Mmmm...history...sort of

This is a Yule Log...it's a sponge cake (using the separated egg sponge method), chocolate mousse and chocolate butter cream with marzipan holly and italian meringue mushrooms. It's not hard to make, just intricate. It's history is pretty intricate, too. 

You see, back in the day...and by that I mean WAY back, before the Christian faith sort of took over the world, pagans worshiped things like the sun and the moon and the turning of the seasons. One of the ways they did this in the winter time was to burn a log and have a get together to celebrate the shortening of the sunlight during winter time. What would become the Catholics then adopted this tradition, along with many other pagan beliefs, in an effort to make it easier for the recently converted from receding back to their old faith. Instead of burning the yule log, they made it into a cake! Yay! Not as exciting, but way yummier. 

This is brioche...it's a very buttery bread...in fact it's almost all butter. It's also delicious. It apparently also started the French Revolution (according to a certain culinary school). When Marie Antoinette said "let them eat cake" (which she didn't ACTUALLY say), it was in reference to this bread. Back then, anything that used an inordinate amount of eggs, butter, or milk was considered above the simple class of "bread". It was a cake eaten by the upper class, those that could afford food products that were expensive...like butter. Poor Marie...shoulda kept her mouth shut. This particular style of brioche is called "brioche a tete". It means "head cake" in French. It's meant to look like a head in a basket...like a head that's just been cut off by a guillotine. It's yummy...and disturbingly so.

Yeast is not hard to make...you take some grapes, squish them and put them in a bucket with some flour and water...you feed the grapes with this flour and water mix for about 3 weeks. Once you get the grapes out of there, you've got perfectly good baking yeast. Well...sometime in the past someone over proofed some bread dough they made and decided to bake it off...why waste it right? That's where we get sourdoughs...the over proofing resulted in a tangy bread with lots of holes and a tough outer crust. It's a great way to take what this poor guy thought was a major boo-boo and make it into something fantastic.

America has produced some of my favorite foods. The modern hamburger, the hot dog, deep dish pizza. One of my personal favs is the chocolate chip cookie. One day, a while ago (I'm not a freaking historian, you guys) someone decided to cut a few corners making a very popular chocolate cookie and just threw chunks of chocolate into plain cookie batter hoping the chocolate would homogenize and melt into the cookie dough and magically create the desired product. Instead, that one mistake turned into a baking miracle. The chocolate cookie is hands down the favorite cookie in America. People come to this country in search of the great American cookie, and thy name is chocolate chip.

You never know what's going to happen in life...sometimes what you thing is a great disaster turns out to be your greatest triumph. Baking is a great profession because the mistakes you make don't mean it's the end of the world, nobody dies because of bread...except Marie Antoinette...but really, she had it coming, right?

Trip to Fredericksburg

SO, some of my family was in town and we really wanted to go see them. So we drove the 2 hours to Fredericksburg, Texas to see them anticipating some fun. Fredericksburg, for those who don't live here, is a little German town that's very kitschy and touristy. For you Washingtonians, think Leavenworth without the piped in German accordion music, and WAY more beer. Walked around with my cousin, Tara, who helped me redesign my blog. Hence the reason I changed it. She's pretty much an artistic genius, so I don't question her, I just do what she told me to do. We did a little shopping and we stopped here---->

Pretty much I want to live in this store, it has everything you could possibly want when it comes to cooking, baking, eating, etc. I bought myself a few essentials.

<---------Pointed Offset Spatula, great for decorating cakes

<----------10X (Powdered Sugar) Shaker, for professional dusting

<-------A Pinch, a Smidge or a Dash? These are a gag...although sometimes our recipes do call for a pinch.









Later in the day, Frankie and her cousin Charlie (he's 6...actually he and Frankie are the same age difference and my sister and I) went to Mr. Gatti's pizza and played games and won tickets and she got some of these.

And while I was shopping I bought myself this card with a quote from Christopher Columbus. 

Sometimes you have to take a leap...sometimes life throws you halfway across the world. Sometimes you find something new and exciting and it changes everything.

Buttercream Fail :-(

Fridays are test days. This past Friday I had to make a plain genoise cake with Swiss butter cream frosting. This is what my finished product looked like. It was my chef instructor's birthday...

I didn't do as well as I should have because my Swiss butter cream seized on me.

So I didn't get a very good grade on my practical...my chef's words were, "Honestly, Mary, I expected better from you." Ouch.






I know I could have done better. You see, I could have just redone the stupid buttercream, which is 4 ingredients and not terribly difficult. I could have simply heated the bowl with a torch whilst whipping until it was the right consistency again. But I didn't...not because I was being lazy, but because I didn't care. That reflected in my work.
I should care, it's my grade for goodness sake, but I've been kind of down the past few days. This definitely snapped me out of it. I had been lamenting my life lately, things I should have done, things I didn't do...things I wish I had.
What I should have been doing it make a better freaking butter cream! ARG!
So lesson learned, when life gets you down and your butter cream seizes...just freaking do it over woman!

Genoise

I'm 28 years old and I decided to start my life over in April of this year. Baking is a proud (and in most points of history, vital) tradition, an art that will last as long as humans exist and stuff still grows on this planet. When I was young I  honestly never really had a clue what I wanted to be when I grew up, other than when I was 4 and I wanted to be the lady in the circus that does acrobatics on horseback. She was cool.

So, why name this post "Genoise" you say? The picture above is a black forest cake with a chocolate genoise sponge. It has whipped cream, tempered chocolate shavings, chocolate trees and garottes (brandy soaked cherries). 4 months ago this would have been unfathomable to me as to how to make this...I wouldn't have even wanted to try. The Genoise cake isn't easy to make either. Several things could go wrong, from over folding the batter to the oven being too hot. Nobody wants a flat genoise.
I never thought "hey I think I'm going to bake for a living" or "that song Patty Cake really changed my life". When I do something right it makes me feel REALLY good. When someone eats the product that I made and their eyes roll back in their head from pure gastronomic pleasure, the feeling is indescribable. It's like your birthday and X-mas and the best day you ever had all in one moment. There's a saying one of my chef instructors taught us from the industry. FYIM...feeling like that is addictive. I'm glad I'm in school. I don't care if I'm going to be in debt for the next 5 (or 15) years.
I'm a baker, I bake therefore I am. I'm glad I finally figured that out. It's nice to have purpose and to carry on this tradition.
This blog is mostly going to be about baking, since that's my life's obsession right now. I'm not going to put up recipes or fully explain how I do what I do, that's why I'm paying to go to Le Cordon Blue. If a surgeon told you how to remove an appendix, I'm sure you'd get the grasp of it, but you wouldn't go cutting into people would you? Okay, Okay...so baking isn't as "life or death" as that scenario, but I take this stuff seriously.