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Well since it's summer, I'm trying to eat a little more on the lighter side these days. I decided to make a strawberry sorbet…they don't have any calories right? 
To add some more pizazz to the sorbet, I made some brown sugar meringues and candied pecans to go with it. Overall, I thought the dessert was good, nothing outrageously delicious to write home to mom about, but still yummy. The sorbet really did taste like you were eating a strawberry, not too sweet at all, so if you like things natural then this is definitely the recipe for you. This would be great for a summer bridal shower.
I had a ton of fun making the meringues and choosing which designs to make with them. And for those of you who think you'll never make homemade caramelized nuts think again! This recipe took about all of 5 minutes to whip together and only involves 3 ingredients! Even though this dessert had three different components to it, it really was a user friendly dessert. Each component was extremely easy and fast to make. The only time consuming part is baking the meringues and freezing the ice cream, but you can be busy doing other things while these things take place. Also, if you want to plan ahead each one of these could be made ahead of time and then assembled at the last minute. As you can see by the multitude of photos, I got a little excited when playing with this dessert and tried out many, many different ways to style it. Hope you enjoy them!
My friend from pastry school was having her 40th birthday party and she asked me to help out. For the dessert she wanted cupcakes of course.
She said she wanted to keep it simple so we went with vanilla cupcakes with chocolate mousse buttercream and chocolate cupcakes with Chockylit's cream cheese frosting (aka Vanilla Bean Frosting). Both of these are simple delicious!
The vanilla cupcakes I tried for the first time are from Vanilla Bakeshop. They gave the recipe away on the Martha Stewart show, and I knew I had to try it. The chocolate mousse buttercream is from Sticky, Chewy, Messy, Gooey which is a fantastic book that I recommend. This is probably my favorite chocolate frosting right now -definitely worth a try.
It was my turn to bring dessert to my Bible study last Thursday night, which was around the same time I was making the cake for another order, so I decided to use a little of the batter to make mini cupcakes for everyone. To make the cupcakes even cuter I decided to use some adorable flower cupcakes liners that I got from Fancy Flours. I think I have an unhealthy addiction to cute cupcake liners and once I see them…I have to have them!
Behind the scenes here, one of the things we get most excited about, in addition to fabulous letterpress, is our participation in a local CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) program. Bella Figura and Smock subsidize CSA memberships for all employees so a large percentage of us take advantage of the opportunity to have fresh, local, organic produce delivered to our door - quite literally, in fact, as the Downtown Syracuse delivery pod is here at the old warehouse turned artist's haven that we call home. Once a week a local organic farm, Grindstone Farm, delivers incredibly fresh and delicious veggies and herbs to us, typically within just a few hours of being picked.
Here is the chocolate devil's food cupcake recipe that I used in a lot of my photos. These cupcakes are not only delicious, but they bake up perfectly every time, which is a pastry chef's dream come true. This is Michael Recchiuti's recipe from his book, Chocolate Obsession. This book is a definite buy for the chocolate lover because not only are the recipes great, but the photos in the book are mouth-watering themselves! Well, I hope you all take a chance making this recipe, because it surely won't disappoint you.
Devil's Food Cupcake Ingredients:
Here are some images from my cupcake class at Prep Kitchen Essentials. We had 13 ladies ready to bake, decorate, and eat their way through tons of yummy cupcakes. It was a tight schedule with lots of things to bake, many cupcakes to frost, and lots of decorations to make. I taught them how to make vanilla, chocolate, and carrot cake cupcakes. They also learned how to make vanilla buttercream, swiss meringue buttercream, vanilla cream cheese frosting, chocolate ganache filling, and peanut butter filling. Like I mentioned, it was busy!
In addition to cupcakes and frostings, I showed them how to make modeling chocolate roses, use chocolate transfer sheets, texture fondant accents, and pipe flowers. Here are some photos from the fun day!
My husband's side of the family has an interesting tradition for celebrating birthdays. Instead of celebrating everyone's birthday on their actual birthday they like to group birthdays together from a 3-4 month period and celebrate about 10 people's birthdays all together. Now this arrangement does have its pluses, but it also has its negatives -try being 24 years old and having enough money for 8 birthdays!!
Well, one benefit of being a pastry chef is using my culinary skills to make homemade gifts that make people forget that I didn't spend the big bucks on them. I decided to try out a new recipe for the big party extravaganza! I took a look through my folder full of cupcake recipes that I've been wanting to try out and I kept flipping back to Chockylit's recipe for Salted Caramel Frosting, so I decided to try it out.
Here are some fun photos from a previous cupcake class at Prep Kitchen Essentials. We had a great menu full of tasty cupcakes, fillings, and frostings and also played around with some fondant and marzipan. We used the fondant to make little embellishments for the top of our cupcakes by imprinting them with scrapbooking stamps. To check out this technique you can look at some of my post from yesterday. So here goes the menu for the class:
Happy Friday everyone!
As promised, I am sharing this delicious, refreshing, addicting drink! So get ready to get some chips and guacamole, a margarita glass, and some salt because here it comes!!
My husband and I spent the morning digging in the dirt. We're making raised beds in our backyard to plant veggies and berry bushes. Hauling wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of topsoil can cause a sudden craving for watermelon. Thankfully, I had some on hand.
Watermelon is fruit of the gods. There is nothing better than a cool piece of sweet watermelon after hours of manual, outdoor labour. Nothing better, except maybe a cold drink, served right out of a fresh watermelon!
When I stumbled on this DIY watermelon keg tutorial on evite.com, I couldn't help but think that this would be perfect for an outdoor wedding - or any outdoor party for that matter!
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