"There is one thing I will show you today that, alone, will be worth any money you spent to be here."
That's part of the script I recite at the beginning of each basic cake decorating workshop I've taught through Skillshare.com in San Francisco.
That "one thing", as you may recall from this post from 2011, is a genius technique for filling a piping bag, using plastic wrap. I am still as excited about this as the first time I tried it, and can't even imagine having ever done it any other way.
So without further ado, I'm proud to present, as promised, my first ever video tutorial: "The Easiest Way to Fill a Piping Bag." Enjoy!
First, despite the mocking tone I took in an earlier post, I finally pulled the trigger on the banana holder from Daiso. As it turns out my husband and I take bananas on the road with us fairly often. And I've ended up with banana mush in my purse one too many times. This purchase was long overdue.
Banana snack, now properly protected.
Okay that's not really my first piece of exciting news. The real reason I was at Daiso was to pick up supplies for my first cake decorating workshop!
3 pastry cutters
3 bench scrapers
I'm offering my workshop through a neat Web site, Skillshare.com, where, as its name suggests, anyone can sign up to teach, or learn, a new skill, in person, with other like-minded people.
This week, I spent hours shopping, organizing my game plan, preparing all my equipment, baking ten 6-inch cakes, and making 5 batches of Swiss meringue buttercream frosting (phew) for my students to use on their very own ruffle or rosette-covered cake. Check out the workshop description here.
Shabby chic?
With only three hours to share everything I know, and walk three students through the process from start to finish, I set about to do a timed dry run at home. But my designated "test student" bailed. So in an effort to recreate the pressure of being watched, I conducted my demos in front of a rolling camera!
Quick cameo in my cake leveling and torting demo
And that's the second piece of exciting news. My new goal this month is to brush up on my editing skills (I already took one refresher course last night - offered on Skillshare, of course) so I can start posting video tutorials on line. YouTube is one of the first places I go when I want to learn something new. Maybe someone out there will be excited to learn something from me, in person or online.
If you're reading this blog, you're probably the type of person who knows that National Ice Cream Month is in full swing.
Or perhaps you caught one of the countless segments about this all-important issue on most every morning news and talk show some time in the past three weeks?
I don't miss those crazy PR blitzes from my days as a morning show producer, but this is a pitch at which I would have happily bit.
It's clear that National Ice Cream Month was dreamed up by the dairy industry in a bid to boost sales, and I've certainly done my part to help. One summer in college, I inadvertently observed an almost all ice cream diet and ended up losing more than a few pounds.
What I'd do for a Wegmans in SF...
This year, on National Ice Cream Day (the third Sunday in July) my family and I appropriately found ourselves at a dairy farm in Woodstock, Vermont.
My nephew getting a lesson on where ice cream comes from.
Dukan Diet be damned - of course I also had to sample the local offerings. I wondered how I spent two and half years living and working in the Vermont TV market without ever having being introduced to a maple creemee.
But I digress.
There are still almost two weeks left in this magnificent, once-a-year, 31-day celebration, and have I ever got an idea for how you can mark the occassion: make your own ice cream!
I'm not asking you to run out and buy a bulky machine, or rock salt, or anything fancy at all.
Are you ready for this? All you need are ten minutes, a mixer, and just two very basic ingredients to start making ice cream that will easily rival your favorite brand.
Flavors and mix-ins are limited only by your imagination. Here I've got macadamia nuts to go with white chocolate, bacon to go with salted caramel, and a mix of strawberries and pomegranate.
Step 1
Start with 1 pint of heavy whipping cream. Whip until peaks form. You don't need a stand mixer, a hand mixer will do the trick.
Step 2
Empty a 14oz. can of sweetened condensed milk into a bowl.
Mix in flavors and ingredients of your choosing.
Step 3
Fold whipped cream into condensed milk mixture until uniformly combined.
Step 4
Pour mixture into a container and store in freezer.
(I hit up the clerk at a neighborhood take-out place for these cardboard tubs that were just perfect, but you can use tupperware.)
And then comes the hardest part - waiting for it to freeze. And when it does, I promise this ice cream will be so creamy and smooth, you'll be able to convince people you slow-churned it by hand.
Caramel bacon on the left, strawberry-pomegranate on the right.
I know. It sounds too good to be true. But try it, and trust me, you'll be snickering to yourself the next time you see someone eyeing the elaborate ice cream maker display at Williams Sonoma.
Something had to be done after the gluttony of my Paris debut. And whoever said birthday calories don't count was sorely mistaken. So the day after I turned 33, I put myself on a diet for the first time - The Dukan Diet, the French regimen a certain Ms. Middleton reportedly turned to before a certain royal wedding.
I'm on a plan designed by a Paris doctor, to lose some of the pounds I put on in Paris. The irony is not lost on me.
my current bedtime reading
For the past three and a half weeks, dessert for me has consisted of plain greek yogurt with Splenda, and fat-free, sugar-free jello.
pudding party
You'll understand then, why it is particularly hard for me to recall our lunch at Restaurant Guy Savoy in Paris, where my caloric intake during the dessert course alone was easily 5 times what I ate all day today.
It started with an artful arrangement of raspberry stuffed with avocado, a bite of meringue topped with strawberry, and a spoonful of soft marshmallowy foamy who-knows-what deliciousness.
But this was just the palate cleanser, of course. A preface. A dessert amuse bouche, if you will.
We had ordered the prix fixe menu, which included our choice of dessert.
This here was the "Strawberry Textures," which is exactly what its name suggests: strawberries done four ways.
As best I can recall, they were granita, sorbet, and a fresh strawberry stuffed with strawberry confiture, all sitting on a bed of something basil-y.
My choice was the "All Black", comprising a chocolate biscuit base infused with lime, a dense bar of chocolate ganache perfumed with cardamom and black pepper, topped with dark chocolate sorbet.
Plates scraped clean, we leaned back and relished the satisfaction of a great end to a great meal. Or so we thought. Instead of the bill, our server rolled up with this thing.
I call it heaven on wheels - a trolley laden with sorbets, ice cream, at least two types of rice pudding, caramel creme...
... cookies, marshmallows, macarons, cheesecake, clafoutis, mini Paris-brest and... and...
and... and just a whole bunch of other sweet little bits and bobs.
Here's another angle, in case you didn't get the idea.
Somehow we managed to find room for round four... and five and six... of dessert.
I'm going to take another break from writing about Paris sweets to, well, share a favorite post about a favorite Paris sweet, the macaron.
I started to notice how this delicate beauty was tres en vogue last summer, when it started showing up on most every dessert table pictured on most every party-planning or wedding blog.
So naturally I had to try making some.
I turned to the trusty interwebs to go about my research - reading post after discouraging post about how fickle macarons were, how hard it was to get everything "just right", and how one of many potential missteps would lead to disappointment. And if you know me, you know being meticulous is not really my bag.
But just as I was considering giving up, I came across this post on the BraveTart blog.
Read it before you read anything else on making macarons.
Read it before you finish reading this post, if you must.
Here goes nothing.
You don't need to take a class. And despite what you might read elsewhere, you don't need to buy a $200 scale, and you don't always need to grind your almond meal and sift your flour exactly 106 times at just the right altitude. Apparently you don't even need to use almonds, would you believe it!
I know because Stella at BraveTart took all the guesswork out of these once-mystical morsels, through a rigorous process of elimination.
From BraveTart:
I don’t know if my experiment would stand up to the rigors of the scientific method, but I did take a systematic approach. I standardized every aspect of my already stable recipe: the exact number of minutes spent mixing, weight and temperature of ingredients, oven temperature, baking time, etc. Each day, I changed a single variable across multiple batches (generally three), and noted my results. I also tested variables by their absence. (Read more...)
I dove in head first, and look.
(Just ignore that one cracked one.)
I made these last May, having never set foot in France, and having only ever eaten a macaron maybe twice in my whole life. This lover of short-cuts and occasional experimenter achieved success on the first try.
Except for one little experiment with caramel sauce, hee hee.
Don't use caramel topping as caramel filling. DUH.
I almost didn’t believe my eyes when
we happened upon this strange little storefront on our way to Jardin du
Luxembourg.
What was the story with all these tiny toys set willy-nilly in the
graffiti-stained window?
Are those cake dummies I see?
We stepped into the dimly-lit shop to
find a deli case full of plainly frosted cakes - some with random (or maybe
strategic?) bursts of airbrush color, and others fully emblazoned with edible
images, including some raunchy ones, not seen here.
More rows of bizarre little plastic figurines
filled up the spare shelf space, presumably to be used as cake toppers.
Further
inside, I wandered wide-eyed
among more inventory, this time of the wedding cake variety. Disheveled
cake stands
with staggered tiers, cake ruffles and doily-like things, and gaudy
floral toppers were strewn chaotically amid cardboard boxes and
bootleg Disney characters.
Stock includes a cake topper for a Chinese Wedding
Wedding cake that looked more at home in a 1980's Disneyland wedding
After days of feasting our eyes on museum-quality showcases featuring pristine gateaus and other such elegant
edibles, I couldn’t quite figure out what to make of all this. I wanted to ask
the young shopkeeper about the business and its backstory, but she
didn’t look too happy about my gawking.
Despite the disrepair, I was tickled
that we chanced upon this shop that seemed like an oddity, yet at the same
time, was in line with what I was already feeling somewhat in Paris – like I
had stepped back in time.
We interrupt our regularly-scheduled programming (i.e. my Paris Top Ten List) for this important message:
TODAY IS MY BIRTHDAY. Time to kick it up a notch.
The day started with a completely corrupted version of what's supposed to be a healthy breakfast - oatmeal topped with crème brûlée at Zazie in San Francisco.
Criminal.
Why even bother with the oatmeal. I barely ate any of it (or many of the bananas, for that matter) if only because I had to save room for pancakes. It wouldn't be my birthday without pancakes.
Fast forward to night-time. Post chicken parmesan dinner, made by the mister, came dessert part one: Secret Breakfast Ice Cream from Humphry Slocombe. For the uninitiated, that's bourbon ice cream with corn flakes - Humphry's most popular flavor, but nowhere near its most offbeat (from NYT: Who Wants Prosciutto Ice Cream?)
And if you think the aforementioned prosciutto ice cream is wackadoo, up there on the right is Humphry's foie gras ice cream sandwich. That's right. Ice cream made with fattened goose liver, between two ginger snap cookies (a limited time offer, considering a ban on foie gras goes into effect in SF in July.)
Quite the line-up on my special day. But how does a guy really impress a girl whose life passion is cake?
Why, you get out the flour and bake, of course.
Or in the case of my better half, you get nukin'!
My Sweet (the human, not the blog) had filed away a blurb from Lucky Peach Magazine, which laid out instructions for a chocolate cake, that you make in a mug, in two minutes, in your flippin' microwave!!!
Mind. Blown.
You could buy this:
Spotted at Cost Plus World Market
But why would you?
Recipes abound on the World Wide Web (just Google "mug cake.") A Pinterest search yields a Nutella-flavored version (mmmm...) repinned dozens of times.
Here's the Lucky Peach version, which calls for a few simple ingredients you probably already have on hand:
In a medium sized microwave-safe mug, add the vegetable oil, whole milk, egg, and vanilla extract. Use a fork or small whisk to mix until combined. Add the flour, sugar, cocoa, and salt and mix until combined. Stir in the chocolate chips. Bake in the microwave on high for two minutes. Serve immediately.
"Serve immediately?" Who's making this in advance? It only takes 2 minutes. And therein lies the danger of this magical microwavable love in a mug: low commitment plus instant gratification equals sweet, sweet temptation.
