gfron1

Tonight I reached my limit. I made the Chocolate Toffee Torte. It was good, but it was just too much for me. So much chocolate and so much butter. I really like how she works in crunchy (toffee and nougatine) into her buttercream. This was a dense, moist chocolate cake base, topped with chocolate buttercream and walnut toffee, ganache and ganache creme. I tried to draw a walnut on the top in a denser ganache and my friends couldn't decide if it was a brain or a vagina. Oh well...

Inspired by hummingbirdkiss' mention in the Starting a Sourdough topic, where she talked about the use of juniper berries, I decided since I live in the land of junipers, I would give it a go! To start with I have made a sourdough starter once before. I used organic grapes from our local co-op. Everything went according to plan, but after about 6 months, I got tired of feeding it and looking at the grungy jar, so it was laid to rest. My spouse, however, has nagged me to make bread ever since, but my interests have leaned much more sweetly since that time. But with hummingbirdkiss' mention lingering in my mind I set off to collect the berries. Now, if I'm going to do it, I'm going to give it my all. I decided to hike up our highest peak and gather the berries off of the top of the mountain, that way I could call it Bear Mountain Sourdough (nice ring, huh!). As many great tales begin...it was a dark and stormy day. Not really a day recommended for climbing a mountain. But I did. My pups and I loaded up a small sack and decided to race the rain. Curiously, the weather wasn't too bad going up, but there was enough humdity in the air that I noticed the smells that are normally lost to our daily dryness. The smells (and this is no exaggeration) were of grocery store baking bread! A good omen I thought. I got 2/3 up the mountain making very good time, and the scent shifted just a bit. I've learned to pay attention to my nose up in the mountains because my dogs are surely smelling the same thing, and they love to chase animals. This scent was unmistakably - bear. Not good. I saw a bit of fresh scat, and some tree scratchings so we just started singing Valderi, Valdera loudly enough that it would scare off any animal. But the scent got stronger. I assumed we were following the bear (and he was probably wondering why we were chasing it singing a stupid song). I hit the summit, logged in the summit journal, and pulled out my ziplock. I quickly filled it with a dozen juniper berries - the biggest, plumpest, whitest ones I could find. I did my best to not knock off any of the natural yeast that coated the berries. I didn't even know this was yeast until hummingbirdkiss told me. Not even a minute after picking the berries, the thunder started roaring like a loud bear (the comparison to the forbidden fruit was not lost on me). My dogs are used to hiking with me, and we've been in some tight spots before so I'm sure they understood clearly when I said, "We need to get off this mountain right now." And we did, we ran as fast as the trail allowed down the path. The thunder kept getting louder and the rain started to fall. All scent was gone now - no bear, no bread...had I destroyed the garden of knowledge?! (This will seem anti-climatic) Then we got to the car and drove home incident free. I went to the kitchen and pulled out my materials. I used hummingbirdkiss' formula of 1 C. flour, 1 C. water and 6-8 berries. I covered the jar with saran wrap with small holes cut in it and kept it in a warm place. One week later I had this: A good start (or starter in this case). Two days after that I had this: This was looking really good! But then things fizzled as I tried to feed it. Now, nearly a month later I have this: Don't be confused by the bubbles, they're from me pouring into a new jar moments before the picture. I have a good sour-smelling pancake batter. So that is my story as of today. I'm looking forward to a resurrection of sorts with this starter. Any ideas?

From www.desertusa.com The fruit in my area are still green, so I'll be patient for now. All of the recipes I'm finding are focused on the juice. I'll try some, but I wonder if I can cook/fry/dry the fruit and pipe a filling into the center. We'll see.

I don't usually use this word, but that very first picture is GLORIOUS! Man, that looks good. I've never made baklava because it seemed like too much work, but your version looks very manageable. Thanks for posting it.

I typically use Kerrygold or Lurpak. Sometimes I have an imported French butter. For the pith above I used Kerrygold.

We're having a pretty good monsoon season which means that our prickly pears are getting very plump. Has anyone processed these before? When are they "ripe"? Can you do anything besides jelly with them? Tips for dethorning?

Nope - I have a higher level of trust with my sushi chef than I do the guy behind the fish counter at my local grocery store.

I believe its on their website, but I had the full tour plus the upgraded wine and it was around $600 per person with a generous (slightly alcohol induced) tip.

Sorry...its a family story how her kids used to call it that. There were no birdseeds harmed in the making of that cake.

Or...I've seen people make chocolate boxes which are just panels "glued" together - might fit the individual chocolates better.

Great cupcake Joe - it looks huge (I'm assuming that's just the effects of the closeup. It also looks like its in a camoflouge paper I made Amernick's Birdseed Cake. Full write up here.

I thought I would never get this one done! Life has gotten in the way of my dessert making, but I finally finished the Birdseed Cake. This is the cake that the book says launched her career. Its my favorite type - multi-day/multi-component - high payout. I have got to say this is the best cake I've ever had in my mouth. Maybe that's an overstatement, but really, I can't remember anything with this many great components working together. The buttercream (I've only made buttercream a few times) is so incredibly silky, and the nougatine was a perfect addition to add texural character. So here it is: The cake is chocolate almond genoise. The bottom layer is soaked with rum syrup, topped with chocolate buttercream, another layer of genoise soaked with rum syrup, ganache, more genoise soaked with kirsch syrup, plain buttercream with crushed almond nougatine, the final layer of genoise, covered in light chocolate buttercream. For me this was great because it helped me resolve my simple syrup soaking phobia. And was my first buttercream decorated dessert (I've used it in other desserts but not as the exterior decoration). I would love to spend a week with a pastry chef and learn/practice basic decorating skills...but that's for another time.

Flattery will get you everywhere with me I've tried a few different Madras Curry blends. The brand is not important because the sweetness of the marshmallow will tame whatever spicyness occurs. If you don't have any type of madras curry, then pull a recipe from the internet and it will work just as well. I'm not sure what you are asking about the "minus the vanilla" recipe. If you haven't already, make sure you check out the marshmallow topic which has a wealth of information. Cheers.

Here is my posting on it: Project #1 Project #2 Of all the desserts I've made, these are consistently the most favorably received.

The conversion to black is very simple. On your layer, magic wand the background - not the color. Now click INVERSE - you should now have all of your color selected. FILL: Black Give it a try.

I'm not sure why you're not getting your layers - again under the layer option in the top of the page toolbar, you'll see NEW LAYER. But, your way is almost as good. The downside to your system is how you could easily test for blank space - make your background color a hideous, bright color that will shine through your layers when they are all visible.

Okay - I'm doing sloppy work here for time's sake...Here is an Orange layer. [disclaimer: If a Photoshop expert wants to step in and offer an easier solution, no offense will be taken] Do a SELECT ALL of your original image so you can come back to it later. Then, select the color that you want - in my case orange. Use the technique above to grab all of the areas that you want. Go to SELECT: INVERSE: delete or cut. Everything but that color should be gone. You've made it this far before. Now, under LAYER: NEW: LAYER. You've just saved it as a layer. You can go back to your original layer and PASTE the original image that you copied. Repeat until you have all the layers you want. How does this do for you? Again, when I've screened, I've had to convert each color to black for the film to burn. EDITED TO ADD: This process (after selecting your areas) took less than 20 seconds - so its not as cumbersome as it might read.

Okay...so here's my response to what I thought was the question since I just did a little playing. Below are two alterations that I did. 1. Taking the green and getting rid of it. This was done with 75 tolerance which proved to be too tolerant...you'll have to have patience to select all of the area without grabbing the black apparently (hold shift while you select multiple areas). Then I did another options called FILL which allows you to change the color - great feature for screen printing because you can make your desired space fill as black which will better transfer to the screen as you're burning the film. On this I filled with orange after using the INVERSE option. Now to your real question. All you're going to do is create a new layer on the layer palette and save it. Copy and paste after magic wanding. And John suggested wanding for this image, but others the lasso might be more useful.

If you're just going for 'disappear' then all you have to do is hit 'delete.' If you're going for transparency...that's a different matter. (BTW, this is my 1,000th post - woo hoo!)

Often times eGullet topics are better than cookbooks, so here's a good starting point for you Wedding Cake Questions

I'm a regular Photoshop user and John's explanation is correct. The only challenge you'll find with that is removing or replacing colors often times won't blend well. For the sake of screen printing you have to think in solid colors, so when you set your tolerance, you'll want the number fairly high (50-100) to include the halftones. If any of this makes sense great - if not, tell us to slow down even more.

I'm bumping this topic as an extension to my search for malt ball texture. I have my bag of TapMalt finally. I'm trying to make a chicklet sized after dinner mint that is pressed powder wrapped in a skin. The powder, I am thinking, will be basically chocolate mint ice cream with TapMalt. I'll use the proportions mentioned in this topic and report back. Any final advice or warnings? Also, I'm assuming that when I had the powdered browned butter at Alinea, this is how they did it. Thanks.

Steve - Welcome to the forum! With a request that specific, we expect some great posts from you

It seems to me this is going to become a question of how much of your soul you're willing to sell!? Puffy...well that suggests shortening, so you can compromise and do a mix of shortening and butter. And for the coconut...are you willing to use extract? If not, what about some of the coconut liquors (heat to remove alcohol if you wish). Another thing you might try is storing your flour with coconut for a while - maybe even split a fresh coconut, dry it out real well and store your flour (or maybe just the sugar) in the shell.

How many people are we talking here? How adventurous are they willing to be? For surreal I would go Dali-esque and hang pasta off of pasta drying trees with a pool of sauce below. I would probably avoid the Andalousian Dog reference of having needles in sheep eyeballs however