All posts tagged: Homemade

Coconut Mango Entremets

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Baking for my younger brother allows me the chance to reach into the crazy section of my creative side and try things and combinations that I usually wouldn’t try out on other people. I’m just going to come out and say it; he’s a complete weirdo. Since he is returning home from college this week, I decided to be a nice sister and bake something for him. This time my train of thought started out with a layer cake. Maybe I’ll make an exotic layer cake covered in coconut, I thought. Then I flipped to Miette’s Coconut Mousse Cake and thought maybe I would add in some coconut mousse layers… and then that led me to thinking about adding in some mango…and before I knew it, the idea had changed into an entremet with a never-before-seen liquid mango juice center. So I started in with my experimental creation–making a mango puree and simmering it with some simple syrup before straining it and putting the juice into some silicon molds. At the same time, I made …

Honey Matcha Castella Cake

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I told myself I wasn’t going to do any baking this week. I was going to avoid the kitchen in lieu of being productive and getting important things done in all the other areas of my life. And then the spark of an idea led to me tumbling down the rabbit hole–flipping through a handful of cookbooks and spending a solid hour furiously Googling subsequent ideas… Until not only was I in the kitchen, but I had about four projects in various stages spread across every available counter space as I vaguely listened to 30 Rock playing from my computer while sitting cross-legged in front of my oven, carefully regarding the cakes inside. Despite not understanding how the oven in my parents new house can simultaneously over and under cook the things I try to bake, my evening baking adventure turned out to be quite a success. Half following some recipes and half throwing in ingredients haphazardly like the rebel I am, I ended up with a Honey Castella Cake, Almond Matcha Mousse, Matcha Spread, …

Dark Chocolate Jasmine Cakelettes

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I wish I were cool enough to pick a random word and use that as the title of my new flavor combination. It can’t be something too mundane, it probably shouldn’t be in English, and it has to be vague enough that allows for it to represent several flavors and an entirely new idea of dessert. But alas, I am a relatively boring person who lacks creativity in the naming department. So this little “cakelette” or small cake is just named for the main flavors it carries–dark chocolate and jasmine. It also features raspberry and tonka seed, though those are a bit more subtle, and are present to enhance and deepen the flavors of chocolate and jasmine in the rest of the dessert. The idea for this dessert came to me while I was on the train from Agde to Paris last weekend as I was traveling to London. Though I should have been studying French, I was instead doodling in my sketchbook, thinking up new ideas and jotting down thoughts I’ve had on previous …

Gastronomicom Week One

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You probably (hopefully) already read about my orientation and my first day of classes–since I couldn’t wait to get those thoughts out into the world instead of including them in this post. I am already in love with the fact that every day we are doing new things while sticking to a fairly rigid routine: I take the bus at 9:06, arrive at school at 9:20, change into my kitchen clothes, and am ready for three hours of pastry. In pastry class, we make something or part of something, clean our tables and the dishes, then make something else before we do a deeper clean of the tables, dishes, floors, refrigerators, etc. After changing back into my normal clothes and eating lunch with the other students, I sit in the “green room” (it is literally painted green) and have French for three more hours, with one 10 minute break in the middle. I take the 4:40 bus back to my residence unless I need groceries from the bigger grocery store, and chill for an hour …

Raspberry Macarons

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I love baking for other people. I love knowing that something that I have made with my own two hands has brought a smile to someones face and a happy moment to their day. But I also like these moments of giving baked goods to be spontaneous, because up to this point in my life I only bake when I am in the mood or I randomly change the path of what the end result will be mid way through the baking process. So while I would love to bake on commission and take orders for cakes and things, I am always hesitant to do so. I have yet to have an actual bad experience with baking on commission, but since I bake to make myself and the people around me happy, I live in fear of the promise of cake that never works out. A couple weeks ago a friend of mine told me how much her coworker loved the pictures of all my cakes and how she was really hoping that she could …

Homemade Extracts

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In addition to making homemade chai to give as gifts for the holidays, I also made some homemade extracts. I can’t recall how the idea first crept into my head, but once I had the idea I tried to do some in-depth research to find the best recipe. Only problem: literally every single recipe is exactly the same. I looked on foodgawker, tastespotting, asked the Google gods…Every recipe said that theirs was “it”–that it was the “true” recipe, despite them all being identical minus the varying pictures. Armed with so many recipes, my next step was to find a way to bottle the extracts. Typically with baking, the presentation and gift wrap can very incredibly, but with something like this the container needs to last for as long as the extract does–which could be months. After again scouring the internet, I ended up buying some glass bottles off Amazon, and following Sprinkle Bakes’ recipe I also got some filament tape and sealing wax. Then came the most difficult part of the recipe. You will all …