use real butter

Last night I had my last class and finished my pastry course! I felt both relief and sadness. Sadness, because I love the class and my instructor and most of the people in the class. Actually, we were missing several people (again!) last night. Everyone who showed up was pretty dedicated from the get go, and it was nice to bake with all of them one last time. I was relieved because I have been acquiring so much information that there is a backlog of stuff I need to process and ingest on my own before I feel I’ve mastered it and can move on. While we sat around eating our light dinner of soup and salad and bread, three of us were analyzing the soup, trying to pinpoint all of the flavors and the sources of those flavors. I like foodies. There aren’t enough of them in my life. Elena lives in the next state, Kell is in the next hemisphere, Nicole is moving to Seattle, Fiona moved to Australia… and everyone else is scattered like gunshot (i.e. not here). *sigh*

I should just learn to accept that it is okay to purchase a cake. But not yet.

It’s really hard for me to bake in someone else’s house, mainly because their kitchen isn’t outfitted the way mine is, but also because I need to dominate in the kitchen – no room for yackity yack, please get out of my way.

Today’s endeavor involved two cakes that will be traveling with us. The first: lemon lemon with lemon cake. The second: chocolate with chocolate and chocolate cake. If the second cake was not for Jeremy’s grandma, I might have gotten a lot more interesting with the flavors, but the Darlings like their chocolate straight up. Not the most sophisticated, but certainly doable.

The recipe I have for the lemon cake base makes a lot because I only have 9×2 pans. I like the 9×3’s they have at school. So we had enough batter for a mini 6-inch. I made all of the components for the cake and then packed them up since it makes more sense to assemble it at Elena’s place. I wanted to test it out though in mini form, so I made the 6-inch version with limoncello simple syrup, lemon curd, and lemon buttercream. It’s cute.

I had an extra vanilla chiffon cake from class and decided I’d use it for dessert this weekend when we had friends over for dinner. I normally like to work with chocolate despite my indifference toward it, but this time I wanted to try something orthogonal… something strawberry.

Originally I wanted to layer the cake with pastry cream and then frost in strawberry buttercream, but pastry cream can misbehave if it gets warm. I began the previous night washing the strawberries and setting them out to dry completely. First I wanted to do some garnishes, just for fun.