Wee Market Treasures

My Mama and her husband Robert are in town for my graduation on Tuesday and though it is their first time to the city, my Mama told me that she only wanted to see one thing: the Greenmarket. She didn't care about the Statue of Liberty, she would go to museums but it wasn't a big thing, even the Empire State Building didn't excite her: she just wanted to see the market. I guess being a foodie is something I inherited from my parents as both of them have always been great cooks and like me, they are easily delighted by all things foodie. However, there is one area where my Mama and Dad differ when it comes to food, my Mama has always loved little things and I'm not just talking about kittens and puppies here (although she likes those too, obviously). Mama likes anything little. Little spoons, little bowls, little teapots, little purses, but today at the Greenmarket, her world was full of little fairy eggplants, the tiniest (and sweetest) little tomatoes, and even wee little red onions. We had a grand time and I hope you enjoy the photos of some of today's wee foodie treasures.


Can you believe how small this tomato is? Literally smaller than a dime!


Fairy eggplant


I know I've posted pictures of these baby doughnut peaches before but are they not adorable?


Wee red onion


Baby zucchini and a hand model in need of a manicure (ahem, that would be me...)

The End Is Too Close

Pastry school is coming to an end far too soon. I am very sad about it and that emotion is shared by a few people in our class and then there are others who can't wait for school to be over. I can't believe it has all gone by so fast but I'm very grateful that Rod convinced me to start this blog because it is going to be a lovely scrapbook for me to look through when I'm done and remember the little details that fade with time in your memory.

That being said, today was another day of hard work in our kitchen. We started by making the strangest buttercream I have ever seen. It was called French Buttercream and it was weird. We start by heating milk and sugar till the sugar dissolved, then we chilled the sweetened milk over ice while whisking in flour and vanilla. Then we put the whole thing onto a 20 quart mixer and added three and three-quarter pounds butter -- no that is not a typo and heavy cream to the mixer, mixing till we had a light, fluffy buttercream. To be honest, it kind of tasted like butter: shocker, right?

So after the French Buttercream, we levelled and iced our six and ten inch cakes and froze them so that we can cover them with fondant on Monday.


Cake Rounds

After our cakes we safely stowed away, we continued working on our flowers. I petal-dusted all my "filler-flowers", my leaves, roses, and the rest of my carnations. I truly hope I am done with flower making for a little while because even though I find it to be a very zen experience, I ready to try something else.

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Roses


Leaves

I'm Flowered Out

More flowers today. So many more flowers and there are still more to make. We didn't just make flowers today, we also began petal dusting of firm gum paste flowers. Petal dust looked kind of like loose eye-shadow and you use a dry paint brush to lightly highlight, or just color your flowers. I was, of course, in a state about doing anything to the flowers that I had worked so hard to make perfect but I'm pretty happy with how they turned out.


Lightly petal dusted flower on top and un-petal dusted flower on the bottom


A "field" of petal dusted carnations!

Oh yes, here are my lack-lustre lilies from yesterday. I just can't get on board with them. I don't like lilies as a flower and I think it shows -- they are not my best work.


Tomorrow morning before class, I'm going to make more of the "filler flowers" -- the little flowers that take up the blank spaces in the gum paste flower arrangement, and probably I will make more carnations too as I am stressed about running out of them for the final cake product. Then, in class, we are going to be making buttercream and icing our cakes for Monday. I'm having a module three flashback and it hurts.

So Many Carnations, So Little Time

So the other day our chef announced that if he didn't show me how to make carnations that I would likely stab him in the neck. Personally, I think his choice of words was a little harsh but I'm not going to lie, learning how to make carnations was pretty high on my list of to-do's. He taught me today and I spent a lot of time working on them, and tonight, I will continue to work on them at home because I need so many for my cake that it hurts my eyes. Good thing it's fun.


Pretty carnations

We also finished our lilies today (which you will see tomorrow as I forgot to photograph them today), made leaves and I finished my mimosas from yesterday.



Tomorrow we start petal dusting our flowers and we will be baking for the last time in school as we have to bake the bases for our celebration cakes. A fact which, I have to admit, makes me a little sad. But anyway, before I get I weepy, I've got to get started on those damn carnations!

Four Flower-Filled Hours

I hit a wall today. A wall covered in flowers. About two hours into class I looked at my watch and wanted to cry. I like making the gum paste flowers, I really do, but today I just couldn't imagine making anymore. I think it was because the majority of my day was spent doing little tasks for tomorrow that I felt a little bored and frustrated but hopefully that means that tomorrow will be full of sunshine and roses, err, carnations...

So here is the round up for today...

I dipped the lily bases in cornmeal:


I made carnation bases and more mimosas:


I made azaleas:


I finished my roses with more petals and with bases:


Oh yes, here are the tools that we use to create the gum paste flowers. The red thing is a dense sponge pad that you use to lay the petals on when you are shaping them because it is a soft surface. The little tool is called a dog bone and it is used to thin and shape the gum paste. It is very smooth and allows for detail work. The cutter that is sort of shaped like a big tear drop is for cutting out rose petals. And finally, the rolling pin is made specifically for gum paste/fondant. It allows you to roll out small amounts of fondant and it is smooth so it doesn't wrinkle the fondant.

Petals One, Three And Five

Like the piping skills days, the gum paste flower days are slow and relatively simple in terms of new skills. Today we did two things, we worked on our gum paste roses by applying the first, third and fifth petals and we also covered our mimosas, which are damn cute, with colored cornmeal.

The process of making the petals used some new tools and I will try to remember to take a picture of them tomorrow for y'all so you know what I'm talking about because it is kind of tricky to explain how we made them without seeing the tools. However, it is funny to me that the process by which we make the roses with the gum paste is the same way that we did it with the chocolate plastic, and actually, kind of similar to how we made buttercream roses too. Here are two of the roses:


Three Petal Rose


Five Petal Rose

The mimosas, or wee little balls on wire, were really fun to color. We just painted them with egg whites, and then rolled them in cornmeal tinted with petal dust to give them a bit of texture. When they are all dry, we are going to bunch them up into little bundles and use them as filler flower in our cake's floral pieces -- stay tuned for that!


Mimosas!

BLT Bites

There are few things in life that taste as good as a BLT sandwich. I mean really, juicy tomatoes, mayo, smokey bacon, and butter lettuce sandwiched between two slices of toasted white bread -- so delicious! Sometimes, because I'm fancy, I like to put avocado in my BLT's, it makes them extra creamy and also adds an extra layer of freshness to the classic sandwich. But then there are also the times when I'm feeling extra fancy and turn BLT's into little tiny bites of deliciousness or in other words, BLT Bites.


To make them, simply slice a baguette into 1/2-inch rounds, toast and spread a little mayo on top. Add a sliced tomato, small piece of butter lettuce, a silver of avocado and top with a two-inch piece of bacon and enjoy! They also look very pretty on a platter too, don't ya think?!