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*Deborah*

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Everything posted by *Deborah*

  1. Ha! beat you!
  2. It's pinned in the "Best of" topic up there: Tofino
  3. I have some fresh figs that I would like to turn into compote (? relish?) of some sort, with wine or brandy, to serve in a month or so. The only recipes I can find call for dried figs. Can I use the fresh fruit and just reduce my liquid longer, or is there some method to dry them first? Thanks for any guidance.
  4. There's Globe@YVR, at the airport. I don't go anywhere in Richmond except IKEA, Costco, and the airport: I get lost there.
  5. Just to clarify what Arne said, Sean, I think he was not objecting to posting about a negative experience, but more wondering whether the management had been given the opportunity to rectify a bad situation, or even been notified of the customer's unhappiness. *shrug* We all are witness to Leonard's sincere desire to give each customer the best experience possible, so it feels odd. That aside, I must say that if I had to wait an hour for a reserved table, at any restaurant, I would be pretty cranky.
  6. Very nearly went there the other night myself! but their apparent lack of a liquor license and my lack of beer in the fridge dissuaded me. Soon, though! I usually trust your recommendations
  7. ^ :laugh: There were a few pieces plated that night that looked nice, I promise!! unfortunately the pictured slice is not one of them. It really helps if you clean your knife between slices, e.g.
  8. Wicked, wicked woman! feeding me egg tarts!!! I second (third?) the votes for Michele's. I usually get my bun fix at T&T downtown: do they bake their own? I had a delicious red bean paste bun earlier this week. Oh, and why are the mooncakes so spendy? they looked tasty, but especially hearing that they will be half-price soon, I will wait to get them. Moosh, where did you get those yummy coconut buns we had that time? and why, oh why are you always feeding me addictive, high-calories sweets?
  9. ? (just curious) Oh how times have changed, I remember when they did that at the Four Seasons. ← They still *do* do that at Brown's Hotel in London, and no doubt in plenty of other places.
  10. If I'm not mistaken, that's Pino Posteraro/Cioppino's, Enoteca to the left of Sean Riley; I'm not sure of his name, but the fellow to the right has The Quay on his jacket. Is that Dobi Kovacevic?
  11. Eating foie gras and being charitable are mutually exclusive. =R= ← Took the sarcastic words right out of my mouth. What presumption!
  12. I just had a brilliant idea....a riff on pommes dauphine with sweet potatoes instead of regular...mmmmm...deep fried crunchy goodness! You could extrude them from a pastry bag, so they would be tater tot shaped...or make them long like a churro! You could sprinkle them with either chili powder or something like that for a savoury, or do them with cinnamon sugar for a sweet. Must be close to quitting time...starting to obsess about dinner! ← ...smoked paprika or chipotle ?
  13. When I used to live in the States (NY and then Philadelphia), my little family (Mum and stepdad and I) used to drive to Freehold, NJ, and have Thanksgiving dinner (with requisite chill in the air, fallen leaves, and football, and a cast of 15 or more) with a family friend’s extended family. These were great, and introduced me to many staples of the Thanksgiving table (somehow my previous Canadian Thanksgivings hadn’t made much of a dent on my consciousness). Every year, certain items were required to appear: the turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes, stuffing in the bird, green peas with butter and pearl onions, baked candied sweet potatoes (which were really good, with ginger and cinnamon, and actually baked in the oven; my mother makes them in the microwave now and with too many marshmallows), dinner rolls, ambrosia salad, waldorf salad, pumpkin pie, apple pie and pecan pie. I don’t remember too many non-standard items, or changes in the menu. These dinners are the basis of my family’s tradition now, although the sweet potatoes are different, and my mother has an unfortunate predilection for instant mashed potatoes, which are something I never use and boxed stuffing, which I admit I do like sometimes. When I moved back to Canada, I had an orphans’ Thanksgiving (Canadian) with some friends who were away from their families, and altered the menu only by making a different stuffing, with sausage and apples; no salads; and fewer pies, as we were so many fewer to eat them. My family is back down to three again, so we are blessed (or cursed) with turkey dinner leftovers forever--when my mother cooks, she still likes to prepare enough for at least 8 if not 12 people. “Why do we need a 20 lb turkey, Mummy?” “Oh, we’ll have lots of leftovers!” she says brightly. Our turkey dinners are usually just at Christmas now though, as my parents tend to be travelling at Canadian Thanksgiving. My favourite thing about the dinner (if I can’t have Mrs. T’s ambrosia salad) is the turkey sandwich the next day: on white bread, with Miracle Whip, cranberries, and salt and pepper. I suppose I'm pretty open to change
  14. Figures.
  15. Shoot, Lorna! I hadn't been in this forum for a while, and missed your birthday!! Belated best wishes, and your cake looks very good indeed!
  16. Oh, one thing I forgot to mention is the assembly: When I was discussing the assembly of the cake, I had kind of expected to put it together in Vancouver a few days before the wedding, and carry it up to Whistler (an hour away on a curvy road) all in one piece. I expected to need straws or dowels to support the top layer. I decided to keep it separate until the day of, as that gave me one less thing to worry about; I was pretty confident the leaves would run all over the fondant, too. As it happened, it was not very cold out (only decided to snow on the very day of the ceremony) and pretty humid, so I think that was the wise choice. We stored it in the (unheated) garage, and it only had to stay sturdy for about 4 or 5 hours. I think largely because of the tensile strength of that fondant there was no problem with resting the smaller layer on the larger one without any other support. I also think I probably wouldn't do it that way again just because I would be too nervous
  17. I suppose you could if you froze it, but in spite of looking like a solid chunk of chocolate, it's really kind of like a dense mousse, and it melts rather quickly (mmm, butter), so I don't know. The suggestion to make in shorter layers could probably work a little better, although your cooking time would be really quick in that case! The Dede Wilson recipe calls for inserting raspberries into the batter when it's in the pan. I didn't do this as in January, there were no reliable fresh raspberries around, but that would be an option to get more fruit inside the cake.
  18. Whiskey & nerves Wow great demo--love your cake! Amazing work. >>Insert 'clapping hands wildly' smilie faces<< Bravo Bravo!!! ← Oh, Kate, it's so ...basic compared to the lovely cake you made for your daughter! thanks for the kind words though!
  19. I imagine you could. I'm not sure how many layers/how much you would need to get a really smooth finish though? or presumably you could smooth the cake off after taking it out of the pans. I thought about doing that (and removing that ring of butter you can see ) but I didn't want to start losing chunks of the cake, so I did only very basic smoothing. In more recent ones I've made, I've lost a little chunk or two of the bottom (top) of the cake to the parchment lining the pan, also, which then had to be replaced rather carefully. The other thing I imagine that you can do (and I think it's what RLB does for her Art Deco Cake) is put a crumb coat of buttercream or what have you under your final finishing. I wanted it all to be chocolate, so the white chocolate ganache and the white chocolate fondant worked for me.
  20. Next was (after a good chill) putting some ganache down so the fondant would look white. Wendy gave me a recipe for white chocolate ganache in this thread (where there is also all kinds of great advice about fondant). In spite of Wendy's recipe, I managed to get my proportions wrong, and my ganache was way too thin: I cleared the freezer in an attempt to keep the stuff stuck to the cake Then the only thing left was the fondant! I'm afraid my photo-taking took a back seat at this juncture...I have a few, though. The bottom layer: and after smoothing and trimming: After that, they were put in the fridge loosely covered with wax paper, in their carriers. It was OK, as I was living on whiskey and nerves by this point and needed no room for food in my fridge. A few days later, the morning of the wedding, I put it together and put my cute little leaves on: The ivy isn't as odd as it might seem, when you consider that the bride and groom had ivy headpieces: And the cake was presented thusly: I have since made...two or three of these cakes (just the small version), and it's more about taking a little time than anything else. One I made recently had ganache frosting instead of fondant (in a huge rush, hence the sloppy edges, oops): And plated thus: I have no pictures of the wedding cake plated, but I swirled some raspberry sauce on the plate, followed with cake and unsweetened whipped cream. Most everyone even ate the white chocolate fondant, so especially if you want an off-white rather than stark white colour, I highly recommend this.
  21. Making the cake, I wanted to have not just chocolate. I toyed with a few different ideas, but the bride and I settled on chocolate raspberry. Dede Wilson has a chocolate cake in her Wedding Cake book (pictured above) that is based on the RLB recipe, and has exactly the sizes of layers that I was looking for, so when I was actually baking, I followed along with this instead of the RLB book. It was also laid out in a way that was easier for me to follow. But I still had The Cake Bible open on another surface and spent a fair bit of time running back and forth, checking everything! Dede's recipe and photo: This is a really easy cake to make in that there are only four ingredients: chocolate, butter, eggs and liqueur. That means that you shouldn't skimp on the ingredients, because you can really taste the difference. The ratio of chocolate that I ended up with, and which I have used since, is about two parts of Callebaut semisweet to one part Scharffen Berger bittersweet. Per RLB, one TBS of liqueur per pound of chocolate works out well. Before you even begin, you leave your eggs out overnight to warm up (it was winter, so no danger of a too-hot house). Then I measured my chocolate: Then I melted the chocolate and butter in my improvised double-boiler: When the chocolate is melted, you whisk it up and put it aside to cool down a bit. Then you add your liqueur. While that is cooling off, start whipping your eggs, which will take around 5 minutes on high speed: And thank your lucky stars if you have a Kitchen-Aid or similar. For the small layer, only one go was necessary; but for the large one, I had to whip the eggs in two batches. I cracked the eggs into a cup before adding to the bowl, and since I was being completely anal about this cake, I removed (as much as I could) those stringy eggy things, so there wouldn't be any chewy bits in the cake. It has since occurred to me that I could instead have popped them through a small strainer with the same effect. Once your eggs are all whipped, you fold them into the chocolate and butter...it's a bit tricky, so I have no photos of this process. There are two keys, though: one is that they must be well mixed, all one colour; and the other is that you are trying to maintain as much volume as possible, so it behooves you to be gentle. I don't know how better to say it. Once your batter is all mixed up, gently spoon it into the pan, and smooth off the top as best you can. Then put it in a water bath (I handily had the next-size up pan available, which worked out well. Not sure what I would do with the 14 inch layer!) and bake it: And then this is how it looked when it was done: Here are the two cakes, out of the pan, with minimal damage:
  22. Last September, my best girlfriend was up here in Vancouver to suss out some things, go up to Whistler with me to check out locations and chalets for her wedding. For some reason, I had offered to make her wedding cake for her. I had gotten a bunch of books: (excuse my curious kitty, Ilya Kovalchuk) including Rose Levy Beranbaum's The Cake Bible (1988, there seems to be only the one edition). We went through the books, looking at all the gorgeous pictures. There's one important thing I haven't mentioned: I bake quite a few cakes, and they're pretty tasty, but I am not a professional, and I know basically nothing about decoration. So we were extremely limited by my skill level, as what I would have liked to do for her and what I was comfortable promising to do for her were two different things. Luckily for me, this was her second wedding, and she had already had the enormous brouhaha and fancy expensive cake the first time round. This time she wanted something that was more about her than some princess fantasy. She was also very interested in having something rich and dark and chocolate. We came to RLB's Art Deco Cake: (picture, p. 29, description/assembly p. 204, recipe, p. 84). It wasn't exactly what we wanted to do, but conceptually, it was a starting off point for a white cake with green accents, simple but (hopefully) delicious. I kept reading my books. I booked vacation time before the wedding so that I could bake and decorate (oh, yes, and see to my Maid of Honour duties). I came to eGullet, and these wonderful people helped me find my way! I had figured out that I needed fondant. K8memphis shared a recipe, but I was scared to get it wrong since I'd never worked with it before. I bought some Wilton, and tried to find some Pettinice or other better-quality fondant...hard to source where I am in Vancouver. I ended up ordering McCall's White Chocolate Fondant from Toronto, which cost a dollar or two in shipping. It was really good though, so I think it was worth it. Before I got started, I assembled a pile of...stuff. From top left, roughly: Green fondant decorations; a few kg of white chocolate fondant; an oversized keeper; cardboard bases for the layers; more fondant and assorted items for decorating and shaping same; two dozen fresh eggs; two pints of 36% whipping cream; three pounds of the most expensive butter I could afford (around $5/lb); parchment rounds; foam bases; Wilton aluminum pans, 6 in, 10 in, 14 in; a couple of pounds of Callebaut semisweet; 26 oz. of Chambord Royale liqueur; raspberry dessert sauce; more Callebaut ; some lovely Scharffen Berger 70% cocoa solids bittersweet; a squeezy bottle for raspberry sauce. At some point I tried to add it all up and it was decidedly north of $500, but of course many of these items I still have. I can't "demo" the fondant decorations, as I am not very good at it, and I didn't take any photos in progress. What I did was turn some of the Wilton white fondant green (used leaf green (oops) and green and black as they had no moss green at the shop I went to; added some icing sugar to make up for all the gel colour wetting it down; rolled out my fondant, rolled it as heavy as I could with a stencil on top that had different sized ivy leaves; sliced the leaves out of the sheet of fondant with a paring knife following the stenciled outline; smoothed/pinched down the edges of the leaves and added veins with that nifty Wilton vein-maker; let them dry on a curved plastic tube to add some more realism; and then some antique gold lustre dust brushed over top for a little magic. I am blessed with beginner's luck, and they turned out better than I had any right to expect, although you're not likely to see anything quite so amateur on a professional cake: Next up: the actual cake.
  23. I covered a dark chocolate cake with Italian Silk Meringue Buttercream, using about half the butter called for? maybe a bit less. It worked out fine! I'm afraid I didn't take any photos of it cut, but here is a pic of it before decorating. It was tasty, too, sweet but not like supermarket icing. Good luck!
  24. I do most of my drinking at home and at restaurants, rather than bars, but the bar at Bacchus at the Wedgewood has long had a great reputation, Lee. Keeping in the hotel theme, the bar at the Sutton Place Hotel--Gerard?--is supposed to be pretty great; and I have had drinks in the Hotel Vancouver lobby which were pretty nice. There's something that feels so sophisticated about drinking in a hotel bar, somehow. My nod for a pre-prandial cocktail has to go to Parkside, which always has an interesting fresh sheet of luscious libations. My hands-down favourite is the Blood Orange Negroni (in season), with homemade blood orange sorbet. I think they also have the sought-after Plymouth gin, and I know they have an incredible selection of eaux-de-vie for the after-dinner drinking. If you're interested in whiskey, then The Irish Heather is a good place to go. Others can chime in with the fabulous bars, I'm quite out of my depth there.
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