The Ways of a Sweet Hearts Baker

First let me apologize for not updating in a while! Things have...

Wed, 06 Jun 2012 18:23:49 -0400

First let me apologize for not updating in a while! Things have been pretty busy in life and at the bakery! Today I decided to tell you all how to make these delicious little morsels (and one of Kristen’s favorites) canneles. It’s very hard to explain what they are other than custardy vanilla rum flavored bite sized pieces!

First you want to bring the milk and vanilla bean to a boil then let them infuse together for one hour. In this recipe, like many before them, I can’t stress enough that you need to sift the dry ingredients (aka the powdered sugar and the cake flour). It just makes the batter less lumpy. A lumpy batter is an unhappy batter. While the vanilla bean and milk are infusing, you want to whisk the eggs, egg yolks and powdered sugar (second picture). Make sure they are whisked very well to avoid lumps. From there you add in the rum, melted butter, sifted flour (third picture) and milk (second to last picture).

After you refrigerate the batter for 12 hours, you pour it into its fancy cannele molds and bake for one hour. The canneles will puff up then sink down and turn really dark. This is normal. Then there you have it, yummy little canneles~!

Now there is nothing too glamorous about a tart shell but a lot...

Thu, 10 May 2012 17:52:33 -0400

Now there is nothing too glamorous about a tart shell but a lot of work goes into making these little guys and they are very essential to making a delicious looking (and tasting of course) fruit tart!

First you want to take a good hunk of short dough (which is made using a lot of flour, sifted powdered sugar, butter, salt, and eggs) and roll it out on a thin lining of flour so that it doesn’t stick to the table or your rolling pin. Then, once you roll it about 1 cm thick, you want to place the dough over the tart tin, gently pushing the dough into the mold. From there you take off all the extra dough and bake those little tart shells until they are golden and there you have it! Tart shells!

Photo credited to: Crafty Ginger Cake Pops are a tricky,...

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 16:34:33 -0400

Photo credited to: Crafty Ginger

Cake Pops are a tricky, delicate art. You will need left over cake, popsicle sticks, coating chocolate, and of course, pots and pans. Cake pops start out as a regular cake, broken and crumbled up into tiny pieces. Then you mix these tiny pieces with a little or a lot (depending on how much cake you broke up) buttercream, until the cake molds and clumps together and holds together like wet sand. Then you put it into the fridge to cool for up to 10 minutes. Then using a small icecream scooper, you scoop out the exact size cake pops and line them on a sheet pan until you no longer have anymore cake left. Then you refrigerate them again for up to 10 minutes. Then you want to mold the pop into balls.

Next you want to melt chocolate over a double boiler over low heat. This will ensure that your chocolate will melt but will not burn. Once your chocolate has completely melted you want to grab you popsicle stick and your rolled balls of cake and begin making your cake pops. The trick to making it so that the cake does not fall off your stick when dipping it into the chocolate is to first dip the stick into the melted chocolate, THEN place the stick into the cake THEN dip the cake into the chocolate. This method has proven to work wonderfully so far and Should work for you too.

At this point you want to work quickly because the chocolate will begin to dry. You want to gently shake off the extra chocolate then carefully decorate your cake pop with any sprinkles or icings before the cake pop dries fully. Then there you have it! You made a delicious cake pop!

Anyone up for some beer cupcakes?

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 16:09:51 -0400

Anyone up for some beer cupcakes?

Another fruit tart looking so delicious!

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 16:03:08 -0400

Another fruit tart looking so delicious!

Today I thought it would be good to go through the making of a...

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 16:56:00 -0400

Today I thought it would be good to go through the making of a macaron. These little guys are tricky because a whole lot of work goes into them. Before we even get to the parts shown in the pictures, The macaron batter (which is at this point only almond flour and powder sugar) must be blended in a food processor then afterwards be sifted so that it is a very very fine powder. Then come the egg whites and thus the little batter all dispersed in the 5 bowls that you see.

Then there comes the food coloring! You have to make sure you don’t put too much or you’ll get too much of a colored product. Also you have to be sure to delicately fold the color in. You don’t want to harshly mix in the color otherwise when you bake them, they will not form a nice smooth circle but will come out deflated and crooked.

We used the bottom of a food coloring bottle to get the perfect little circle you see in the picture! Before you bake a macaron, you have to let it sit out and dry a little so that it forms a somewhat stiff outer shell. Then you pop them into the oven and watch them carefully so that they don’t over cook and bam, you have a macaron shell. Then filling is a whole ‘nother story which I will save for a different time because there are many different fillings. There is only one macaron shell.

Fruit tarts always come out so photogenic!

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 16:39:06 -0400

Fruit tarts always come out so photogenic!

Lessons learned

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 16:37:23 -0400

DON’T ADD EGGS TO CORNSTARCH (unless you immediately start whisking the two together). It can make a batter lumpy.

Cupcake Batter

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 16:35:33 -0400

When adding extras (such as pistachios to our pistachio cupcakes or strawberry puree to our strawberry cupcakes) be very delicate and don’t stir too much because it can make the batter tough by building the gluten. Fold gently!

Time for some daily deliciousness featuring left, strawberry...

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 16:32:23 -0400

Time for some daily deliciousness featuring left, strawberry cupcakes and right, pistachio cupcakes. Yum, no?

Buttercream

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 11:11:00 -0400

So this week I thought I’d talk a little bit about buttercream, since we make so much of it at the patisserie. It is a real tricky thing to make, at least in the beginning. For those who don’t know how it is made, you first have to boil sugar with a real teeny tiny amount of water, just enough to get the sugar wet basically. Then you have to watch the boiling sugar and make sure that it does not crystallize on the sides of the pot. You can tell when it starts to do this because it looks like little grains of sand on the sides or it gets kind of glossy. If this happens, you have to quickly brush it away with water.

You want to bring the sugar up to a boil, to about 230 degrees before you start whipping the eggs you will need for the recipe. Then, going back to the boiling sugar, once it reaches 238 degrees, you add it to the still whipping eggs then let the two of them go on whipping until they cool down. Once they are cool, you can start to add the butter.

Then you get a product that looks like this.

Buttercream is super tricky and if you make it at home be careful and be sure to have the proper equipment (such as a thermometer and a kitchenaid appliance or something similiar). Homemade buttercream is worth the effort though. It is light and delicious and once I have the boiling sugar down, I will be able to make this decadent topping myself!

Carrot cake baseball! Can’t go wrong there.

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 10:56:24 -0400

Carrot cake baseball! Can’t go wrong there.

Cannoli cupcakes anyone?

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 10:52:36 -0400

Cannoli cupcakes anyone?

Photo

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 10:48:53 -0400

Lovely raspberry white chocolate cake that I can assure you is...

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 10:47:37 -0400

Lovely raspberry white chocolate cake that I can assure you is delicious.

Petit fours are a very diligent process. I personally did not...

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 09:13:40 -0400

Petit fours are a very diligent process. I personally did not make them but these delicious morsels were made yesterday and I got to watch HOW they were made so now I get to share with the world. You bake cake, let’s say for the sake of this conversation it’s a red velvet cake, very thin on several sheet pans. You let the cake cool then you layer it: cake, buttercream frosting, cake, buttercream frosting, cake. Finally comes a layer of fondant icing which is carefully drizzled over the topas to cover the entire cake. Then comes the design and there you have it, a petit four!

Maple bacon cupcakes. Need I say more? They sold out the day we...

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 09:00:37 -0400

Maple bacon cupcakes. Need I say more? They sold out the day we made them.

On Thursday I learned how to make flourless chocolate cake....

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 10:11:29 -0400

On Thursday I learned how to make flourless chocolate cake. First I’d like to note that making any baked good without flour is really awesome to me because nearly everything else I can think of requires at least some type of flour (be it almond flour or some other type of specialty flour).

You have to separate the eggs at some point and whip the egg whites (which the pictures illustrate) so that you get fluffy white peaks and fold it into this chocolatey goodness very gently. This is very important, you have to make sure there are no white streaks but at the same time you don’t want to be harsh with the batter and over mix it or you lose the airiness. It becomes this fluffy light mousse-like batter that you bake. It puffs up like a souffle and deflates slightly when it cools but stills looks awesomely delicious. I love how it’s flourless.

Beautiful.

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 09:54:37 -0400

Beautiful.

This was a big week for Kirsten, she had to made a special cake...

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 09:52:02 -0400

This was a big week for Kirsten, she had to made a special cake for a wedding rehearsal and as you can see, it turned out amazing! It took several hours of dedicated work but she got through it and I decided it had to be featured in a post on tumblr.