Our pastry chef in residence

Tags

baking, chef, pastry, postaday2015

   
 
Our daughter spent yesterday afternoon making cheese Danishes, her first time and they were delicious! She made them because she had promised her very good friend two years ago that she would make him cheese Danishes, well yesterday he got his wish. Trust me when I say that they were more then worth the wait, I had made cheese Danishes myself some time ago, my source of inspiration was my mother, mine weren’t as delicious as our daughter’s. Our daughter’s friend made out better than my mother did. 😀

   
 
She not only made tasty Danishes, but she remains the queen of chocolate chip cookies. Her cookies are to die for and I make sure that when she is preparing to make them, she has people lined up to eat those cookies, she can’t leave me alone with her cookies because once I have one, I can’t stop, I haven’t the proper discipline necessary to stop at one.

There I admitted it, I am powerless over my daughter’s cookies and her baking powers in general. LOL

She has talent, that one.

Daily prompt: Barter system

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barter system, food, pastry, postaday2015

If the world worked on a barter system, how would you fare? Would you have services to barter? Would you be successful, or would you struggle?

   

   

I am in love with farmer’s markets plain and simple, but the ones in France are particularly dear to my heart. I think primarily because I associate France with family and very happy memories. Food has always played a major role in my life from the negative to the postive; anorexia being the negative and cooking and baking being the positive. My parents invested a great deal of emotion, time and interest into food and its preparation and that has not only rubbed off on me, but it has had an impact on how I view food.

So I can pinpoint the origin of my passion for food. I then nutured it by experimenting in the kitchen as soon as I was allowed near an oven in my early teen years; those were the days of Jello, pudding and Cool Whip. As I progressed, those ingredients lost their luster and I moved onto adult cookbooks which called for more complicated techniques such as puff pastry recipes, pastry cream recipes and other types of pastry making techniques.

If I had had the talent for pastry decoration or even just the finesse necessary in, not only creating delicious desserts, but beautiful ones as well, I may have thrown my hat into the ring in opening a Patisserie shop, a small place where one can sit and order a cappucino and a pastry while you read your newspaper or your iPad. That has always been a dream buried beneath a realist assessment of my limited talent.

All of this conjecture does bring me to the heart of this prompt, if we ever re-engaged in the barter system, I would feel very comfortable trading my skills in the kitchen for supplies or services that others would be willing to barter in return for say an apple tart or a cream puff. I might even find a home at a local farmer’s market, bartering my pies, cookies and cakes for cuts of meat, beautiful produce and other sundry items that I would need. I would definitely have a lot of work to do if I wanted to be able to run my household based solely on my edible wares. That would be quite the challenge. 

I think that this would be a very good lesson for many of us, a lesson in understanding the how’s and why’s of value and precisely how objective, and alternatively, how subjective both value and perception can be; because in the final analysis, there is not one concrete method to apportion value to something that could be devoid of one’s inherently emotion based perceptions, thereby thrusting subjectivity into the equation. The last item involved that I neglected to mention is the need factor, there is where I may have trouble, how many people out there really “need” my pastries? Moreover another factor to take into consideration would be how many people want my pastries? Need and want are two different scales in the human value system and how one perceives their relative importance is yet another factor to be considered. I can see how one can view economics the discipline as both simple and complicated at the same time. I have just seen first hand how tricky it is to satisfactorily explain what I mean even when in my head it seems so clear. Good luck trying to decipher my gobblygook. lol

Special delivery on the way

Tags

baking, cookies, pastry, postaday2014

This morning I walked from the hotel to the Herndon Post Office to ship off two packages of homemade goodies. They are now in transit and in several days will arrive to their destinations. As I was walking back to the hotel, it was a mile and a half each way, a nice bit of exercise which made me even happier, I was thinking as usual about the possibilities of actually baking goodies commercially and the logistics of shipping my goodies to customers. This curiosity is always lingering deep in the back of my mind and the only thing that stands in the way of it ever becoming a reality is me. Well in actuality it is more than just me. My piece in this potential puzzle would lie in setting the ball in motion, the other factors could very well be out of my control such as customers actually wanting my goodies, finding a good space to bake that is sanctioned by the health department, finding the time to do all of the baking, packing and shipping and this tiny list barely scratches the surface.

When these thoughts take over my mind, I step back and think of the many ladies and men who actually took their dreams and passions and made them into concrete success stories and I am full of admiration for their courage, their dedication, their tenacity and their steely resolve because it takes all of that to make it in the competitive and volatile retail food industry. And then I ask myself do I have what it takes. I might have had the energy and the strength years ago, but I don’t think that I have the passion to make it a reality. I adore baking for my family and friends, I don’t know if that would ever have been enough for something more on a commercial level.

This isn’t about regrets because it isn’t ever too late. I think to Julia Childs and what she accomplished at 50. She is an inspiration for me, not only when it comes to cooking and baking but also in writing. She did mostly for herself and her friends and then she shared, I like to remember that.

Anyway I am happy, my packages went out and hopefully they will make their recipients very happy.

The baker within

Tags

baking, pastry, pizza, postaday2014, writing

Yesterday I made pizzas once again, two pies, for the three of us. As I was preparing them and getting them ready to put in the oven, I couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to sell my pizzas. The two pies did go really quickly, there were only three slices left for the next day and as of now, those three slices are long gone. Both the baby boy and my hubby rave to me how good they are, so I get curious and that leads me to daydream about a pizza empire in the Laurie fantasy land that is my imagination.

Now I know that owning and operating any food establishment is as far from fantasy land as you can imagine, I know that from seeing my father handle the day to day operations and responsibilities of his restaurant. So my flights of fancy are just that, flights of fancy. However it doesn’t change the fact that I love cooking and baking for not only my family, but for people in general.

I have a fairly large amount of puff pastry dough that I made during the holiday’s in the freezer, this is the first time that I froze the excess amount and I am curious to see how it will thaw, so next weekend I am contemplating what to create with this puff pastry dough. I know that Pillsbury puff pastry sheets work quite well when defrosted, but is that because of the additives or does puff pastry dough in general freeze well? Next weekend I will find out, the question remains; what should I bake? The issue at hand is that it is only the three of us and I am on a diet so what to do with the extra’s. I could, I suppose, give it to the neighbors.

What to bake? Do I make elephant ear cookies, do I make an apple tart, do I go out of the box and do something complicated with pastry cream and whipped cream? I suppose I’ll have to see how I feel next weekend.

These thoughts of baking professionally come and go, it is never serious because I am too fatigued on a good day for it to ever come to fruition, but it doesn’t mean that I don’t dream about it. I do know that in the cold, hard light of reality, I am not talented enough to make a serious go at owning a bakery shop, my baking skills are at the caliber of a home baker, not a professional one. My goodies are made with a lot of love and whenever the people I love eat them and express their appreciation, that is what makes me very happy and fulfilled, I suppose that I start feeling this way when it has been too long since I received a little approbation for my baking efforts. I have to confess that I can be a little needy when it comes to compliments for things that I do and what I create. That is my confession of the day.

Unique Sweets

Tags

baking, pastry, postaday2013, T.v, talent, work

My hubby and I are watching the show Unique Sweets on the Cooking Channel. It’s a dangerous show to watch on a lazy Sunday afternoon, everything that they are describing is making my hubby salivate. All this show is doing for me, is calling my inner patissiere or baker to get out into the kitchen and make something like croissants or pain aux raisins or an apple galette. Trust me,when I say that I don’t have the skill set or the true talent to go into business making beautiful pastries for public consumption. My stuff tastes good, I might even go as far as very good at times, but I never get the aesthetic part right.

The show was highlighting breakfast pastries and there were three places that rated their mention. On the West Coast there was Knead Bakery, there was also Levain Bakery and there was a third called Sonoma Bakery. All three had original pastries. There was a breakfast apple pissette; essentially a thin crust apple pizza which looked mouth wateringly delicious. Another amazing breakfast pastry offering was the palme d’or which is a puff pastry shell filled with soft caramel sprinkled with sea salt topped with a vanilla pastry cream and sprinkled on top with a generous dusting of sugar that the pastry chef puts a blow torch to creating a hard carmel topping to the pastry. It was a masterpiece. The other pastry that was truly note worthy was a whole wheat dinner roll that once out of the oven was split open and stuffed with slivers of excellent European chocolate and closed back together. After purchasing, you saw the customers open their whole wheat rolls and see this luscious molten chocolate emerge, I have personal experience with this type of treat. When I was a child in France, my sister, my cousin and I at 4:00 p.m, would take 4 inch pieces of French baguettes and insert pieces of chocolate in the interior and eat them for a snack. French crusty baguettes make an excellent foil for good quality chocolate.

My love of baking is really the love and desire to put smiles on everyone’s faces. Whenever I make something by hand, it makes me so happy to see my family close their eyes, flair their nostrils and lick their lips in delight. It truly is all about the love. That would be the only reason for baking in a professional capacity, to spread the love and goodness that is all about patisserie.