JeanneCake

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?

Many years ago, one of my instructors was featured in PA&D, and I asked her how that happened. She told me she had a PR person who specialized in the food business and their "plan" was to send out press releases, announcements, etc. to appropriate media outlets (TV, newspapers, magazines, etc). And now, six years later, she's still in the local bridal magazines that come out twice a year, quoted on new trends in cake design and how to put together a dessert station. Very similar to what Confetti Cakes did with PR and communications. Another cake stylist sent a portfolio "book" to PA&D after attending the World Pastry Forum and one of her photos was used there and also in Chocolatier. So I agree that the point is if you want people to know about what you're doing, you have to tell them. Over and over. Wasn't there a quote about the music business ... you're only as good as your last 3 mins and 21 seconds?!! If what you want is the recognition from the media or your peers, you have to give them a path to find you.

I think you should use some red fondant (Satin Ice sells pre-colored fondant - www.rolledfondant.com; or you could use Sweet Inspirations brand www.cake-visions.com) for the vertical stripes. It's easier to deal with than coloring icing, piping it, etc., and since it comes in 2# or 5# pails, you could definitely have some to practice with first. You roll it out, cut the strips and apply..... For the logo.... well, the easiest shortcut is to take a jpeg image of the logo to your local "edible image" maker bakery and ask them to print it out on to the edible sheet that you can then attach to a piece of fondant, or chocolate plaque (even one of those Ghiradelli bars they sell in the supermarket could work). Or get some of the food color ink pens and a piece of white fondant (suitably dry so you can color on it) and recreate it if it is not very intricate...

Or chocolate plastique, which handles like fondant in that you roll it out and apply it to the sides of a cake. In a thread on wrinkly sugar figures, chefpeon wrote out her recipe for modeling chocolate and this is her post on it: You can use anything to color modeling chocolate, because when you add the corn syrup to the chocolate to make it in the first place, the chocolate in essence has already seized, so adding liquid color to it won't make it seize any more. However, the more liquid or gel color you add to it (especially when you want deeper tones), the more slack it gets, so I usually use a combination of gel/powder color to maintain consistency. I get most of my powdered colors from Country Kitchens SweetArt. My modeling chocolate recipe is as follows, and it's based on using Guittard White Satin Ribbon. Other brands of white chocolate behave differently, so adjustments may be needed (such as using a little more or less corn syrup). In micro, melt 6 lbs white chocolate. Stir often! Remember WC burns easily! When melted and perfectly smooth, heat 2 2/3 cup corn syrup for about a minute in micro. In a large plastic bowl, add your corn syrup to your melted chocolate and stir rather quickly, making sure you scrape the sides of the bowl often. I use a big rubber spatula. The mixture will seize and clean the sides of the bowl. When completely mixed, press mixture into a flat pan that has been lined with plastic wrap. Fold the plastic wrap up over the top. Put in fridge to set up, then bring out to room temp, break off pieces and knead it smooth. If it's cold out, I put it in the micro for about ten seconds so it doesn't kill my arm off to knead it.

thanks, that's what I thought. I guess I was wondering whether the customer would notice. Usually I crumb coat, chill, cover with a slightly thicker layer of bcrm, chill and then if I need another coat, I go over it again, otherwise it's decorating time. I've never been crazy about the icing tip, it's faster and easier for me to apply the icing by hand. Good night!!

Happy Birthday!

I'm exhausted from the weekend's wedding work, and tomorrow I have a small 8" cake due. It was a last minute order and I should have said no, but I didn't. I have several "leftover" layers from half-sheets I did this weekend (I do three layers of cake when I build my cakes, and I use 2" pans so I torte each one in half). I could cut 8" circles from these sheets and assemble the cake order without having to bake a separate 8" cake (which would mean getting up very early tomorrow). Aside from not having the browned crust "edge", is this a bad thing? We do it for little 3" cakes all the time, but I've never done it for a larger layer cake. Whaddya think? Can I sleep in a little longer tomorrow or do I get up and bake....?

I'm actually quite an attentive parent--probably too much so--but clearly I did something really bad in a previous life, as the following will attest: The whole family has gone out to dinner at a new, funky restaurant. One of the specialties of the house is a kids' drink that's super bubbly and produces lots of smoke (courtesy of dry ice.) Naturally, my kids think this is the coolest thing ever. My 7 year old daughter takes a sip of her green apple concoction and pronounces it "Yummy!" Then she burps REALLY loudly. (We try not to laugh, because we know it's not funny to be impolite--but we really can't help ourselves.) Then my 5 year old son takes a sip of his bubbly, smoky, cherry drink. "Ooooooh," he says, a little too blissfully. "That's so good, it tickles my pee-pee!" Needless to say, we made all the other parents feel very proud of their offspring. ← OMG, that's too funny (I'm the mother of a boy a little older than yours, and trust me, it doesn't get any better in the coming years either!!!) I'm still laughing....

chocolate and zucchini is fantastic! Chocolate and Zucchini

Congratulations on the new job! Thanks for all the suggestions, everyone - I am heading to Home Depot for the engraver for the sheet pans; and to see if they have the plasti-dip for my spatulas and/or cable ties for the rubber spatulas.

I rent space from a caterer and we share the cost of a dishwasher who is usually pretty good about knowing what stuff is mine and which is not. But for those times when it's busy, all bets are off. I need a way to mark my rubber spatulasand icing spatulas so they find their way back to me. One of my teachers used red duct tape, but that washes off; I've tried hooking elastic bands to the loops on the rubber spatulas (they fall off when they're washed), but I am tired of losing my icing spatulas - especially the small offset ones. I have both wooden handles and the plastic handles. I've given up on the sheet pans. I've been at this space for 3+ years and came in with 50 brand new sheet pans - all of which have been subsequently shared and beaten up over time. So, any ideas?

I won't go back to the nylon bags for anything. Waiting for them to dry... having the old ones crack .... making sure they're clean.... no, I don't miss that at all. I've used Hygo, and Thermohauser and both are fine. There's another brand, KeeSeal that seems to be very good too. I use the 12" and 18" sizes. Sometimes I get lucky with production so that I can start with plain buttercream, then go on to lemon, then raspberry - this way I use one bag and get three uses from it, which is especially helpful if you're only filling a small cake.

Sometimes when you add a lot of color to fondant, it becomes slack and hard to roll out because it is so much stickier than it was before the color was added. This could be part of your difficulties. I like to use cornstarch (I put it in a bouquet garni bag and use that to dust the work surface) instead of confectioner's sugar - with the sugar, I've found it dries the fondant out faster than the cornstarch does. If you use too much of either one, the fondant dries out and starts to crack. I use a stainless steel table to roll out fondant on (I don't use the silpat, it sticks no matter what), and if your fondant is as sticky as I think it might be, you might want to try icing down the table to cool it first (and just to state the obvious: drying it off so it isn't wet) then dust w/cornstarch and use a heavy wooden rolling pin. On a chat with Ron BenIsrael on PastryScoop, I asked him how he handled the SatinIce brand of fondant - which I find to be incredibly soft and hard to work. He uses the SS table and makes sure it is very cool. Which brand of fondant is it that you're using?

My usual batch size is 30 oz of whites to 6# of butter. I add the syrup on speed 3 (hobart) and let it cool for about 8? 10? mins at speed 2. I know when the meringue starts to climb on the beaters that it is too cool. To test, I put the inside of my wrist against the bottom of the bowl and if it can stay there comfortably, I know it's time to add the butter. If your butter is cool - not soft - then you can start adding it sooner, while the meringue is still warm-ish. If your butter is squishy soft (all these techical terms, I know!) then wait until the meringue is cool to the wrist before you start adding it. When I make small batches in the KA, I beat the whites with a whip at speed 6 - add the syrup while on speed 8, then back to 6. If it seems to be taking a long time, I can go to speed 4, but I very rarely have to do that. If you are really bothered by the sugar crusting on the sides, wash the pan down with a pastry brush dipped in water to help minimize it (I don't, I just live with it). The amount of buttercream you end up with is supposed to have a correlation to the amount of syrup added to the whites; I usually get 10.5- sometimes 11 pounds of buttercream to my 6# of butter batches.

Over the years, I've learned that I can use a probe-type thermometer in the sugar syrup - set the alarm to go off at 244 or 246 and the syrup will be at 248 by the time you pour it in. I have to walk about 15 steps in the shop from the stove to the mixer and if I let the alarm go off at 248, the syrup could get to 250 or higher by the time I poured the syrup in. There's no discernable difference by pulling it off the flame at the lower temp. I started doing this when the little bits of hardened sugar that show up when you add melted chocolate to the buttercream really bothered me. I thought it might have something to do with the temp of the sugar, so I started to pull it off the heat at 246 and I don't see those little white flecks anymore. But I still get steam! I have successfully added the 3 oz of liqueur to the buttercream but I don't like how "hot" it tastes with that much alcohol so I don't usually add that much. The only time I can get away with the full 3oz is with Bailey's Irish Cream - anything else like Amaretto or Grand Marnier seems to get "hot" with that much of it added. Thanks Ruth for taking the time to put together the demo....

The angle on these particular letters remind me of a candy mold I have stashed away somewhere - it is a three part mold with initial caps and the smaller caps plus numerals. I bought it so long ago that I can't remember where, but it might have been Country Kitchens. If you soften fondant with some piping gel, you could mold it in the form then release it and neaten up the edges. Or use white chocolate, which would be more rigid than fondant. For monograms, I use an oval plaque and pipe the mongram in royal icing. I can usually do it freehand but if you have one of those kopycake image projectors, that would work too if you don't feel confident in your freehand piping. I've been doing RLB's Hebrew 10 commandments design for years and still use the image projector for that particular project!

When I was a kid, I used to go into the closet and take my mother's cookbooks out and pore over them, dreaming of making every single recipe. My mom's a great cook, but I was fascinated by the pictures and the possibilities. As soon as I was able, I made the Lemon Mousse from Maida Heatter's New Book of Great Desserts and I haven't stopped yet. My husband knew I was a foodie when he brought recipes from a Thai cooking class that I'd given him for his birthday - he said that one of the dishes (I can't remember what the name is, but it's ground fish sauteed like a fish cake) was really good but he missed it and didn't know how to make it. So I did it, it came out looking and tasting like it was supposed to and he was stunned that I was able to replicate it without knowing what it looked like or was supposed to taste like before doing it. The bad part is that he decided he wouldn't attempt anything in the kitchen except take out!!

That's true about the Cuisinart strainer; I got one on eBay years ago and it's great. And since they don't make it anymore, I take especially good care of it. It works like a charm. But it's easier to open a jar of Perfect Puree.....

there's a really good recipe for meringue "stars" in RLB's Christmas Cookie book and if you pipe them like kisses and make them larger, they'll resemble what you pictured (is it too funny that you see bags of Lay's potato chips in the background? ) The bottom looks as if they developed "feet" like a macaron; that happens to me if I bake them too long, put the sheet pan too close to the bottom of the oven or don't let them dry out enough before baking.

that's what I do - add about 2 tablespoons more (1 qt milk with 4 oz sugar, bring to boil, 2.5 oz yolks, 3.5 whole egg; 2.5 oz cornstarch with 4 oz sugar, then 2 oz butter at the end. I'll use 3 oz cornstarch for a thicker consistency. Too much though makes it rubbery).