Flavor rut

Occasionally I will look at the desserts I've been making a realize that I'm in a flavor rut. Not that the flavors aren't delicious but I find myself getting bored of constantly doing lemon, coconut, coffee, raspberry, and yes even chocolate. I feel guilty saying that chocolate is that long term relationship that you know you love and you'll always go back to but after so much time you want something a little more exciting. That feels so wrong since chocolate is amazing. Everyone knows chocolate is fantastic, frankly I think even chocolate knows its fantastic. It compliments almost any flavor; but alas, here I am in a flavor rut.

Usually when I get like this I just try to get some new flavor. Something I haven't done in a while or maye a texture I've never tried. This time I asked my boss to get some acai berry purée for me. 

You've heard of acai but if you've never tried it you're missing out. The flavor is pretty subtle the purée tastes a bit like tea, somewhat sweet but nothing overpowering. Since I wasn't sure of the taste at first I decided to make it into a jelly. I won't lie I love making jellies, if I ever have a fruit and I'm unsure what to do with it, I'll make a jelly. After trying out the Acai berry jelly and realizing what a subtle taste it was I decided to pair them with something tart and not overly sweet. Raspberry!

Sophia suggested that I make a mousse out of the organic raspberries we had in the cooler. So we made a Raspberry Mousse Bombe with Acai berry Jelly. It's a bit tart, it's a bit sweet and it's all around yummy. You try something it might not always work and perhaps next week I'll be able to try something a bit more daring with the acai puree that I have but when it comes to experimenting with flavors I suppose there is nothing wrong with the research.

Tiramisu: Coffee perfection

Oh tiramisu. Where I work we can hardly keep tiramisu inspired desserts in stock. As soon as that first cocoa powder covered dessert is in the display case people are asking, "is that tiramisu?" "Can I have another slice?" "What do you mean you're out of tiramisu?" "When will you have more?"

Tiramisu is an Italian dessert that consists of lady fingers, mascarpone cheese and Marsala wine(or maybe a delicious dark rum instead). When reading up on the dessert (everyone does that right?) I learned that tiramisu roughly translates to  pick me up. Tiramisu is a dessert that is telling you to pick it up and shove it in your face. Okay maybe it's more polite than that.  

 When I adapt the flavor for the restaurant I don't use lady fingers but I do soak the yellow sponge cake with coffee and alcohol. The frosting has a light coffee flavor and it then sprinkled with cocoa powder. Truthfully the mascarpone, to me anyways, doesn't add much flavor. My coworker tells me that I really don't have to add it as no one would notice with the coffee and wine overpowering the light flavor of the cheese, but I suppose I'm slightly traditional when it comes to flavors like this. 

So tiramisu has everything anyone could want. It's a combination of cheese, chocolate, coffee and wine. Perhaps I could adapt it into bombe form, a tiramisu mousse with lady fingers in the center. I might have to try that tomorrow. 

Today is Memorial Day so I'm sure the restaurant will run out of the nine tiramisu cakes I made last night. 

Cakes, cakes, cakes

Pina Colada Cake

Before I went to pastry school I made cakes at home. I made cakes the way I imagine most do, boxed cake mix, can of frosting or two (one for me and one for the cake). I have really fond memories of helping my mother make cakes for her office parties when I was younger. It was always my job to make sure there was no extra batter left in the bowl before washing it.

By the time I got to pastry school I had this silly notion that I was pretty good at building and decorating cakes. I thought to myself ," This part will be easy." How wrong I was. When you're at home you might not think anything of spending a half hour on a cake. When I was in school my chef informed our class that this would not do. In his way he told us that if we spent more than 30 minutes on a basic cake that any employer would more than likely thank us for our time. He did that frequently. If you can't write in chocolate no one will hire you, if you can't clean as you go no one will hire you, if you can't build a cake in less than 30 minutes no one will hire you. I'm not entirely sure that's really true but I know that it pushed me to work faster, cleaner and all around more inefficiently. 

When I was in school I admit it I couldn't build a cake in less than 30 minutes. In case you're unsure about what I mean by build a cake that includes: trimming, cutting, syruping, filling, frosting, and decorating. In fact it wasn't even until I started at my first job that I really started getting better at it. That might have something to do with amount of cakes that I had to decorate; once you have to make more than 20 cakes in a day you start to develop a rhythm. The older ladies at work (who have been doing this for longer than I've been breathing) showed me their tips and tricks, a fact that I'm extremely grateful for.

My average time is down to roughly 7 minutes per cake, perhaps a little longer if the decoration is more

Chocolate Peanut butter cake

complicated. It's really a thing of beauty to step back and realize how far you've come. Even in the two years that I've been working I realize that I have so much more to learn. Sometimes I think about going to visit my chef to tell him "Hey remember how I couldn't build one cake in less than 30 minutes? Well now I can do 10 in one hour!" I think he'd laugh.

The upside of making desserts for a buffet is that they always require a variety so my boss is pretty open to any flavor my coworkers or I want to make. Black forest? Great. Chocolate peanut butter? Delicious. Pina Colada? Watch it because someone might get drunk off dessert.

I also have the added benefit of working with people that inspire me. There will be nights where my coworker Sophie and I start talking about some other dessert completely and by the end of the night we're trying to figure out how to make it into a cake.

Life is sweet. Busy but sweet.

Where are all the cookbooks?

I recently received  a gift card to Barnes & Noble for my birthday so I set out this morning in the hopes of purchasing a cookbook or two. I've recently been re-inspired at work (which might be another entry at another time) and I wanted to get some fresh ideas. Imagine my surprise as I went through shelves and shelves of cookbooks I could not for the life of me find a dessert cookbook with variety. I don't want to seem over dramatic but I was a bit dumb founded. It seems that, when it comes to desserts, cookbooks fall into one of three categories:

Specialty: Gluten-Free, Sugar-Free, or what you can make with microwave. Not terrible, there is certainly a demand for these types of desserts but for me I want my gluten, I want my sugar and I want to use my oven ( or what have you). I admit I know I probably could have looked through these for ideas but it just wasn't what I was looking for.

Cookies: Cookies, cookies, cookies. If you need to find a cookie recipe I'm sure it will not be difficult. There are books on dietary cookies, cookies that look like things, cookies that can all be made from one recipe and cookies that promise to be better than your mothers (which could never be true in my case). Cookies are, of course, a wonderful comfort food and with all the varieties you are certain to find something you like but as with the specialty books a cookie cookbook was just not what I was in the market for...especially considering I already have two.

Last but certainly not least are the Cupcake books. Oh goodness the cupcakes. I counted not two or three but eight different books dedicated to cupcakes. I'm not even talking about books on cakes that you could possibly turn into cupcakes. I am referring to at least either different books that are dedicated entirely to the art of the miniature cake. I have nothing against cupcakes, I love them in fact. I used to work in a very charming cupcake shop (where the own use to let me have them everyday) but I have to admit a bit of frustration when I cannot find a dessert cook book but I can find eight different cupcake books.

I am certain there has to be a cookbook dedicated to the most important meal of the day out there. For whatever reason it was just not at my particular Barnes & Noble. I just want something that has a range of recipes. Cupcakes and cookies may be permitted but they should play harmoniously with the fruit tarts, bundt cakes and various fruit curds. I suppose that is what the internet was invented for. 

Keep your station clean or I will kill you

Anyone that knows me knows that I am not the tidiest person. It is true that before culinary school cleaning while baking seemed unimportant, something that could be saved for afterward. It was something that I even admitted during my interview for culinary school, I was embarrassed but the woman conducting the first interview told me not to worry that would be fixed during the program.

She was right, for the first few weeks it seemed my chef was constantly reminding all of us to "CLEAN AS YOU GO". On more than one occasion my chef  would pull a student away from their final (thankfully not me) and tell them to clean. It seemed by the end of the program the problem was, for the most part, fixed. Cleaning as I cooked became second nature.


I will make this easy to remember, "Keep your station clean  or I WILL KILL YOU"

Holidays in the pastry world

I was grabbing a cup of coffee before work yesterday and the barista asked me how my three day weekend was. It took me a moment before realizing that Memorial day weekend, for a lot of people, means barbecue and an extra day off from work. I smiled and said fine, I knew he was just being polite and making small talk. Truth is I don't remember the last time I had a three day weekend; not that I really mind, I knew what I was signing up for.

My three day weekend was comprised of people wanting more and there not being enough hours in the day. Really nothing out of the ordinary for a holiday weekend. While I do desserts and pastries for most of the eateries in the casino my main focus is desserts for the buffet. Cakes, pies, individual servings of creme brulee, all of it delicious and all of it in large quantities. Sometimes you feel as though you've just refilled the tower of cookies, you turned around and everything is gone.

This is par for the course with most holidays. Christmas? New Years? Valentines? Don't bother making plans, you're working. The last holiday I had off was Thanksgiving and that was because my regular day off is Thursday. Sometimes I feel utterly helpless, like there's no way I can keep up with demand, but at the end of the day I see customers smiling. Every once in a while a customer will pop their head in my little area and tell me that my desserts were just perfection.

Really that's why we do it isn't it? To make people happy. Well that might not be the entire truth, there is something wonderful about creating sweet things. At the end of a 9 hour shift I might be covered in chocolate, flour and frosting; but it's heaven.

Must begin researching vanilla bean cremeux. Father's day is coming up.