Panaderia Canadiense

I've been crazy busy and thus not eating terribly well (there's no way I was going to show you cold pizza and yuca chips with a side of hot sauce, or any of the other atrocious things I eat when I'm otherwise preoccupied!). However, the last couple of days have produced dinners worthy of this thread Major volcanic eruption has a way of slowing down my business. In that vein, I'd like you to know that if I disappear for a week or so, it's because the eruption has affected the hydro dam at the foot of the volcano, and I'm without electricity. Don't worry about me - I'm far enough from the volcano not to be affected by lava, lahar, or pyroclastic debris. Everybody else is showing such amazing things (I'm looking at you, C. sapidus, mm84321, Norm, and Patrick) that I'm feeling kind of plebian and down home, but hot-damn if it wasn't tasty. Panfried tilapia in ritz-crumb and parmesan breading, 4-cheese mac'n'cheese, steamed veg, obligatory asparagus. And, lending credence to the idea that sometimes the things that look the worst taste the best: roast chicken reheats in fresh sage gravy over sourdough/7-grain stuffing and mashed potatoes, side of carrots and peas. This photo actually makes it look better than it did in life, which is unusual.

Well! The bride with the cascading fuchsias cake changed her mind! Now it's a fairy forest for 400 on 4 flavours of shamrock-shaped cake. This is probably the largest cake I've ever undertaken to decorate; the sugar things that I put on it will be taken by guests for mementoes of the event, so there have to be at least 300 figures worthy of that. So, I'm calling on y'all for inspiration here. I'm making fairies and mushrooms and whatnot, but I need some inspiration for mythical critters and other assorted fairy forest denizens that I could be sculpting out of gum paste for this cake. There will be a bridge to hold the bride and groom figurines, which will apparently be gnomes; I am certain that there's a troll under the bridge but that's as far as I've gotten. I will be making varied flavours of gum paste - neutral/sugar, strong mint (think Altoids), lemon zest, clove (this is for the troll and the gnomes), sweet almond, white vanilla, and coconut. I'm using gum paste in place of pastillage for its slightly longer open time with which to sculpt. Here's the best of what I've got so far; I'll post the first of the fairies once her gelatine wings are set. If you'd like to see the mushrooms, I can stage 'em and take a picture. Some of them have eyes. Curiously strong mint dragon Neutral sugar frog

Do you mean barrel LEES? Because must does not exist in a barrel ... Yes, lees. Apologies - I spent most of that day speaking Spanish and Kichua, and my English took a while to fire back up, obviously. I still find it unconsionable.

I'd like to ask winemakers how they can concience selling their barrel musts to Ecuador for the production of some truly horrendously awful sloosh wines.

Thanks, flourgirl! It was quite a blast to make it as well (although I'm not going to tell you how many of those gumpaste orchids I broke before getting the six I used.....) Is it wrong that although I know IMBC is the correct acronym for that icing, I still want to write it as ICBM (intercontinental ballistic meringue)?

I'm in the camp that says there's no wrong approach to plating - it's food. Put it in your mouth! Whether it's artistically pleasing or not is secondary to why you're at the restaurant in the first place, namely, to eat. Like Liuzhou, some of the tastiest things I've ever eaten looked like cat yukk in a bowl, and I'm actually a great advocate of plating things onto leaves or into edible food platforms. The slate thing doesn't bother me one bit, nor do boats made of banana leaf, or any of the other rather imaginative ways I've had food served to me at high-end places. It's all part of the experience, and quite frankly if I'm going to get food poisoning it will more likely be from the questionable things I eat from street carts, which are generally served in baggies that start off sterile. I'm more perturbed by the trend of plating smaller and smaller portions on larger and larger plates. I understand what the chef/food artist is going for in those cases (a sort of Mies van der Rohe "less is more" thing, I suspect), but I'm likely to be disturbed that it was so tasty and gone so quickly, and in some cases it also results in what should have been a warm dish being served cold. That, in my opinion, is inexcusable.

Is there any way to repair it in the same way you'd repair a broken ganache (ie by stirring a small amount of milk into it in order to re-emulsify?) If not, I'd say write it off and make a note next to your recipe to the effect that "no matter how rushed you are, never ever double this recipe" - I have several such notes in my cookbooks reminding me that hurrying confections will end in tears.

Can you get your hands on some queso fresco and epazote? That's a lovely combo with frijole negro refrito.....

Have you considered using Limocello as a sweetening agent for absinthe-based drinks? It strikes me that a Lemon Fairy would be quite tasty (I'll report back as soon as my latest batches of both liqueurs have aged sufficiently). Edited to correct atrocious spelling.

It's surprising what even a thousand feet can do in terms of how batters and doughs behave.... Up here, I use far less soda, slightly more powder, and a lot more fat.

Tiered apple-walnut-raisin moist spice cakes with manjar de leche IMBC and gumpaste flowers. For a christening (hence the little angel figurine).

Cut me a little slack - I've just gotten up! I was at that event until about 5 pm, and then I had to make wedding cake samples (see the cake wreck thread for more on how that went....) This is the first moment I've had to show you what the cakes actually ended up as. The clients were more than impressed.

It's winter here. Humidity stays steady at about 20% unless it's raining, but as I noted above the weather doesn't change rapidly here. And at 10,000 feet, you'd better bet that all of my recipes have been adjusted for altitude! The first time I tried to bake up here, it was a far worse cake wreck than what's shown above.

I am. I made the recipe again in a springform, and it was also an epic fail which tells me that yesterday was not a day for cake, or for that recipe (and yes, I'm 10000% sure that the right amount of flour went in!)

I have a gas oven. The verniers are the jets on the oven floor from which the flame issues; given the amount of time that the oven's been on lately in proportion to its age, it's probably time to replace them - they're generally only good for so many hours before they start to burn out between the perforations, which can cause heat spikes. And that's a prime example of me reaching for the correct Spanish term before the English one, which is (I believe) "gas element" or some similar. I've always called that particular oven part a vernier, though.

Possible, but not probable - I autopilot bake quite often, and have found that by putting my soda and powder in two very different jars, I almost never cross-leaven anymore. Heat spike, though, is a definite possibility - I need to replace the verniers in my oven, and I've been too busy to do it. Another possibility, now that I think about it, is that I slightly overmeasured the milk. Or perhaps it's just not going to work in silicone today! Ugh, so many possibilities.

This is normally one of the most reliable cake recipes I have; it's an amaretto-espresso cake that's so simple that I can make it in my sleep. Any ideas why it did this rather than caking up correctly as it normally does? The moulds were filled to 1/2 full, which should have left plenty of room for expansion. All is not lost - the cake is actually cooked properly and will become some version of Darienne's "cake doohickeys". But that's not what I was shooting for! (ps - at 10,000 feet, my barometric pressure doesn't vary more than about 50 millibars between sunny and cloudy days, and rapid weather changes don't happen here.)

Gum paste Oncidium orchids, for a christening cake (full effect to be posted once assembled on-site). I also did Callas and triple Azaleas for the same cake, but they're not nearly as impressive as the orchids are.... This is the beginning of the paste flower run for the wedding season; expect to see more native orchids and other complex native flowers in coming weeks. (One cake will have cascading paste fuchsias from one tier to another). For scale - these are life-size.

Thanks to all of you! I did this last night with about 4 oz of manjar heated to 25 C so I could get it out of the tub, added at the end of the process (when I'd normally be putting in vanilla or other essence-based flavours). It worked beautifully, has a strong manjar flavour (partially due to my using panela for the syrup base, which lends a nice note of burnt caramel), and has held its sculpted shape on the cakes very well. Plus I had to really restrain myself from eating it by the spoonful! jmacnaughtan - I've always had a horrible time with crème anglaise; the eggs either scramble or fail to emulsify. However I'm a big fan of syrup meringues, and the yolks I leave behind never go to waste anyhow. (It would be impossible given the amount of bread I produce).

With that much whole grain, you might want to investigate sourdough leavening in place of the poolish. It's a little slower but you get a great rise from it, and it works beautifully with whole wheat and other high-bran grains without having to add much by way of extra gluten.....

Presumably, but then again I put so much rum into my rumballs that they're essentially unperishable, kind of like a 6-month brandied fruitcake.

If the new cake doodads have the same rum content as the old ones, at least a week.

For me, the dislike comes from the texture of the tripes, rather than anything to do with its function in the animal (I'll happily eat liver pates!) I've only had properly prepared tripes two or three times in my life, and in those instances it was fabulous. However as far as my palate goes it's very hard to get tripe right. I agree with Dick - the "hated more than loved" thing is a very narrow statement; I can tell you that in Latin America it's actually more popular than the meat of the same animals. Guatita, Guata, Menudo, 31, and a host of other dishes are both extremely popular and widely available; they use everything from chicken innards through pork tripes and finally 31 is beef intestines and other tripes.

You're going for the kind of soft, ripe fried plantain with a bit of caramelization on the outside, yes? They're not so much fried as they are lightly poached in a bit of water and then finished by sauteeing in the frypan. You also have to start with really ripe plantains - you can't do this with greenies. Slice or simply peel your plantain, then toss it into a frypan with at least 1" of water, and poach with a lid on until the plantain has turned golden. Then remove it from the pan, drain off the water (or reserve it and use it as a base for Sancocho!), add some butter or oil to the pan, and get it sizzling. The plantains go into that and are sauteed until they've developed their caramel. That's the Ecuadorian trick for it; Colombians would cook those plantains in the soup.

I missed this the first time around. Those are Alfajores, sounds like Alfajores Clasicos if coconut wasn't involved.