Summertime Pie

As the weather gets cooler and berry season is coming to an end, it's time to make the most of the few weeks we have left of summertime flavors.

Last month after graduating and leaving my former job in pursuit of more culinary adventures, I spent a week in D.C. visiting my family. My Dad has a very particular sweet tooth - he's not crazy about cakes, cookies, or chocolate, but he does love pie. He will take a pie warm or cold, big or small, and with any type of fruit. It's amazing for me to watch my normally stoic middle-aged father turn giddy as a little boy at the site of baked fruit encased in crust.

Knowing this, I did a lot of pie baking while at their house, and was particularly inspired by a bottle of limoncello my parents had received as a gift from a friend who'd recently returned from a trip to Italy.


Not that I wanted to bake a lemon pie, but rather thought that the limoncello would be a great compliment to the sweet and rich cherries my Mom had picked up from the farmer's market. Toss in a couple of blackberries for small bursts of intense flavor, and you have a great pie filled with the tastes of summer.

I used a linzer dough recipe from Food Network Canada (replacing almonds for the hazelnuts), and about a pound of cherries with a pint of blackberries. Just bloom and melt about a teapoon of gelatin in about 3 tablespoons of limoncello, toss with pitted cherries and blackberries and a 1/4 cup of sugar, and bake for about an hour. (I prefer to taste more fruit than sugar in my pies, but if you prefer something sweeter add more sugar.)


The crust is flaky and buttery to offset the sweet, tart cherries, and the hit of limoncello brings out the deeper berry notes. It's not simple, but it is definitely worth making before we have to say adios to warm weather food for the winter.

a very belated wedding cake post

Well here I am, almost a month after graduation (gasp) and finally, finally posting my wedding cake project photos. As Jade mentioned earlier, the theme was Marie Antoinette in a modern day setting. I used the location's (Tavern on the Green) flamboyant ceiling as the palette inspiration and covered my cake in yellow fondant, wrapping the bottom of each tier in pink and placing blue bows amid the sugar paste flowers. Royal icing piping and gold dragees add a festive touch. I also stacked the tiers in a less-than-conventional fashion to give the piece movement and playfulness.

Graduation

Hey, so I totally forgot to post graduation photos in the last post. And really, what would be the point of spending all that money, nine months of our lives, and the last month in a kitchen without working air conditioning for 15 hours a week if we can't at least celebrate at the end?


Apparently we were the first class to ever hand out class superlatives. Rebekah and I were excited to share them with everyone after everyone received their diplomas. Although we look mischievous above, they really were quite tame and graduation-worthy.

After the ceremony, we relaxed with some well-deserved champagne.

(Yay, we're graduated!!)

A couple of things

We graduated - yay! There are many, many things that I wanted to post here during the last weeks of school, but life got in the way.

So, as a quick catch-up, I just wanted to share some wedding cake and graduation photos. Enjoy! I'll be back with a great Linzer dough recipe that got me rave reviews when used in summertime pies.

This wedding cake, like Rebekah's earlier, was a class project done in a Marie Antoinette theme. These pictures were taken about a week after the cake had been sitting in my fridge (again, I'm going to play the 'busy life' card) so the curved bottom and top tiers look a little ... well, dumpy, here.

But you can see that the use of the gold edible paint in the beading, royal icing piping, and the furls at the top really give this cake a fun and flamboyant twist. The theme was also expounded in the chocolate cameos on each of side of the middle tier.

PattyCake makes its way into the mainstream!

http://www.saveur.com/article/Recipes/Meyer-Lemon-Egg-Salad

It's graduation time!

June is known for many things: the official start of summer (yea!), Father's Day and a flurry of graduation celebrations. My cousin Zach was one of the many celebrating his big leap from high school to college and, while I refuse to believe that my little cousin known for his suffocating bear hugs is no longer so little, PattyCake jumped at the chance to help him celebrate his big day.

Two early morning plane rides to Wisconsin, 17 hours and 150 assorted cupcakes and cookies later, Zach had his {cup}cake and I was ready for a much deserved nap (didn't you read Jade's former post? Birthdays, weddings and graduations...oh my!).

The assortment:
Cupcakes: vanilla, chocolate and red velvet.
Frostings: vanilla, chocolate, praline and cream cheese.
Cookies: vanilla-sugar, homemade oreos and bourbon pecan.

Busy Little Bees!

So it's been a while since Rebekah or I have posted anything, and we promise it's not because we have forgotten to! We have been extremely busy over the past month and now that we have a little time to rest, it's the perfect time to catch you up.

We have been delivering cupcakes across this great city, and also even all the way out to Wisconsin! (More on that later.) We also had our first cake order, which was probably one of the most challenging and rewarding jobs yet.

We had to recreate a wedding cake.

No small feat, let me tell you. The original cake, served five years ago at the wedding of J.'s boss M., was completely custom-made, from the bright-red fondant with elegant flowered piping, to the filling layered with dark chocolate ganache, vanilla cake, and raspberry mousse. To top it off a handmade, pure white, sugar-paste rose bouquet flourished atop the five tiers. It was a masterpiece of a cake and our task was to recreate it (in miniature!) to serve at their anniversary lunch.

We could have done a lot of this with store-bought parts. However, being the ambitious girls we are, everything was made from scratch. Once the easy parts were out of the way - the cake, raspberry mousse, and ganache – we tackled the hardest part: draping the fondant on the tiers and applying the piping. Finally, the sugar-paste flowers were molded by hand, shaping little white buds and wrapping them with thin petals with our freshly made sugar-paste.

We've heard horror stories of fondant cracking, peeling, and falling apart, but one thing we think more bakers should talk about is sweating. Not the sweating that you do when you realize you have to make fondant from scratch at 11:30 PM because the white store-bought fondant doesn't want to absorb enough red food coloring to get it even close to the color your client wants, but rather the sweating the cake does as it defrosts beneath your, previously perfect, layer of fondant, creating a problematic layer of moisture. This discovering found Jade doing her own form of sweating (and I’m sure grumbling) into the wee-hours of the morning while holding a hand dryer to the otherwise lovely cake.

Despite the unfortunate discovery of “sweating,” the cake was delivered in perfect form to the restaurant and promptly enjoyed (and admired) by the clients. Whew! Next, remind us to tell you about the red velvet mishap!