Cake Talk

Our New Chocolate Football

Thanks for the advice everyone.  Here's the finished product.  We used a large (very) warm spatula (heated over a torch flame) to level the edges and melt the chocolate a bit so the two sides will stick together.

Then we rubbed a slightly oiled soft cloth over the chocolate to remove some of the discoloring from the gelatin mold.

Next time, we'll made the mold going the other way so the seams in the chocolate match the seams in the football.

This one is for Bear Bryant's birthday cake at the museum tomorrow.  We'll make more to have in the shop for other cakes and general game day decorations.

Pretty cool, huh?

Making Chocolate Footballs

The goal is to make a (several) chocolate footballs, using this pink rubber toy as a model (thank you Heidi!!).  We need one to put on top of Coach Paul W. "Bear" Bryant's birthday cake for Friday. (If he were still living he would be 96.)

The learning curve on these buggers has been steep and expensive, and we still do not have a finished product.  But I am not giving up.

First I watched a couple of videos on YouTube.  They were very informative and made it look pretty easy.  I am regretting now that I didn't take the chocolate class in Culinary School because back then I was interested in hot food, and not pastry.  Hindsight...

Then I bought some "Amazing Molding Putty" at Michael's Art Supply.  It is a bit pricey ($20 for a pretty small amount) but I used one of their 50% off coupons and practiced using a resin tombstone (think Halloween Cake...).  It worked pretty well but hardens very quickly and I didn't think it would mold smoothly onto the softer toy football.  What I really needed was something that started out more liquid.

So I tried the package of food-grade silicon I had been saving for just such an occasion.  At NINETY DOLLARS it made the amazing putty look amazingly cheap.  I figured it would last forever and we could be turning out chocolate footballs by the dozens every week.  For $90 I got barely enough to cover the football in a small container.  I followed the directions last Monday and it never really set quite hard enough to mold.  I also didn't figure that the small plastic football I was using was filled with air and would try to float in the liquid silicon, making it extremely difficult (and messy) to set into the silicon evenly.  Three days later I needed a "Plan B."

I remembered back in Culinary School we had talked about using gelatin for making molds.  When mixed with equal parts water and gelatin, it makes a nice firm mold.  Only problem is that it does not last forever, and spoils after a couple of days.  Oh yeah, did I mention it costs $84 per case of 12 one-pound bags?

It took three bags of gelatin (which smells pretty bad when mixed with hot water).  How bad?  Like its main ingredient -- pigs' feet.  Not so bad when it hardens.  Still had the problem with the floating football, so the football got molded in two stages.  The first just to anchor the football, and the second to build up the sides.

The rest was easy.  Just can't figure out why the discoloring of the chocolate (the appearance improved after four or five castings).  Way too tired of the process this evening to attempt "gluing" the two parts together.  That will happen tomorrow.  Which gives me one day to spare for the Bear's birthday on Friday.

OMG...Chocolate Peanut Butter Delights

Throwing a bunch of stuff together to make a "new" bakery treat works...sometimes. Other times not so much.  These are a winner.  Only problem is that I'm not sure I can make them again.  Here's the (long) story.

I get a magazine called "Modern Baking."  One of many trade journals dedicated to the pastry business, it just appeared in my mailbox one day.  Most of the content is focused on large independent and in-store bakeries, but it is refreshing to see what others in the industry are doing.  We're the only bakery of our kind in Tuscaloosa and don't have many peers to share experiences with.

There is a section in the magazine called "Formula Exchange."  Many months may go by without anything that catches my eye but I have found some useful recipes there including granola, croissants and baguettes.  Last month there was a recipe for Chocolate almond espresso petit fours, contributed by the Almond Board of California.  It was the photo that caught my eye.  Some people call this type of photo "food porn" and I understand why.  Looks pretty inviting, huh?

I promised the girls in the shop that we would try it if they got all the items on the daily list done at a reasonable hour. (We have a daily list of about 10-15 things to do and items to make -- ranging from the simply obvious (breakfast) to the mundane (bake snickerdoodles) to the more pressing (finish cookie deco for tomorrow's orders).  By 3:00 the "reasonable hour" had passed so I took matters into my own hands.  This recipe would take too long to make before 6 when we closed, but I could probably throw something else together, and a variation of the multi-textured chocolate covered treats was calling to me.

Back to the dry food storage area in the back of the shop: oats, peanut butter, chopped peanuts.  From the freezer: chopped day-old pound cake.  Ground the pound cake into crumbs then toasted the oats, cake crumbs and nuts in the oven for about 30 minutes.  No patience to let it cool, just dumped it in the large mixer.  Added peanut butter, almost an entire 40-oz. jar.  Too crumbly and not sweet enough.  Added some confectioners sugar.  Better, but still too crumbly.  I was looking for something I could press into a sheet pan, let firm up, then cut into squares and coat with chocolate.

Epiphany!  Added some melted white chocolate and butter.  It was crunchy but held together, slightly sweet and begging to be enrobed.  I must have said "Oh my God!" out loud because suddenly there were three others standing over the mixer waiting for a taste.

Yep.  Delicious.  Right out of the mixer.

Only one problem.  I didn't measure anything so I am not sure I can ever make it again.

Cardamom Truffles: I should have known better!

Some day I will understand how to market exotic food flavors in Alabama.  Not even "exotic."  Maybe just a little out of the ordinary.

I learned years ago while working at the Cypress Inn Restaurant in Tuscaloosa that people will not order a dish if they are not sure what it is.

"Penne a la Vodka," for example, is a staple at almost every Italian restaurant in New York where I lived for almost 20 years.  And it's an easy dish to make -- saute some garlic and minced onions in olive oil, deglaze the pan with vodka, stir in some chopped tomatoes, add a little basil, salt and pepper, cut with heavy cream.  When I made it for the kitchen staff they loved it.  So did the owner.  He knew his customers however, and insisted that we could not put it on the menu, even as a special, with "vodka" in the name.

Call it "penne pasta with a creamy tomato sauce."  Which we did, and we sold it out every time we made it.

Cardamom truffles.  I should have known that most people don't know what cardamom is.  Those that have heard of it could not describe it.  And instead of asking to try it, they just pass it by.  Feed them a sample and they think it's great.  Samples often result in sales.  But given the choice of a sample of pound cake and a sample of cardamom truffle, and most people here will take the pound cake.

We also made chili-jasmine truffles...can hardly wait to explain that taste.

No Chocolate Cigars!

Sometimes it is not a case of Bridezilla, it's her mother or (in this case) her father and husband-to-be.  Makes you wonder why she's getting married.

It was last January -- prime wedding-booking-season since many brides get engaged over the holidays.  The bride and her mother came in first.  Wanted to order a wedding cake for the summer.  Her colors were espresso and cream, and she did not want flowers on her cake.  So I suggested chocolate decorations (besides curly willow there were not many other brown accents I could think of).

We went through photos of cakes -- some we had done, some from books, some from magazines -- discussing the options.  Then her father and husband-to-be came in.  The father planted himself with a book, announcing he was only here to sign the check.  No problems, I had heard that before.

The bride and her mom started showing the fiance photos of cakes and decorations they had in mind.  I have to say that USUALLY, the bride and her mom make most of the decisions about the wedding cake.  Most men are not that involved, but that is not always the case.  In this cake, HE had a (very strong) opinion about every idea they suggested.

NO, ABSOLUTELY NOT.
I HATE THAT ONE.
YOU'VE GOT TO BE KIDDING.

Made me wonder how much wedded bliss this bride was expecting after the wedding.  I figured they needed some family time and disappeared behind the counter for a while.  Until HE said "what do you think?" in my direction.

Reasonably fresh out of culinary school, I knew (and used) the proper names for many types of chocolate decorations.

• Curls and mini curls
• Mikados, sticks, cigars and cigarettes (longer, thinner and fatter curls)
• Shavings (a sheet of chocolate broken into an assortment of sizes)
• Shapes and cutouts (sails, waves, cresting waves, surfing waves, tiles, rounds, stars, hearts, petals, triangles, etc.)
• Plaquettes
• Tree bark
• Vermicelli (mini sprinkles)
• Ruffles
• Croquants (puffed rice enrobed in chocolate)
• Cups and bowls
• Clay

So I said "Well, chocolate curls or chocolate cigars would be one option. "

Now we hear from the bride's father:  "Absolutely no chocolate cigars, we don't want people to think we smoke."

The Traditional Bûche de Noel

I spent a considerable amount of time living in Paris in the late 1970's,  working as an apprentice in commercial kitchens.  As Christmas approached, just about every pastry shop window was filled with some version of the Bûche de Noel, the traditional French "yule log". Christmas eve dinner would not be complete without it.

They were mostly yellow or chocolate genoise (sponge) cake filled with buttercream and covered with whipped ganache to resemble a log ready for the fireplace.  Each shop had a unique way of flavoring and decorating their Bûches, but meringue or marzipan mushrooms were pretty standard, as were sugared rosemary "pine needles."  One end of the rolled cake is usually cut at an angle and placed on the side or top of the cake to form a branch. Confectioners' sugar is sprinkled on top to resemble snow.

We make a Bûche de Noel at Mary's and you can make it at home too.  We use a chocolate sponge cake recipe (in our cookbook, page 45), chocolate buttercream (page 71), ganache (page 75), meringue mushrooms (page 137) which we piece together with melted chocolate, sugared rosemary (page 139) and a marzipan Santa (page 108).

It's not too late to order one for the 23rd, or buy the cookbook and make it yourself.

Truffles are NOT bonbons

A lady came into the shop today asking for bonbons.  Had we been in a large city or another country, I would have shown her our truffles.  But I could tell that raspberry, ginger and mocha truffles were not what she had in mind.  These are our mocha truffles.

I was so right.  When I pointed to the truffles in our display case, she told me "those are NOT bonbons."  In fact, she went on to explain that she was looking for those "old fashioned" candies like chocolate covered cherries and "stuff like that."  Along the lines of "Cracker Barrel" bonbons, which is where I sent her.

The term "bonbon" has many meanings.  According to Wikipedia, "bonbon" can refer to several types of sweets, including chocolate covered ice cream, but also any confection with a soft fondant or fruit center (the infamous chocolate covered cherry), and even a hard candy with a soft center.  In Mexico, it is a common name for cat (fluffy bonbon?) and in Australia, it is the word for English Christmas Crackers.  In France and Germany, the term "bonbon" refers to any bite size confection.

I like the French version, and immediately thought of French singer Jaques Brel and "Les Bonbons". (Isn't YouTube wonderful?) but I'm sure she was probably thinking Lucille Ball and "Bonbons Gone Wild".  In any case, we sent her on her way.  And she called later to say "yes, Cracker Barrel has bonbons, thank you so much."

There you go.