myself with ) Not being lactose intolerant, I can't relate to what it's like; some people tell me they can handle the milk (in my white and yellow cakes) and butter, some can't handle the butter (so we have to do the Fleischmann's, which is really IMHO awful but if you can't have icing any other way I guess it's ok) others are ok with soy milk or soy butter Some people tell me that if the dairy is cooked, they can handle it, but if it is raw, they can't. I remember people telling me about this Duncan Hines thing, they must have changed it since the last time someone asked me for it, which was years ago.

I'm now on a hunt for a recipe that appeared between 20-30 years ago in the Boston Globe's Confidential Chat pages (it was a printed forum "newsgroup" from way before the computer age). My mother got lots of terrific recipes from it, and one of them was called "Wowie Cake". As I remember it, it had flour, sugar, oil, vinegar, maybe some vanilla, cocoa and I cannot remember if it had eggs or not. It got mixed up in a single bowl, it was easy to put together and it rose and had a nice crumb. At one point, I think the recipe was reprinted with a cream cheese frosting. Anyway, I was reminded of it today when I was baking a cake per a client's request for a lactose intolerant group. The cake from the client's recipe is about a half inch high and very heavy - I don't think this is how it was supposed to come out but they originally wanted me to use a Duncan Hines boxed mix because it is/was dairy free and something they could have without worries. But when I went to the market to get this mix, I noticed that it listed non-fat dry milk and called them; then they gave me this recipe (verbatim): 2 cups cake flour 2 cups white sugar 3/4 cup cocoa 1 tsp baking powder 1/2 tsp salt Mix above ingredients til blended, then make a well in the center. Add the following: 2 eggs 1 cup cold brewed coffee 1 cup rice dream (a milk "substitute") 1/2 cup veg. oil 2 tsp vinegar The batter is thin (an understatement!); pour into greased/floured 9x13 pan; bake at 350 for 35-40 mins. So, I think there's a lot of liquid in this recipe for this amount of dry ingredients, I also think that my cocoa (Felchlin) is not what the average home-based cook has, and the sugar I use (fruit fine) is a finer granulation than what home based cooks use, I don't think either of these two differences are totally responsible for this cake being so dense/heavy and so very thin. There's barely enough leavening to support it and there's no structure to speak of. Anyway, if you've ever heard of the Wowie Cake and have a recipe, I'd love to have it again. And if you have any thoughts about this formula, I'm all ears. The cake is already done (it's SO heavy!! For lactose intolerant clients and those who need a dairy free alternative, I make a meringue buttercream with Fleischmann's unsalted margarine instead of butter. As long as it's flavored with something like raspberry or blackberry, it masks the margarine and works pretty well.) Thanks! Jeanne

well, since creme brulee is really custard with a burnt sugar topping, you could do the same with cheesecake (cheesecake is a custard of sorts too). If you poured a slightly cooled caramel on the top, it would be hard to cut (I'm not talking about a caramel sauce) which is why I thought shards would be better. If you're trying it out this weekend, try bruleeing sugar on top of a very well chilled cheesecake. I had one of those little torches with me at a charity dinner and it wasn't very effective, I gave up and got my industrial strength one and that worked a lot better. You'll have the torch on for longer doing the cheesecake (if it's a 9" or 10" size) so this might make a difference for you. Take pictures to share .....

Or wrap the sides in a clear acetate strip, and tie with ribbon - put a few sprigs of currants on top and 10x it....... I like all of K8's suggestions and the one about masking the sides with toasted almonds. They look delicious, don't stress over what you might see as a less than flawless finish but to our eyes is an invitation to dig in!! ETA: you could spread an apple or red currant jam on the sides to make the almonds cling if you didn't want to use buttercream.

In the interest of research for you (yep, that's what we'll call it), I bought a container of creme brulee ice cream from Haagen Daz yesterday. It's vanilla ice cream with swirls of burnt sugar throughout and the label identifies it in this round-about way: Cream, Skim milk, sugar, corn syrup, egg yolks, caramelized sugar swirl (sugar, corn syrup, caramelized sugar, pectin, natural flavor). So, I'm with Swisskaese here - make a rich vanilla cheesecake and either put some caramel shards on top and serve with a clear caramel sauce (a la Maida Heatter). Hmm, maybe you should call it a flan instead or maybe creme caramel!

Another alternative is to make caramel, let it cool on a silpat or foil, smash it up then grind it in a robot coupe and add it to the finished buttercream. The burnt sugar of the caramel comes through and the finished buttercream isn't too sweet - I live dangerously, though (having burned myself more than once, you'd think I'd have learned by now) and make the caramel pretty dark - almost but not quite to the bitter edge.

I looked for the recipe in my copies of Maida's books, and it's in the newest book of great desserts. The instructions for beating the eggs reads: "In the large bowl of an electric mixer beat the eggs with the vanilla and sugar at high speed for 25 minutes or until the mixture is pale and falls in a slow ribbon when the beaters are raised." She uses a Sunbeam Mixmaster stand mixer, which I don't think is as powerful as your Kenwood (probably where she got the 25 mins from, she also uses cold eggs) and to Annie's point, the eggs are beaten to the ribbon stage - then the COOLED melted butter is beaten in at low speed and then the dry ingredients only until incorporated. She says that adding the butter and dry should only take seconds. This reminds me of a genoise. She does caution that this is easy to mess up either by over or underbeating the eggs or beating too much after the butter/dry.... she ends the recipe with "good luck" Annie, PM me if you want me to fax over the recipe as written ....

Unfortunately Maida Heatter doesn't always include weight measurements in her books (usually she does for nuts, and sometimes butter, but not always flours). So if I need to "convert" a recipe quickly I use 5 oz as the standard weight for 1 cup of a/p flour and 4 oz for cake flour; and 7 oz for a cup of sugar, 4 oz (1 stick) for 1/2 cup butter or 2 sticks for 1 cup. I've never made the recipe for Light Pound Cake, but if she has you beating eggs for 25 mins, she means 25 mins! I've made a lot of her other recipes and haven't had any "misses" yet.

As a professional baker, I was first going to say my collection of well-worn, well-annotated cookbooks and recipes. But as a parent, I realized that what I want my child to know is his culinary heritage: the cooking of his parents, grandparents and great-grandparents. It's what my paternal grandmother gave ME, and that is more priceless than anything else I have of hers. It's the memory of being too small to stand at the counter, but big enough to sit in a tall chair and roll meatballs; it's fishing the sausages and pork and brasciole out of the gravy (that's what we called tomato sauce when I was growing up. We didn't call it pasta either, everything was macaroni!). It's being able to recreate the ricotta and spinach stuffing she used in her roast chicken when my mother wanted to taste it again after my grandmother died (my mother never managed to get that "recipe" out of her!) It makes me realize that I have to start teaching my child how to do all those things and say "this is what your great-grandmother showed me how to do" so he has a connection to a generation he only knows through photograhs. And it wasn't until you posed the question that I realized it. Thanks!

A client of mine wanted to use an acrylic stand sold by Cake Deco in Australia. While browsing their site, I found these cupcake liners I don't know whether they're useful for you or not, or whether they'd sell you just one color but it can't hurt to ask....

Way, WAY optimistic! for a 12/9/6 round configuration, I calculate 80 servings (including the top. I give them a certificate for an anniversary cake so they can serve the entire cake at the wedding. Too many times someone forgets the top tier, or whatever so a few years ago I changed my policy. Works out much better this way.) I use Earlene Moore's serving chart and find it works really well.

where are you installing it? At home? In a commercial kitchen? Sometimes your options may be limited by where you are putting it - for example, in a home environment, you might have to go with an electric oven because an electric oven doesn't have to be vented; but a gas fired oven (regardless of convection, conventional, deck or otherwise) must be vented to the outside. Some local BOH will mandate no open flames in a particular kitchen - the local gourmet deli had this as a requirement but I never knew why (e.g., no burners, you have to use an induction top) and others have no such rule. So you might be looking at electric ovens rather than gas ovens; and at least where I am there are more used gas ovens than electric. A long time ago someone told me about the Deluxe company as a good source for a home-based operation - you can check them out here: Deluxe Ovens I once asked the local repair company about which brands they had to service the most - they said Baker's Aid.

I have sets of odd-shaped pans from Australia (hexagon, octagon, emerald, etc) and they are 3" deep (my rounds and squares are 2"). For the larger 3" deep pans, I've used a heating core (it's hollow on the inside and you use some batter to fill it to plug the hole it leaves behind.) All the flat-head flower nails I've seen have a little curve or lip to them - when you use them, do you flatten them out so they sit level in the pan?

In my sleep-deprived haze, I have a vague memory of a Food Network show where they were at Disney for a bunch of weddings and there was a behind-the scenes shot of a chef peeling the fondant off of a cake tier before it was cut and plated. I remember thinking "I can't believe he got that off in one piece!" and from the brief glimpse of the stripped cake, it didn't look like it lost any buttercream under the fondant. Does anyone else remember this or am I hallucinating? Again.

I found it makes the function manager nervous when I arrive 30 mins before the guests are due to show; usually I get there about an hour before so I can do some last minute stuff or I time it to be there same time as the florist. I hate not being there with the florist when it calls for fresh flowers - I have been burned with flower dregs that look pretty awful and it bothers me to no end that some florists just leave the loose leftovers for the cake when the client paid for nice flowers for the cake. Everyone looks at the cake, while only 8? 10? people are looking at a table centerpiece. I just don't get it. But that's another story. Just about all of my wedding cakes are three (sometimes four) tiers, stacked, and 3 tiers are what I can safely manage to carry by myself and they are all assembled before they get delivered. Most sites won't let their employees help carry anything in - just last week I wrenched my neck lifting a tiered, square cake that was enormous. I could just barely get it from the truck to a cart before my arm went numb and the chef was good enough to help lift it to the table. So, three stacked tiers is my limit; for taller cakes, I have to put the rest of the tiers on at the site. Plus, driving with 4 tiers stacked (the center of gravity is higher) always makes me nervous - I can see the top tier wobbling when I go over a bump or take a turn! The weather this weekend is hazy/hot/humid, which means condensation for sure. It's a 4 tier, square stack - two bottom real and two top styro - the 10" square is the pastry cream cake. I can cover the styro tiers tomorrow, it's whether or not to do the real tiers Sat AM and chill them or do them at 2:30 Sat PM just before I leave at 3:30. The design is minimal - lavender fondant, a few random dots, fresh flowers. I am very seriously considering doing the pastry cream tier as a styro just to be safe; I don't want to take a chance on the pastry cream with the weather (not that I think bad things will happen in the 30 mins it takes to get there, but it's a holiday weekend, traffic can be unpredictable....) Yep, I do that! Cheers. ←

I've always wondered about this so now I'm just going to ask.... if I fill a cake with pastry cream (and chopped fruit), how long would you safely leave this at rm temp? I ask because a lot of my clients love the pastry cream filling option I offer, but I usually encourage them to use a buttercream for a wedding cake because it stands out for so long (figure it takes me 1-2 hrs for decorating - and yes, it's covered with fondant, no flames from the other thread please! - then it's delivered an hour or two before the reception starts, it stays out for another 2 or so hours before it is cut/plated). I'm always careful about pastry cream because of all the milk/yolks, etc and I'm nervous about it being out for 4+ hours the way a wedding cake is. I don't typically refrigerate a fondant-covered cake, because I don't like how fondant behaves after refrigeration, and the walk-in I share is humid anyway - but if I had to, I could. I just would hate handling the cake afterwards (no matter what brand of fondant I've used, it always gets condensation on it after refrigeration. The condensation makes for fingerprints when you go to assemble the tiers.) Would it make any difference if I used a mix (the only mix I've seen for pastry cream calls for adding milk and optionally, whipped cream to the powder. I don't think that changes anything, but as I have no experience with pastry cream from a mix....)? Or should I still encourage clients to go with a buttercream with chopped fresh fruit filling in lieu of a pastry cream filling for wedding cakes?