Puff Pastry

Puff pastry. I wish to make you gluten free. Oh how lovely you will be if you let me eat thee. This was part of my final project for the puff pastry portion of pastry school.
These are speedy vol-au-vents. They are filled with a sweetened whip cream, and toped with seasonal fruit. Enjoy.

Top Left: Me playing with left over fruit and chocolate.
Bottom Left: I like bee hives. It was the start of fall, so bee hives in raspberries.
Bottom Left: I like it!

Look, a box!

For the love of chocolate... So this was our first big project for chocolates. We had to make a box to hold a bunch of truffles. The box had to have a bow on top. It also had to be made of two different types of chocolate. I chose dark and white chocolate. Oh, and those truffles you see are chocolate orange truffles. They are very good. And very gluten free!

Before I put the bow on this box it reminded me a lot of the Ark of the Covenant from "Raiders of the Lost Ark". That would make the truffles the most delicious malicious spirits ever.

Yep. Everyone wants to see the inside of my box.

I'm back from the dead

So I just got done being really really sick. Yay for viral infections! So, they do not get the internets in the underworld, so here is some new food!

This is a chocolate cake covered in chocolate leaved. This was the first project we worked on after learning to temper chocolate. Basically we made a chocolate cake with dried cherries, currants pears, walnuts and pecans. It was then glazed in out not so classic French chocolate glaze. The glaze is chocolate, butter and a little corn syrup. The leaves were made by painting tempered chocolate on lemon leaves. Enjoy.

Supposedly this stated like a super chocolate brownie.

I am the evil face of gluten. Fear ME!!!

Abstract chocolate art. This picture is actually in focus. I am just so awesome that I can make out of focus chocolate.

An ancient Ted monster seen trapped in chocolate. To see less ancient Ted Monsters visit www.Karensmonsters.com

So many leaves, so little cake.

Gluten free for you and me

I love food. I love food so very much I wish to make it for a living. I especially love to bake. I have always loved creating pies and pastries. Unfortunately about two years I discovered I have Celiacs Disease. It was nice to be able to do something about 23 years of stomach problems, but it was also so very terrible. What is a Italian Jew in New York to do? I lived off bagels, pasta and pizza.

After changing my diet I jumped head first into the world of gluten free foods. tasting the commercially available gluten free choices out there I became rather distraught. Most of what is available is really bad. Most commercially available breads are akin to solid blocks of bland rice. If I wanted rice, I will eat rice. I would not dress it up in a bread costume.

Eventually I became fed up with the offal that is available I started making my own food and now I am in pastry school learning what I need to know to create food that tasty and edible. So far I am having some success. I have a great gluten free recipe that I will share later. In the end I wish to create desserts that are gluten free and do not taste like the bottom of a new Yorkers shoe.

The Aquarium cake

Hay look! Its my midterm for pastry school. Look and love the aquarium cake. The cake is milk sponge layered with lemon mussiline. The topping is fondant with marzipan decorations.

And yes, that is an Angler Fish.

This project taught me the value of a nice xacto knife. I did not have one, and I lost a lot of fine detail in the decorations.

The cake was also very tart and refreshing. It seems that there was a very strong flavor of lemon.

A meditation story

The year was 1987. The time was 9:32 pm. I was sitting up in bed, when suddenly I had this great idea. I wondered what it would be like to think nothing, and so began a six month long journey to clear the mind of all thought. That night I worked myself up into quiet a tizzy trying to think nothing. Waking up in the morning found me slightly depressed, but doubly motivated. In the following months, I slowly worked through my mental process, cataloguing where it was that I was thinking. Slowly I was able to calm the active parts of my mind until all that was left was this stubborn black mist and the thought “I am thinking nothing”. I spent a good solid month confused. To me I was able to think nothing quite easily now, but it just did not seem right. One night, a little over six months after my initial thought, I realized that what I was doing was thinking “I am thinking nothing”. In that earth shattering moment, my mind cleared, leaving only emptiness behind. I do not know how long that first moment lasted, but over the years I have built on it and made the study of meditation one of my passions.

I will freely admit that I am proud of the fact that I did what I did when I was four years old. I am also proud that I have built on my initial experience since then and have achieved some wonderful things. I look forward to sharing them with the world too.

(Though I have spent most of my life in meditation, it seems that my ego has as well =^_^=)

Aquarium cake 2

More pictures of the aquarium cake. Taste the love.