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The first in a series of zines to show you how to get ready to scratch bake.
HOW THE F*CK TO BAKE, PART 1
The first of a zine series to help you over the skill gap between box mix/cookie dough in a tube and actual scratch baking. This one talks about three important rules of baking.
Advisory: I say "fuck" a couple times.
gay sex
is very cool
gay sex is awesome
it rules! :3
queer adolescence is just learning about a poet in school and going home and googling "(poet's name) gay" and then repeating that cycle for four years
holy shit! two cakes!
I made this one at home for practice because my shell borders look like ass and I needed to work on them, plus there was a small Function I needed to bring some sort of treat to. Vanilla cake with some orange zest and flavoring, basic ass American buttercream.
I decided to try a fun trick from our textbook with the roses. You start a rose with a splurt of buttercream that's about the size and shape of a Hershey Kiss. And the textbook even says you can straight up use Hershey Kisses as rose bases! Easier, faster, more consistent and not nearly as temperature-sensitive, AND you can upcharge for the chocolatey surprise in the middle. I had cookies n' cream Kisses (didn't really vibe with the cake) and I had Hugs, so I used Hugs. And it worked great! Until I got the cake to the Function and realized we were going to have more than six people show up... and I would have to cut smaller slices. Right down the middle of chilled Hershey Hugs. Ah well.
This one is from class. We did frozen buttercream transfers, where you print out a design in reverse and tape some parchment over it and trace the outlines in black icing and then color it in, then you freeze it, then you coat the whole thing in whatever color your cake is going to be and freeze it again, then you just stick the whole thing on top of your cake.
In my hubris I chose the most complicated design Chef offered us. Halfway through I began to question a number of my life choices. I also learned how much water-based liquid in American buttercream is too much water-based liquid and I will never make that mistake again.
It came out pretty okay for a first try! And this freezer-stash cake was actually baked within the last few months, unlike some of the other freezer-stash cakes we use.
Basket weave piping on a flat surface: lmao this is easy
Basket weave piping on the sides of a cake: damn gravity got hands
Leaves and little simple star flowers can cover up a multitude of sins.
Having played with a whole lot of the tips in my kit for this cake just to see what kind of fucked up flowers I could squeeze out of them, I kinda want to do a Piping Tip Tier List now.
I very much enjoyed the restaurant where I worked for one week and one day [1]. I will miss that crazy place and maybe someday by the time they've grown to the point where they're ready to hire an in-house pastry chef I'll be ready to be that in-house pastry chef [2].
But the bakery I really wanted to work for got back to me out of the blue (and the reason for the delay was absolutely valid and pretty awesome tbh) and in talking to the owner I realized that this was the kind of opportunity that I, a pastry nerd, would regret for the rest of my life if I passed it up.
And now I get to get up at three! thirty! in the morning! on Sunday to do a stage at an honest to god french style bakery two miles from my apartment. it's fine. I knew going into this that bakeshop hours range from "fairly normal human person hours" to "graveyard shift" to "okay so uhhhhh should I try to wake up at this hour or should I just stay up and sleep when I get off".
I really really want this fuckin job, y'all. please please please let me get this fuckin job.
[1] things I will miss a lot: the chef, who was an incredible teacher and who tried every shift to gently bully me into letting her cook me dinner until I gave in and she made me the best fucking bowl of seafood pasta I have ever had in my entire life. the rest of the BOH crew. most of the FOH guys. being able to freely say the fuck word at work. learning useful Spanish phrases like "¿donde quiere esto, Chef?" and "¿como se dice [this thingy]?" and "esta chingadera". things I will not miss so much: the relatively lengthy commute (esp. coupled with the... less than stellar pay). the "left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing" situation between the two owners. that one server that wouldn't scrape her shit before she ditched it in the dishpit. having to shower the second I get home. a situation with the payroll person reminiscient of the terrible computer place where I once worked, whose owner frequently "forgot" to get back to the office in time to do payroll, which was fortunately resolved amicably this afternoon.
[2] and maybe by then they'll have a payroll person who actually does the fucking payroll on time :)
The ivory icing is Italian buttercream. It spreads and smooths like fucking magic. You make it by very carefully timing egg whites whipping in a stand mixer vs. the temperature of a pot of boiling hot molten sugar. When the sugar lava hits 236 degrees you turn the mixer on. By the time the sugar hits 237-240, the egg whites have whipped enough to start meringueing when you start drizzling the syrup in. Then you twiddle your thumbs and wait for the meringue to cool to like, person temperature. And then you start chucking chunks of butter into it. At one point it starts looking weird and chunky. And then all of a sudden it whips up all nice and creamy. And then you smear it on a cake. And it looks so nice. And then you go over it with a warm spatch and it turns all smooth and shiny and unf. It also tastes real good.
The decorations are all that shitty fake practice "American buttercream" we made at the beginning of the semester. That's okay, because...
The cake itself was only edible in the sense that it probably wouldn't kill you. It had been in the freezer since June. It was sticky and gummy on the outside and dry as hell on the inside. When Chef went to demonstrate leveling the layers to us, she had to go get another one because the first one she cut into had multiple visible clumps of baking powder in it.
My shell border still looks like garbage but I did a better job of aiming for the corner and not the board today than I did yesterday.
The practice buttercream is a lot softer than the shit we used for those roses the other day so it was really hard to get nice roses out of it.
I fucking love the leaf tip. It looks like a lil bird beak and leaves cover up so many sins.
Chef doesn't like the rosettes most people do. She makes us do these double-decker kinda things. I kinda see why but my God they are a pain in the ass.
Apparently those hangy-down bits between the swags have a proper name? I already forgot what it is. Something about eggs? idk man
