straying away from theme…

theme baking has been halted for the last few days since i’m waiting for the arrival of a new oven…and for that, convection! it’s all very exciting. i”ve been dreaming about even-baking and flaky flaky croissants since my purchase. but more of that later.

straying away from my usual theme because i’ll be catering a friend’s wedding next sunday. yes, i cater. rarely, at least for now. i find weddings to be challenging, not because of the baking, but because of the wedding cake. cake decorating is such a different animal and i give lots of props to cake decorators; that’s just something i don’t particularly enjoy doing or very good at. but i do bake them a small wedding cake, usually for the purpose of ceremony-cutting, and then a dessert buffet. there are ~150 guests at this wedding, and i’ll be baking a variety of desserts totaling ~450 pieces. this part i’m very excited about.

so today i had to test out a recipe for citrus cupcake with citrus-honey buttercream. nice and comforting on a rainy day…

and yes, i’ve used instagram for the photo, which is something i’ve been resisting until now. all the pics thus far have been taken with my iphone4 without any adjustments. but for this one, plus rainy day, it was hard to see the lemon and lime zests…so instagram it is!

aside from this, the wedding menu will be something like the following…what do you think?!

sable…#2

so the last sable experiment was sort of a disaster. for one, the cookies expanded way too much, and two, i’m pretty sure it was over baked even though i do prefer my cookies to be on the crunchier side. for the second experiment, i actually went and got good butter and decided to just machine the recipe instead of doing the by-hand thing. definitely faster but not as fun. i’m continuing with black sesame on this batch but also did a second batch with red bean paste that’s still in the fridge and will be baked tomorrow…

lots of delicious butter taste but definitely need more black sesame. next time…powder AND paste?!

brioche!

brioche time! when i did brioche in class (did i mention that i took a part-time course at the french culinary institute in nyc?! well, i did, and it was awesome) the chef made chocolate pastry cream rolls with extra dough. so…why limit myself to chocolate pastry cream when i have taro and red bean pastes? that’s exactly what i did…great for breakfast!

i have to say that i’m not too happy with this recipe though. pastry cream and flavor pastes are good. but for some reason, the amount of salt in the recipe surprised me so i cut it down a bit, but i could still taste salt in the end product. i guess that means more brioche this week…