Changes and Confessions

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Nearly four years ago, I started this blog, and I started my love affair for all things baking and pastry.

While I was in Sydney recently I got hit with a big case of reality. I was there visiting friends and attending their wedding (and making their cake!) and just being able to spend time with friends and have an enjoyable weekend with them made something click. I was done baking for work.

I started my business on the 1st of December, 2009. Six months later, I went to pastry school, and then another six months later I was working full time on cakes, cupcakes, and decorating parties. I left my other job and started teaching cake classes. Another year later and I went to study a business diploma… and then it started to weigh me down.

I was working 60+ hours some weekends, from Thursday night until Sunday afternoon, and I missed a lot of things in my life which made me feel very angry, sad and isolated.

Last Sunday I turned 25, and the following day I was starting my new job back in the land of the living. I am slowly making my withdrawal from the cake business. I’ve spent my 20′s so far doing cakes for work. It’s time for a change.

It doesn’t mean I have given up cakes completely or this job. I still love the art and design behind putting together a dozen cupcakes or an awesome looking dessert table (as I made one for my birthday) but I just can’t manage it as a job anymore. I would love to just do this for the fun of it again.

I didn’t spend too much time in that stage of my love affair with cake decorating as I launched straight into work, so I didn’t have time to build things up before it became a fully fledged career.

Since starting my new job on Monday, a lot of my colleagues (and now friends) have been surprised I’ve come from that career, where others have transitioned from another section of retail. Is the surprise about giving it up to come do what I’m doing now? Or awe?

These changes mean I have plenty of time to love cake decorating again for what it was and what it always will be – my beloved hobby.

(and if you haven’t figured it out MORE TIME FOR RECIPES!)

Caramel Tartlets

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caramel-tartlets

I make a lot of little tartlets for dessert tables and this weekend I have a request for caramel ones, so I thought I would share the recipe with you!

You can make your own pastry, but I’m a big believer in the fact if something can be made a little easier for yourself to produce an excellent looking product, then take that avenue.

Also pastry is annoying.

Monnie’s Caramel Tartlets

Makes 12

  • 12 Pampas Sweet Tartlets (Freezer section)
  • 1/2 cup water
  • 2 cups granulated sugar
  • 1/4 cup light corn syrup (you can find this at a lot of places now here in Australia, in SA most Foodlands now stock this)
  • 113g unsalted butter
  • 1/2 cup thickened cream
  • 2 tablespoons creme fraiche
  • 1 pinch of coarse salt
  1. Prebake the tartlets at 180C for 10 minutes and set aside ready for the caramel filling.
  2. Add the sugar, corn syrup and water together and cook over a medium heat until it becomes an amber caramel colour.  This will take about 10-15 minutes. Swirl the pan occasionally so it heats evenly.
  3. When you have the colour you desire (don’t go too dark or you’ll see the colour change very quickly) then take it off the heat and you whisk in the cream, butter, creme fraiche, and salt. The caramel is going to bubble right up at this point, just add everything in and whisk until it settles down. Add back to the heat and whisk until smooth. Done!
  4. Transfer the caramel to a glass measuring jug (carefully, caramel is misleadingly hot, don’t put your finger in it!) and divide among the shells while still warm.
  5. Let the tartlets sit for about 45 minutes – 1 hour until the caramel is set. I did mine and left them to set overnight so I had plenty of time.

You can make the caramel up to five days ahead and store in a refrigerated container. This recipe will leave some caramel left over after your 12 tartlets, which you could use in a buttercream to make filling for macarons (which is what I’ll be doing this afternoon!)

Enjoy :)

Lemonade Scones

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During the school terms when I don’t have any other commitments for work, I volunteer as a cookery teacher at my old primary school. Each week we make something different, and it’s normally the usual cookies and cupcakes.. This week, we made scones.

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Lemonade Scones

  • 300g Self Raising Flour
  • 55g Caster Sugar
  • Pinch of salt
  • 125ml thickened cream
  • 125ml lemonade
  • Milk for glazing

1) Preheat the oven to 220C. Line a flat baking tray with baking paper.

2) Sift flour, sugar and salt into a bowl.

3) Add lemonade and cream and mix through. It will start to get harder to mix towards the end, turn out onto a lightly floured bench and knead the final bit together to form a soft dough.

4) Press out the dough with your hands or a rolling pin to 2-3cm thickness, and cut out scones. We used a glass to cut ours, this way you can adjust the sizes because usually you will have two different sizes of glasses/mugs if you want to mix it up a bit. If you have a pastry cutter then all is well!

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Space them out on the tray and brush the tops with milk.

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Place in the oven for 10-15 minutes or until lightly browned. Serve with jam and cream! Best served warm too. Yummm.

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We made 5 batches on Wednesday and got 84 scones out of it – we were using a smaller glass so that the students all had more scones to take home and eat.
The funny thing was, before we started none of them knew what scones were, and afterwards EVERYONE and their friends knew what scones were, and the following day were asking me for the recipe!

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Baking Photography Hints & Tips

Hi to all my new readers! I have started a Facebook page for the Monniecakes blog now, which you can find at http://www.facebook.com/monniecakes! It will have a post link up for every post (so you don’t miss out on new updates if you don’t have an RSS reader), and also discussion about tips, tutorials and lots of awesome baking photos. Come and join the community! I’d also love to see your photos too.

I thought I’d do a bit of a write up about how to get better photos of your creations if you are struggling  Photos are your record of the delicious items you’ve made, and also great to share on Facebook to impress your friends and family… And then they’ll ask you to make them some ;)

I have a Nikon D70, which is a DSLR, and a Canon IXUS80IS, which is a point and shoot handheld camera. I take photos with both of those plus my iPhone. The tips below help me get the best out of the equipment I’m using.

- You don’t need a super fancy DSLR camera to take good photos! I promise! A compact digital camera will be more than fine.

- Learn how to switch off your camera flash or reflect the flash to the ceiling. If you have a small hand held camera, the flash will be facing forward and wash out all the detail in your subject. Either turn it off or you can make your own little reflector with some cardboard (I will do this in a tutorial next week)

- Want to get close and personal? Most cameras have a “flower” setting – this is the macro option! It will let you focus a little closer, so you can get those lovely details. Usually it makes the background all blurry (this is called depth of field) and makes it look like it’s from a expensive DSLR.

- Diffused (not direct) natural light is amazing for highlighting the right details on your subject. Photographers swear by morning and late afternoon light. I think it’s because it seems so soft and cuddly! Hehe. If you’re unsure about how to get diffused light, open your blinds and hold up a white sheet in front of the window. It blocks out the harsh light, which would wash out all the details on your photo subject if it wasn’t diffused through the sheet.

- Adobe Photoshop Elements is a great basic photo editor so you can adjust colour, tone, contrast and brightness. It’s now FREE along with Photoshop CS2 for Mac and PC. There are thousands and thousands of tutorials for working with these programs but Photoshop Elements is the easier of the two. To download applications from the CS2 suite, visit the Adobe website.

I hope these basic tips help you a little to get the best photos! I tried to write this as simply as possible as I know cameras these days are a minefield! Post any questions you might have and I’ll try to answer them for you :)

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Choc Chip Cookies

On the weekend, I had my brother and sister stay with me (they’re 6 years old and twins!) and Miss 6 brought along an activity book that had a recipe for chocolate chip cookies. We had to change a couple of ingredients to suit what we had at the time, so this has been adapted!

Choc-Chip Cookies

  • 300g plain flour
  • pinch of salt
  • 1 teaspoon baking powder
  • 100g unsalted butter (softened)
  • 100g brown sugar
  • 2 large eggs
  • 60g golden syrup
  • 75g chocolate chips

Method

  1. Preheat oven to 160C.
  2. Prepare a flat baking tray with baking paper ready for cookies!
  3. Sift together the dry ingredients (flour, salt, brown sugar, baking powder). Add the eggs, golden syrup and butter, and work together with a spatula. At the end, add in the chocolate chips and make sure they are evenly distributed in the dough.
  4. Scoop up teaspoons of the dough and place them evenly spaced on the tray. The dough is a bit sticky, but then again it is mid 30′s here.. Just as an indicator, we made a half recipe of this and we had tablespoon sized spoons and they were huge. Oops!
  5. Bake for 15 minutes or until almost firm, but not hard. They will firm up more on cooling. If you like them crunchy, bake them longer, otherwise take them out now and they will be soft and delicious.

Makes about 24-30 cookies depending on the cookie size. They wont last long! Yummo.

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Testing your oven for hot spots

In my Cupcakes 101 class I tell my students about oven hotspots. They’re just areas of the oven that produce more heat than others. This could be the bottom, the top, or a back corner. I’ve always offered tips on how to overcome this issue, but today while browsing some favourite recipe websites I have come across the best way to test your oven for hot spots without sacrificing your delicious cakes.

In a perfect world an oven that has been set to 180C will measure as 180C, but the thing is it’s rare to find an oven that measures exactly to the dial. This is why I always stress to students, get an oven thermometer! It’s only $10 and can save you a world of baking heartache.

If you already own one and you’re still having problems, it might be time to check where the problems are coming from. The hotspot test!

  1. Preheat your oven to 180C.
  2. On a large flat tray, arrange pieces of bread (as above) and set the oven rack to the middle of the oven.
  3. Place the tray into the oven. After a few minutes you will see which slices are darker than others – and where the problems are.

The best way to overcome hot spots is to turn your trays halfway through the baking time. This is also an excellent tip for fan forced ovens that don’t have an option to turn this off, so it will help to prevent cakes and cupcakes rising on an angle away from the heat, and even them out again.

Do you have a dodgy oven? What tips and tricks do you use to get by with baking?

Source: Cooking Light

 

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2012 Reflection

This photo is my last order for 2012, also my last wedding, for a friend of the family. Congratulations Martin and Sandra :)

I wanted to do a quick non-personal review of 2012, mostly about my work and my cake adventures.

  • I taught primary school children baking for two terms, a group of 6 Year 7′s and a group of 8 Year 6′s. The coolest part about this is that it was where I went to primary school. It’s such a good feeling giving back
  • Also taught about 20 cake decorating classes at the Box Factory
  • Started writing a Cupcakes 101 ebook in December – hopefully I will have this finished for sale soon!
  • Finally have macarons sorted out after two painful years of “will they work!?” every batch
  • Improved at larger cake work generally (after removing novelty cakes from my menu to focus more on cupcakes
  • Sent my 500th invoice
  • Celebrated three years of my business!
  • Calculated in 2012 that the business produced over 2000 cake pops, 150 6″ cakes, 2400 mini cupcakes and 3500 regular cupcakes, plus lots of other desserts for dessert tables
  • Saw the huge rise in popularity of cake pops, sparked by an order for a Tiffany Blue themed engagement tower for a friend!
  • Entered the Adelaide Royal Show again, this time in professional baking (but didn’t win again! That’s okay.. next year)
  • Had my products stocked at a shopfront (Central Markets)
  • Came second in the Coonalpyn Show for cupcakes (I won 1st and 2nd for cupcakes in 2009, an honourable mention in 2010 for chocolate cake and 1st for cupcakes in 2011)
  • Learnt how to make sugar flowers (roses, peonies and hydrangeas) at a class in person!
  • Went to a cooking class that wasn’t cake related (hah!) with Callum Hann
  • Survived the biggest wedding year and wedding day on record. We did two dozen weddings this season (July-December 2012) and three weddings in one day (24 November 2012)
  • Hosted a decorating party with 50 children for Camp Quality
  • Donated lots of cake to charities and very worthy causes
  • Drove thousands and thousands of km for work. From Belair National Park to Maccelsfield to the Barossa to Aldinga Beach and everywhere in between

I’m sure there’s more but it all sounds like a very busy year, doesn’t it! Work wise I had a great 2012. I just have to improve on the not work side – and one of those goals is actually working less. I’ve had to pick up the pieces for the last 12 months in my personal life, but in 2013 I will finally be able to relax a bit and not be so overworked. This means more posts and tutorials. I’m getting better and better every day!

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Birdcage Cake

A few months ago I got a referral through a friend of mine to make a birdcage cake for their wedding. They were already having dessert for the guests but wanted something to be as their cutting cake centrepiece. My friend thought it would be a good challenge.. Haha!

I *was* going to take progress photos and then for some reason absolutely forgot! What is with me!?

The cake is made up of 3 6″ round vanilla sponge cakes, stacked and filled with lemon curd, carved into a dome, then coated in white chocolate ganache. It’s then covered in a layer of light pink fondant. From here it gets easier, but with the heat and humidity covering cakes perfectly hasn’t exactly been easy here in Australia lately!

After the cake is covered and everything is cleaned up, I started with the “cage”. I did the strip around the bottom of the cake first, and then the vertical strips on each side all meeting at the top in the centre. It’s easier doing it that way to get them straight rather than one long strip all the way over the top. And don’t forget the last bar around the top where it starts to curve in.

I then put the top of the cage together, which is just a flat cut out circle to hide the joins of the strips and then two balls of brown gumpaste glued on top of each other. Now the cage part is complete! After this it’s your own creative freedom. I lightened up the brown gumpaste I was already using and made the vine out of it, this is freehand placement, totally up to you where that goes (or grows?). Add some flowers and some birds and you’re all done!

I would love to make this again, and I am thinking of teaching it as a class in 2013, because it’s not hard to do when the weather is a bit more pleasant. The hardest part is the carving before the covering, to make sure the dome is nice and even.

Christmas Baking Gifts

Merry Christmas everyone! I hope you had a wonderful time and also hopefully you got some time to relax as well!

I don’t really get much in the way of baking supplies for Christmas as everyone knows I just buy what I need now for myself, but I did get two baking related things:

macaronPierre Hermé - Macaron

Until 2011 this book was only available in French but has now been translated into English, and I was lucky to get this for Christmas. It’s considered almost like the macaron bible.

A great feature of this book is the step by step instructions with lots of photos! Macarons are all about technique, so it is hard to know if what you are doing is right without some visual indicator along the way, which is why a lot of people opt for instructional classes when they struggle at home.

You can buy the book here.

pieweightsCeramic Pie Weights

If you haven’t done much work with pastry you’re probably thinking “what are they for?” Usually with pastry cases (tarts and flan cases) they are pre-baked before the filling is added, which is called blind baking. Because there is no filling to weigh down the bottom of the crust, pie weights are added. They are usually ceramic, but can be stainless steel, or you can use something like dried peas, lentils etc. Otherwise your pie crust will start to rise and won’t be flat at the bottom!

I’m looking forward to using these. I haven’t really done much with pastry since I was at pastry school (hahahaha) mainly because I didn’t own any of these beforehand. It was pretty much the last piece of equipment I didn’t own. You can get them at lots of cooking supply places or here.

Here’s to more baking! Mmmm, tarts and macarons.

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Shortbread

Homemade shortbread is the best kind. Soft, melt in your mouth delicious buttery goodness. I’ve just finished baking a batch and I can’t stop eating them, but they’re meant to be for Christmas presents. Oops! At least there’s still time to make more before Christmas ;)

Ingredients:

  • 250g softened butter
  • 1/3 cup caster sugar
  • 1/2 cup cornflour
  • 2 cups plain flour
  • 1/2 teaspoon vanilla essence

Method:

  1. Cream butter, vanilla and sugar in an electric mixer until pale and creamy.
  2. Sift together the cornflour and plain flour and add into the butter mixture, adding slowly and mixing until almost combined. Use a spatula or your hands to bring the dough together.
  3. Knead the dough lightly until smooth, then work with half at a time – wrap the other half and work with the first half so it’s not too difficult to handle. It will be very soft!
  4. On a tray lined with baking paper, you can press the first half into a disc, cut into 8 with a sharp knife and use a fork to make marks in the top of the disc. Alternatively this can be rolled out and cut out, but be patient, the dough is soft and will be tempremental. Use a metal spatula or cookie spatula to lift up your cut outs – and dust with flour regularly to stop things sticking!
  5. Place into the oven for 15-20 minutes at 150C or until golden. It will harden as it cools so don’t overbake it, you want it to melt in your mouth. Yum yum!

Store your shortbread in an airtight container or sealed bag for a week or so – if it lasts that long!