Teaching/Learning/Cooking

Inspiration comes from the darndest places.  Was reading The Kitchen Counter Cooking School by Kathleen Flinn, a book we acquired in March of this year.  It was all about how a trained chef gave a series of free cooking classes to people she spotted at the food store purchasing pre-packaged and highly processed food.

Things I knew but needed to be reminded of by Kathleen Flinn’s book:

1.  Use up your leftovers.   Some suggestions - combine with new things and create pasta toppings, fillings for omelets, add to salads and soups. 

I put this adage to work right away.  Yes, I confess, I shop at Costco, and am sometimes seduced by the low prices on items I don’t normally consume in huge quantities.  Like that giant jar of Kalamata olives that was languishing in my fridge. 

Checking a cookbook I own, I used my food processor to whip up an olive tapenade,  and added a chopped ripe beefsteak tomato, chopped fresh parsley,  a can of drained imported tuna and served this over wagon wheel pasta (plain for my granddaughter), and topped with more whole olives and freshly microplaned Parmesan cheese.  Wonderful!

2. Use flavor profiles to cook without a recipe.  I do this all the time, but The Kitchen Counter Cooking School contains a “Cheat Sheet” for cuisines from Cajun to Asian with lists of relevant ingredients that you might have forgotten.

3. Always have fresh garlic, onions, and lemons on hand.  Note to self:  buy lemons.

4. Pass on your love of cooking to others.  My granddaughter loves to "make" fruit salad (she can cut up soft fruits like bananas and strawberries).  I was cutting up fruit for breakfast one morning and Devon offered to arrange a fruit platter.  She tentatively tried the apricots, and loved them.  Funnily enough, Devon used the apricot pit, and the next day, used the tops of the strawberries in her design.  Don’t stifle creativity!

Devon and Apricot Pit Fruit Plate

  Finally, a quote from Chapter 2:

5. “You have to give yourself that dream assignment.  No one is going to give it to you.”  Sage advice I’d love to follow and pass on to all my kids.  It's a variation on one I've always loved:  “Create the life you dream of living.”

Lots of people, books, ideas and cooking -   all things I love being surrounded with.  Come and explore all your options at our Library today.

Diane Whitman

Reference Librarian

Lifelong Student

Adventures in Fondant

I had the happy occasion to bake a cake for someone's baby shower (you know who you are!) today.   At first someone suggested that I make the "pregnant Mom" cake from Buddy Valastro's Baking with the Cake Boss, (funny but cute); but instead it was requested that I make something with a beach theme.

How about a fondant covered sand pail cake with shells, sand dollars and a starfish in graham cracker "sand"?   Having made only one other fondant covered cake before - albeit a 3 tiered wedding cake, I was excited but totally apprehensive too.  Could I sculpt a cake like they do on Ace of Cakes?

Using the shell cupcakes from the cookbook Confetti Cakes as inspiration, and the pocketbook cake on the cover for directions on building the layers, I started by making six (yes, that's not a typo!) 8 inch cake layers on Wednesday.

A practice fondant cupcake I made at the Montville Library's fondant decorating class taught by Kristen Havyar.

Thursday I started the morning by making the fondant shell decorations (really fun), and then continued by making both a faux buttercream frosting and a real buttercream filling recipe.  By the afternoon, it was on to  filling, constructing, sculpting, and then the worrying part: covering the cake with fondant.

Constructing involved cutting foam core to size under each two layers of cake and supporting the cake layers with straws.  After all six layers were stacked up,  I sharpened a dowel, poked it through all the layers including the foam core "plates", and cut the dowel flush with the top. Into the fridge with the giant cake (it was seven and a half pounds before filling and frosting, and almost a foot tall) in order to make the sculpting more stable.  Confetti Cakes suggests cakes should go in the freezer for an hour, but there was no way I had freezer space for that behemoth!

On to sculpting the cake.  Fortunately for me (who is completely drawing challenged), cutting a cake into a cone shape is pretty basic.  After cutting off (and BTW consuming!) a lot of frosting filled cake (what was that diet I was supposed to be following?), it was time to coat the whole shebang with frosting.  But first, back to the fridge to cool down.

While I waited for the cake to cool,  I mixed pink gel food color into a two and a half  pound block of fondant.  As I  mindlessly and endlessly pulled, pushed and  kneaded the fondant to get the color mixed evenly, I fretfully pondered how to get the fondant onto the cake.

Plan A:  If I rolled out a giant sheet of fondant and put it over the entire cake, would I then have so much excess fondant that it would bell out around the cake and be impossible to shape without a lot of cutting or unsightly seaming? Also, would the fondant sheet be so big that when I tried to drape it over the cake it would start tearing??? Yikes! Okay, that would be too nerve racking.

How about Plan B:  If I cut the fondant into a top piece with a separate side piece, it would be easier to work with for sure, but would the unsupported side piece then slide off the cake?

Since tearing would be really hard to fix, I decided to take my chances with Plan B, and proceeded to roll out a small circle of fondant for the top.   Thus committed, I put some some serious muscle power into rolling out the remaining fondant into a huge semicircle to drape around the cake.

One small tear near the top later, I had wrestled the fondant onto the cake.  Success!  It still didn't look like a sand pail, but it was an impressive looking pink cake.  Hopefully the additional of the pail handle, some cute fondant polka dots,  crushed graham cracker "sand" and fondant shells would contribute to the illusion.

A friend told me it takes her 10 hours to decorate each fondant covered cake, and with a few more parts to finish up that night, I'd say that was right on target.  Ten to decorate, plus four or five to make the cakes.

So here's the final result today, Friday, and I think the expectant couple was pleased.  Hooray!  The surprised and happy smiles on the parents-to-be's faces were totally worth it.  My only question is:  when can I make the next cake?

Find the recipes for Vanilla Cake and Swiss Meringue Buttercream in Elisa Strauss' Confetti Cakes, and the extra faux buttercream frosting I used to "glue" the foam core to the platter and the cakes in America's Test Kitchen Family Baking Book, both available in our Library

An important food safety tip I would add to the Swiss Meringue Buttercream recipe from the Confetti Cakes book, is that when you are heating the egg whites, the directions say 'until they are very hot'.  If you use a candy thermometer, the safe temperature to cook eggs to is 160 degrees.  (I cooked mine to 165 just to be sure.)  If you get to 180, the eggs will set and will no longer be usable for frosting, so watch carefully and pull the eggs off the flame at 160 or 165 or so. Also, refrigerating the Buttercream and then rebeating it as directed in the recipe will allow you to put more filling between the layers, which I would have done had I had more time.

For inspiration, check out Buddy Valastro's book, Baking with the Cake Boss.  And if you feel like you need some instruction, try the Wilton cake decorating classes offered at  Michaels' stores.  (Also this is where you can buy fondant in 5 pound packs.) I took two Wilton classes (then offered at JC Penney and paid for as a gift from my thoughtful mother-in-law) thirty two years ago in order to make my own wedding cake, and am still enjoying using those skills all these years later.

Diane Whitman, MLS
Reference Librarian
Designated Library Baker


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I Found a Farm at the Library

In these unstable economic times around the world a young American author named Jenna Woginrich is inspiring readers of her books, tweets, and blog posts to take charge.  To learn to be more self-sufficient while being environmentally conscious. Jenna is no whiner. She is on her feet trying, making mistakes, and learning. You can occupy Wall Street if you want.  No offense to the occupiers, but I admire someone like Jenna. She is truly a doer!

I discovered Jenna's first book while looking for recipes in the 640 section of the Library shelves.   I happened to notice the title Made From Scratch: Discovering the Pleasures of a Handmade Life. This  immediately got my attention because anything about "handmade" is impressive to me.  It means that someone has slowed down, taken time to be creative and clever, broke a sweat, taught themself something, saved money, and even helped the planet to boot.  What's not to love?! 

 In her book she talks about how she started off as a young, single woman with a desk job and a city apartment who wanted to build a more self-sufficient lifestyle by learning homesteading skills. She didn't own land or have much practical experience beyond a few forays into knitting and soap-making.  She did have a strong desire to opt out of what she saw as a consumer-driven culture. After moving to a rented farmhouse, she learned to raise chickens and bees, and to grow her own food. All the while supporting herself with a full-time job as a graphic artist. 

Along the way, she learned that an abundance of enthusiasm and a willingness to experiment could make up for a lack of knowledge, and that reaching out to others for mentoring and guidance could help her reconnect with her community.

In the book I found simple sewing patterns and simplified recipes for pancakes, quiche, and bread among other ideas.

Made from Scratch shares the deep satisfaction Jenna found by learning to provide for herself. Her youthful (she is in her mid-20s) outlook is positive and humorous as she shares stories of her ups and downs with her two sled dogs (yes, she even taught herself how to drive a sled team!).  In addition she talks about lessons learned to knit a sweater, play a guitar, make jam, even raise baby chicks.

Her voice is inspirational and encouraging as she goads readers to take small steps toward self-reliance as she does.  For Jenna, it's about learning the simple skills most of us have forgotten, and finding joy in the process.

Since the printing of that first book, Jenna bought a small farm in upstate New York and continues to learn new things, such as training a pony to pull and playing a banjo. She is writing her fourth book now about how she has managed her first year as a property owner, part-time new farmer, and still full-time graphic artist. 

Her story is less unique than you might think. Raised garden beds in Brooklyn backyards has taken on a kind of movement (search videos on You Tube). Upstate New Yorker farmers Josh and Brent of Beekman Farm have a book and now weekly TV show about their "conversion" from working for others to self-reliance on the farm.


One way Jenna has helped herself survive is by inviting readers of her blog to paid workshops in her home, where she shares her hard-won knowledge on a variety of topics.  In March I am looking forward to attending her workshop on Urban Farming, a course for suburbanites like myself who want to be better backyard gardeners and canners for benefit of health and wallet.  
 
To learn more about Jenna Woginrich and her homestead on Cold Antler Farm, just search in Twitter, Facebook, and Blogger, and of course, on the 640 shelf at your local library.