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*

shan demos string work with royal icing

**Jump for more butter**

Mr. Jeremy just finished system administration on my computer. I now have a terabyte of disk space! Well, it’s actually half a terabyte since I have a mirror for redundancy, but when that gets crowded it will be time for an external RAID or some such lovely. Big thanks to Jeremy – a man of many hidden talents. Such a gem, he is.

I stopped by the Cake Lady (her unofficial name). It’s this tiny run down looking shop in a very depressed strip mall. The store is crammed to the hilt full of cake and candy-making supplies. It smells like 1974. The owner is pushy and since customers usually come in one at a time, she hovers and won’t stop talking to let you think for a second. You can’t even browse without her demanding what you are looking for. On top of that, she told me that CSR doesn’t do chocolate molding right, that she never has to scrape the chocolate over her molds. Well – she also makes maybe a dozen or so at a time? CSR is teaching their students to make chocolates in production-mode… meaning hundreds at a time. I really want to support her business, but she makes me batty and also doesn’t have much in the way of pastry supplies. I did purchase some luster dust… beautiful raspberry and midnight blue colors. I wonder who would want to sample some pretty truffles?

I have two projects for this weekend: a chocolate 6-inch cake for Grandma Darling, and a lemon 9-inch for my aunt, Elena, and her family. It gets a little tricky because of transportation issues and the fact that New Mexico is hotter than hell right now. The chocolate cake will be chocolate chiffon cake layers with Grand Marnier soaking syrup and chocolate buttercream. The lemon cake will be vanilla chiffon layers with lemon soaking syrup, lemon curd, and lemon buttercream. I will also experiment with a new mold I bought. Let’s hope it doesn’t tank. I’m a slut for lemony anything. Nice excuse to get this:

limoncello: i buy more booze for pastries and cooking than anything else

A beef brisket is in the slow cooker now. Hoping it will be melt-in-your-mouth tender by morning. It smells pretty good right now!

Class was awesome tonight. Katherine and I made chocolate peanut butter bombes. These were the ones I least liked, but the point is to learn the skills, so I let her choose. I always get the feeling that we are behind schedule, but each class I’ve partnered with Katherine, we tend to finish our tasks at the same time and usually first among the other groups.

chocolate peanut butter bombes

**Jump for more butter**