patris

Thanks - I won’t get to the glaze firing stage for at least another week or two, so you’re all good. I’m happy to take payment when I bring the bowls to Tomric on the Thursday of the conference weekend. Cash is preferable, but checks are ok if necessary. I also have Apple Pay (the thing where you can text people money - I just recently learned about it and it kind of blows my mind) and the Cash app if those work for anyone.

My recent Danish pastry project reminded me that I really love making laminated doughs - almost as much as I love eating them. This week’s project: croissants and pain au chocolat with Joe Pastry’s recipe:

Ooooh this is very generous of you. I was just going to wing it - thank you!

You (and @Tri2Cook and @ChocoMom) are very, very bad influences. Now I am obsessed with the idea! This weekend I shall give it a shot.

I have been known to change a tire or two in my lifetime - I am a woman who prides herself on her ability to do things like that. As for the urine issue, I may leave that to others! To keep this on topic, I am still hoping that coffee season returns this spring, as I will eternally regret not snapping up some of last year's Vietnamese Coffee Caramels to set aside for @Anna N, as I think they would be right up her alley.

My lawn is pretty weedy, and there's plenty of room in my driveway!

I have an irrational aversion to cold liquid dairy, but for me, with a cup of coffee, they hit spots I wish I didn't know I had!

Amen to that. I love those little cakes - so much so that I will no longer allow myself to buy them, because one bite leads too quickly to an empty package - and a trip to get more. I am not good at rationing.

Got it. I shouldn't have any trouble accommodating the orders I've received so far for delivery at the workshop, and can probably handle several more. Thanks!

In flagrante delicious!

I must say I am overwhelmed and delighted with the response to the bowls! I finally had an opportunity to put together some more information and options. Because I am making these in a private studio with limited hours available each week, I would be grateful to have all orders in by next Sunday, March 25, so that I can plan the workflow and have them ready for the workshop weekend. If there is any interest beyond that, we can always arrange shipping. First, here is the final design: t Each bowl will come with 3 two-inch silicone bands to serve as the scraping surface (I’m including the extras in case the first one breaks or eventually stretches out. Further replacements can be got via Amazon). There will be slight variations in size and shape, as happens with handmade items; however, they will all hold in the neighborhood of 500 to 600 grams of chocolate quite comfortably. You can choose your glaze from the photo below - just PM me with the number. Some glazes are not appropriate for this type of piece, so they do not have numbers. All are microwave and dishwasher safe. The bowl at the top of this post is #7, FYI. I should also mention that there will be variations in the color and intensity of the glazed bowls, due to the vagaries of glaze mixing and the fickle nature of the kiln gods. I also wanted to offer the option to add a surface texture - if you choose one, it would be an extra $10. These textures also work better with some glazes than others, as noted on the photo. If interested, let me know which texture when you let me know which glaze. Thank you!

You’re most welcome! I do add citric acid to all the fruit flavors - a bit less for sweeter fruits like cherry and strawberry. I have a real tart tooth, so I like a bit of an edge.

I had a little marshmallow side hustle for a few years some time ago, and we did a bunch of fruit flavors. I never did get a robust strawberry flavor, but we did passionfruit, raspberry, cherry, orange and lime with good success. Here's the basic recipe I came up with, which fills a (well-greased, nonstick) 9X13 pan about an inch to an inch and a quarter high, or a half-sheet pan about three-quarters of an inch: Bloom: .75 oz gelatin in 4 oz fruit puree (we did passionfruit, raspberry, cherry) or fruit juice (we did orange and I have done lime and pomegranate since then) Cook to 240 F: 16 oz sugar 7 oz light corn syrup 4 oz puree or juice 1/4 to 1/2 tsp citric acid Beat into bloomed fruit/gelatin Beat on high until max volume achieved - 7 minutes? I always looked for lots of strings of marshmallow to form between beater and bowl. The flavor probably did fade a little over time, but it was so intense that I don't think they suffered much overall. One note on the orange - getting the right juice was tricky. At first it always came out more like very soft taffy than marshmallow, but we tried a bunch of different brands and eventually ended up finding that we needed a not-from-concentrate, no-pulp juice (it was a long time ago but I think we used Florida's Best or Tropicana). My suspicion was that there was a lot of oil from the orange peels in the other brands and it interfered with aeration, but who knows.

Our staff breakfast was this morning, and the danish were a hit. Of course I forgot to take pictures of the iced and plated final product, but I did remember to snap a (rather poor) shot of them before I closed up the boxes after baking and cooling last night. Bear claws and cheese diamonds in the foreground, and more bear claws and pinwheels with Bonne Maman four fruits preserves in the background. Joe Pastry's recipe was terrific - lovely dough to work with. I had a few bear claws open up on me, but that was the only real technical issue. I refreshed them briefly this morning in a 250 degree oven with a pan of hot water on the lower oven rack for humidity and they tasted freshly-baked.

I got it at Home Goods some years ago - it’s from David Burke’s line.

As the Easter season approaches, @Kerry Beal and I wanted to pass along some information so you can be alert to the health of the Peeps in your local store. Earlier this evening we visited the Peeps display at Wegmans and found that they are being kept in conditions that are nothing short of alarming. The whole colony was clustered around a cooler, leading some to express their concerns about ambient humidity in a manner that truly puts the “pee” in Peeps: Others, overwhelmed with their predicament, have found that their little heads are simply shriveling under the weight of it all:

Barring some sort of injury or clay shortage there will be enough, and with so much advance notice I should be able to get them all fired in time! In the next week or so I will post photos with glaze color and surface decoration options, and everyone can PM me with their choices. @Kerry Beal is coming in later today for a visit and I’m going to rope her into testing them with me to make sure the design is solid before I enter production mode. I’m tickled that people are interested!

Thanks so much! I think I might know where my Friberg is but I'll let you know if I can't find it. IIRC his recipe calls for margarine instead of butter, which was the only thing that turned me off about it.

Hoping I won't get in trouble for a post more about what I'm planning to bake, but I am seeking a bit of advice. Next week Thursday we are having a breakfast at work and before I realized what I was doing I offered to make Danish pastries. For 50 people. To be served at 9 am. It's not the dough that troubles me; I've made it a few times before, each time successfully. I'm perfectly comfortable with laminated doughs and usually, the more complicated the project the happier I am. I'm mostly worried about timing, as I will be busy Monday and Tuesday after work, and am having dinner guests on Wednesday (informal, and planning to order in, but my attention will be divided.) Can any of you with more experience in production baking take a look at my plan and let me know if it looks reasonable? Sunday - make the dough, form the pastries (thinking diamonds, rounds and bearclaws), freeze them unfilled - but wondering if it would be smarter to fill the bearclaws before freezing Tuesday night - move them from freezer to fridge on sheet pans Wednesday after work - fill, bake, cool Wednesday before bed - pack in large cake boxes (half sheet) - debating whether it would be necessary to overwrap in plastic or whether they would keep just in the box Thursday - take pastries, icings and almond flakes to work, ice/decorate and serve Key questions are: - do I need to up the yeast in the recipe at all? Planning to use this recipe from joepastry.com unless I can unearth my copy of Bo Friberg's Professional Pastry Chef from my baking and pastry certificate program 20 years ago. I am concerned that a stint in the freezer will retard the yeast even more than it will be stunted in an enriched dough. - should I proof the shaped pieces before freezing or after? Thank you to anyone with the knowhow and patience to answer - I promise I'll post the results before they get eaten!

The wire will definitely be removable, and the bowls can be used for anything you like - the notches are quite small. I’m trying to figure out the glaze color situation - I may post a photo of available options and have people choose. I should have that figured out in the next week or so.

Sending you an email!

I seem to have taken on a great many baking projects lately. Today’s effort was decorated cutout cookies (Stella Parks’ recipes for both cookies and royal icing) for a colleague’s baby shower this week. This is only my second attempt at royal icing, so I am pretty happy with the result.

Let me know if anyone is interested - if so I will need to get to work, as firings can be unpredictably timed!

I did the same thing and finally resorted to asking him on Instagram because I just HAD to make them. They’re from Chocolate World - CW 1847.

I searched for an appropriate topic for this and this seemed the best fit. A while ago @Kerry Beal and I were talking about an ideal little pottery bowl for small-scale chocolate dipping. We were both keen on the idea of having a wire or string stretched across the bowl, much like the cake leveler trick popularized by @Chris Hennes many years ago, to scrape excess chocolate off the dipping fork. I set to work in the pottery studio and came up with a couple promising designs - both would hold probably 600 grams of chocolate max, and I left a bit of extra clay toward the bottom to help them hold heat for longer working time. They finally got fired and I picked them up today. The blue and grey one has notches on the foot ring to hold the “wire” (just I waxed dental floss in this instance), and the rust one has little knobs on the sides to wrap the wire around and keep it taut. As prototypes, they work great. With a few refinements and the right wire, they’ll be a great addition to my chocolate toolkit.