Coloring The City

Cake has officially taken over my life.

Here is a quick photo update of what we’ve been up to at ICE the last few months…

Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting

Raspberry Genoise Cake with Fresh Raspberry Whipped Cream Icing

Raspberry Almond Financiers

Lemon Layer cake with Kirsch Whipped Cream Icing

Chocolate Layer Cake filled with Caramel Whipped Cream and Glazed with Chocolate Ganache

Petit Fours

Dobos Torte (Austrian layer cake iced with chocolate buttercream and topped with caramel glaze)

Yule Log (Rolled Genoise Mousseline cake filled and iced with chocolate buttercream. Meringue mushrooms and buttercream holly berries for decoration – so fun to make!)

I started this blog over a year ago for many reasons. I had a job that wasn’t challenging, no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and I was bored. Now that I don’t remember what being bored feels like (culinary school + full time job = NOT easy as pie), I’ve let this blog slip into the land of things I should probably continue to do, but can’t find the motivation (it’s settled in nicely next to yoga and using conditioner).

I just brushed it off every time someone asked me when I was going to post again, telling them that I was too busy to write the 22 posts to go with all the photos I have on my camera.

But then, last Sunday happened. And Sunday was a bad day. Not for any particular reason other than I was just feeling slightly overwhelmed with life. To prevent a complete breakdown, I did what any normal human would do. I turned off my cell phone, wrapped myself up in a blanket with a cup of coffee on the couch, and proceeded to watch a marathon of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills (watching people who are complete train wrecks never ceases to make me feel better). I also spent a solid 5 hours making playlists on iTunes, which is very relaxing and much cheaper than therapy. Somewhere between Cher’s soulful version of “Walking in Memphis” and Kim Richards’ reminiscent stories about her days as a child star, I decided that if I’m going to make it past this Sunday (drama.) I better start blogging again. Because, after all, it was this blog that made me realize that I wanted to embark on this sugary career path in the first place.

So I should start by catching you up to speed on culinary school. It has been an amazing experience which I am loving every minute of, right down to cleaning blue Crisco buttercream out of 30 Kitchen Aid bowls.

Actually, I didn’t love that, what am I saying?

We are breezing through breads, pies, and puff pastry, and start our third quarter, cakes and cupcakes (yay!) next week! While it’s true that I have been anxiously awaiting the arrival of the cakes and cupcakes, learning how to bake classic apple pies, fruit tarts, croissants and puff pastries has been incredible. French pastries are quickly starting to steal my heart.

Chocolate-glazed eclairs

Espresso-glazed cinnamon doughnuts

Cream Puff

Pain Au Chocolat

Cheese and Plum Danish

Fruit Tart

Apple Pie

On the other hand, baking bread was not for me. All of these recipes turned out to be amazing, and I absolutely loved the first and even the second day of bread baking; but I quickly realized that bread and I had a short-lived romance that could never last. As our chef instructor says “We have to listen to the dough and do what the dough tells us to do.” I’ve never been one to take orders from dough, and I severely lack the patience to wait 4 hours for the dough to rise.

Foccacia

Rustic Country Bread

Baguettes

Cranberry and Lemon Scones

But this is what culinary school is all about I suppose…to figure out what you love and what you don’t. Now that you get the idea of what my life has been all about as of late, I can move on to sharing some looooong over-due photos of my trip to Portland very soon!

It’s true, we did. Or at least it felt like we did.

We started with flour-less souffles. Chocolate, which turned out light and airy and rose impressively above the rim of the ramekin. They were too beautiful to eat. Lucky for my sugar addiction, not so lucky for a frantic pastry chef in a crazy restaurant kitchen, souffles deflate in a matter of minutes, so we had no problem digging into our chocolate masterpieces after snapping a few pics.

Next we made fruit flavored flour-less souffles. This marks the first of probably many disasters for me in the kitchen. My baking partner and I were assigned apple souffles and handed 5 shiny red apples while other groups were handed shiny new cartons of various other fruit purees. We were scrambling to get the apples chopped, cooked and pureed with enough time to whip our eggs whites and bake the souffles. Some where along the way it went terribly wrong and we ended the night with apple flavored meringue, lacking the substance to be called a souffle.

We redeemed ourselves the next day when we successfully created 3 flour-based souffles: chocolate, cheese and orange. All of which were amazing, but the cheese stole the show by far. Only because the Parmesan crusted, Gruyere and parsley wonderful-ness was a welcome departure from all of the sugar.

A few flour-less fruit souffles made by my classmates who didn’t fail miserably: raspberry and peach

Souffles don’t save well, so we couldn’t bring them home to share with our adoring roommates and families. Or as our chef put it we could (with a French/British/Brooklyn accent) “bring it home, cover it with so much whipped cream, you can’t even see the souffle anymore, then eat it. Or throw it away.” So with tears in our eyes, we said good bye to our souffle babies and threw them all away. Sad day.

So sorry for the late Week 4 post, and I’m so so sooooo excited to share week 5 with you! We went on a field trip last night and it was ahhhmazing.

A few weeks ago my company had a cocktail party to say goodbye to a co-worker, who was leaving us to move to New England, and to reward ourselves for all the hard work we’ve been doing…obviously. In the true spirit of nutrition, it was a raw food party. (rawsome!?)

Needless to say, I was a little skeptical at first. Then I walked in and saw this giant raw cake.

My skepticism turned to pure fear.

But THEN I saw the rest of the food and the panic subsided…and vanished completely when I found the organic wine bar. Nothing a good ol’ glass of Pinot Grigio can’t fix, right Ramona Singer?

But in all honestly, the spread of food that our chef, Tama, put together for us had me wishing I was a raw foodist. If I could find some way to use my Kitchen Aid for a raw food diet, I would definitely convert.

Watermelon and Tomato Gazpacho

Crudites

Lentil Salad

Summer Squash with Mango Guacamole

Sushi made with jicama (instead of rice,) filled with carrots and asparagus

Once I decided to buck up and try the cake I was pleasantly surprised. Rest assured, it is still possible to consume massive amount of sugar on a raw food diet…it just comes in the form of coconut, raw chocolate and dates. Not quite as good, but I’ll take it.

This week in class we started transitioning from learning about the kitchen to actually baking things! Although, we did have to watch a video on kitchen sanitation that had me close to tears. Who knew there were so many different kinds of rats and roaches that you have to look out for. Note to self – scrub down every inch of kitchen.

We started every day this week with cornet practice. We made our cornet, which is basically a piping bag, then we filled it with chocolate and practiced our cake decorating skills…mine definitely need some fine tuning. But this is the best that I came up with.

We moved from cornets to an exercise on how to double recipes , which resulted in at least 400 gingersnaps – and lots of happy friends and co-workers.

And the star of the show this week were the Apricot Pate De Fruit (Fruit Jellies.) I absolutely loved making these, I felt like a real chef. We started them on Monday with very specific mixing and boiling instructions, let them sleep in jelly roll pans over night, then popped them out once they were set, cut them into 1 inch squares and rolled them in sugar on Tuesday.

This recipe called for so much sugar and glucose, my baking partner and I vowed we would not eat them and if we did, we wouldn’t like them. False. We ate so many, I was up all night bouncing off the walls. They are so beautiful and delicious and have a wonderfully sweet apricot flavor…and I’m really trying to make these sound amazing because I have 80 of them in my apartment and I need someone to come take them away from me so i don’t od on sugar….anyone?