Panaderia Canadiense

I do hot cross buns in large quantities, with Seville orange marmalade; I'll probably also do oatmeal-date sandwich cookies (wedding cookies) and little birds made from sweet challah bread. Oh, and just because I'm a bit of a contrarian, I'll also make hamentaschen.

If it makes you feel better, I won't be eating cuy (guinea-pig) this time around. Easter is a massive food festival here that features more on the pig, soup, and salt-fish end of the spectrum. I will most definitely continue to eat from the food carts (I have actually never seen a food truck in the country!) Street food is part of what makes eating here such a vibrant experience!

Eat them until we burst and are so sick of Rambutan that we never want to see another one (until maybe next season)? They're delicious.

Yes, it's me! But I am yet to have baked a Minion cake, dear friends…. That's my Ovaltine jar in that photo, along with my hot chocolate and coffee jars. I'd like to apologize over the salt fish photo - I didn't realize I'd posted that one here before, and it almost gave the game away before it started! As some enterprising guessers pointed out, it's not "true" bacalao (although I will be showing you the real thing, as well as Mero - there's a huge festival of bacalao sales on the starting Sunday). Pictured in the teaser, for the largest part, is salted black rock sole. And finally, kbjesq, those hairy red horrors are Rambutan, not Lychee. It's currently Rambutan season, and people are selling them out of wheelbarrows at 35-40 fruits for $1. When we hit the peak of the season that can go up to 60/$1.

If you don't want that, please ship it to me! It's a round-bottomed double-boiler top designed to fit into small pots.

My sentiments exactly - and that was a huge cake, 35cm to a side.

Taking it down to the theatre on the bus was…. interesting. A lot of people staring. Thankfully, this country's fairly cool about such things, and a lot of them probably ended up at the performance, so it was good advertising.

For International Women's Day, my local women's theatre collective staged an interactive version of the Vagina Monologues. They had me make them this cake as a set piece, to be shared with the audience after the performance. The thing was such a roaring success that they're staging a second performance next weekend - apparently there was less than standing room only and another 70 or so people waiting outside the theatre who couldn't get in. So I'll have to make another one then.

Smørgaslunch…. The neat thing is that apart from the olives, everything on the table was produced locally.

Bienvenido, desde Ecuador!

Well, the market has been rebuilt, but I haven't made it back yet! However, my new next door neighbour's brother is part of the country's fleet of artisan fishermen, and every Friday night she gets in an assortment of single-person-serving sized fish, which she dredges in herb flour and fries up on her front porch and sells to the neighbourhood. Last night's example was a perciforme of some sort; she said that most of what came in this week were "stripy fish" but it bore little similarity in flavour or shape to the Rayado I've shown upthread. It was delicious no matter what - the photo makes it look a bit more cylindrical than it actually was; this fish was the closest in shape and flavour to actual ocean Perch I've eaten thus far. For the curious, the sides were shredded lettuce and some kind of mashed yuca with spices thing.

A few simpler cakes from the past few weeks. For Valentine's Day, celebrated in Ecuador as Day of Love and Friendship, a Death by Chocolate filled with Manjar de Leche, and a Coconut Chiffon filled with Bing Cherry Preserves. Just because, an Orange-Spice filled and covered with orange-amaretto bittersweet cream ganache A Tiramisu 3-layer cake And finally, les pieces-de-resistance: Raspberry Cream Cheesecake and Baileys-Moccaccino Cheesecake. Those are mocha buttercream filled semisweet bonbons.

Pan Injerto (literally, "grafted bread") - this is a typical style from Ambato, although I use blue corn and quinua-herb challahs instead of the more traditional simple pan de agua and pan de yema (water and yolk breads, which despite their names are also styles of challah). It came out really well - good loft and excellent crumb.

Go ahead with the bleached - its characteristics in bread making aren't sufficiently different from unbleached to throw off the recipes. The difference is one of nutrition, not of handling.

I've never been able to get caramel to freeze right solid, but I've gotten it slow enough that it was easy to do a two-piece hollow moulding containing it….

Perhaps the key lies in freezing each half of the chocolates once the caramel has been piped in, then assembling them once it's if not solidly frozen at least sluggish enough that it won't run out. Either that, or if you don't want to risk the temper of your shells, make small balls of frozen caramel and install those instead of using liquid.

Death by chocolate cake for a super-thrilled 3-year old.

My city traditionally gives up meat of all forms. Consequently, I sell a *lot* of vegetarian empanadas in this 40-day period.

Big challah altar breads, for the Christmas midnight mass at our cathedral - the new Bishop apparently grilled his support staff to find out who had done the Easter loaves. Some various and assorted bagels; I'm really digging the new rye recipes my great-aunt sent me lately - the rise is epic. I wish I had crumb shots but these were all spoken for.

@Kim Shook - That cake is making me drool on the keyboard. And I know the cocoa you're talking about - it's the non-Dutched kind. The omission of the alkalization step in the processing of black cocoa is what allows it to take on its natural deep colour. (Incidentally, this is the only type of cocoa I use.)

He was there when I did the delivery - and he was dressed like Darth Maul and jumping up and down for joy. I exceeded his expectations, no mean feat when those were set by last year's Smaug the Dragon cake.

Of all my clients, I think I like the kids the best. Ollie is turning 10 today, and he's a wonderful little Star Wars fanboy already. This is an orange spice cake under the orange-flavoured fondant, with a hidden core of mocha IMBC in bombé style. Yes, I realize I'm severely mixing my trilogies. Yes, those are gumpaste Tie-Fighter candle-holders. And yes, I just had to do the planet-killer death-ray pyrotechnics test for myself….

I'm an "eat the local stuff" kind of traveller - I generally resolve to try almost everything at least once, and then repeat the stuff I like. Market food? Bring it on! Street vendor? Yes, please! Grocery store? It's even more fun if I don't have a grasp of the language! Fancy-pants 5-star restaurant? Probably not - that food isn't going to be as interesting as what I'll get in a hole in the wall mom-and-pop operation, because "fine dining" has become a sort of standardized international experience. At the same time, I am completely guilt-free if I'm craving a KFC - and I'm routinely surprised by what makes it onto their international menus.

Another thing to consider: if you're working with anything other than 100% wheat, the pre-ferment can do more than just add flavour, it can also drastically improve other characteristics. For example, I have a poolish that I'm about to turn into about a dozen honey and whole-wheat loaves. Apart from the space this saves me (pre-fermenting the entirety of that much dough is impossible - my kitchen simply doesn't have the cold space) making the pre-ferment allows me to integrate golden pea flour, which requires extensive pre-hydration but properly handled adds worlds of flavour and texture to the finished bread, into the recipe in such a way that it doesn't bitter or dry out the final product. Equally, for ale-hydtrated ryes, it allows the flour to interact with the liquids in ways that aren't possible with short exposure. And Edward J mentions corrosion factors: as a commercial baker, you haven't lived until your fridge blows a coil and decompresses all its coolant into your doughs, utterly ruining a day's work. The cost of replacing the coils is the reason I do ambient-temperature pre-ferments for 99% of my doughs now. This moves a bit faster than a chilled pre-ferment, but that's less of an issue for me than it might be for other bakers, just based on the styles of bread I produce.

If $5-$6 is the ceiling, I'm really digging La Bamba winery's Chenin Blanc as well as their Malbec and their Cabernet Sauvignon. I have no idea on pricing or availability of those bottles outside of Latin America, though….