My New Pet

I have a new pet. It lives on my kitchen counter and is named after my favorite pasta shape: "Bucatini." Though made of water and flour, the two main ingredients of its namesake, my Bucatini is not a long, tubular shaped pasta. It is a living thing that I need to feed every day, take care of, and watch attentively for mood swings and unsavory personality shifts. Bucatini is my sourdough bread starter.

Sourdough bread starter is just flour and water mixed together. When combined and hydrated, the microorganisms present in the flour and the air (bacteria and wild yeast) start to ferment. This fermentation contributes to the flavor of the bread, as well as producing carbon dioxide gas which makes the bread rise. It is the special nature of the wild yeast found in the air surrounding the San Francisco Bay Area that makes "San Francisco Sourdough" so noteworthy and difficult to reproduce in other parts of the country. No commercial yeast from a package is needed to make bread when you have a starter -- and if you care for a starter diligently -- feeding it daily and making adjustments to control for its environment -- you can keep a starter for years. Bucatini is already 4 years old.

When in Rome, right? And here I am in the sourdough capital of the country -- it's time to make my own! But first things first. Bucatini's feeding schedule is kept on a dry-erase board in my foyer. I will keep feeding it (with new flour and water) each day and soon... oh, so soon... it will be time to turn some of Bucatini into a loaf of true San Francisco Sourdough.

Patent Leather Glazed

I live in a studio apartment, so needless to say, space is limited and precious. I have only one baby blue shelving unit and it must be meticulously organized at all times: the top shelf holds my 12 favorite cake stands, the next down is home to records of past pastry orders, cake portfolios and marketing materials, and the third shelf is the library. After 4 years at an Ivy League institution and 28 years of receiving books for holidays gifts from my very educated and well-read parents, you'd think my library might be an eclectic mix of heady non-fiction and classic literature. You would be wrong. There is not one book in my library that contains anything but recipes and photos... of food, of course. 

I love spending time gazing at my cookbook collection which holds everything from the pamphlet the local egg-roll lady printed up to sell at the West Tisbury Farmer's Market to Pastry School text books. A recent addition to my library is the "Miette" cookbook which shares the secrets to making this delicious Bay Area pastry shop's specialties. Flipping through the scalloped pages of this gem of a book is a pleasure on its own. To actually pick something out and make it in my own kitchen -- fantastic! Then the question arises: How do you choose when everything looks so tempting? I started reading the notes about each cake and then immediately stopped my search when I read the following description of the Bittersweet Ganache Cake: The glaze of this cake is so glossy it rivals the sheen of patent leather.

OK. No further searching necessary. You had me at "patent leather."

Before and After

Cherry Pie. I spend so long making sure it's ready for the world ahead of it. Thoughtfully mixing the dough, gently laying the thin crust into the pie tin, ever-so-carefully cutting the top crust's lattice pattern, and then slowly and methodically crimping the two crusts together to make sure all the cherries are safely tucked inside. And then, it's time for the oven. "Good luck in there," I whisper as I shut the oven door. 

An hour later, I open the oven with excitement and an ounce of anxiety... Did it burn? Did the berries explode out of the crust and form nothing but a bubbly jam puddle on the bottom of the oven? But out comes my pie -- still beautiful, just a little hotter and shinier than it started.

Eating through Thailand

This summer I took my first, but certainly not my last, trip to Southeast Asia. My travel buddy and I picked Thailand as our destination because of its reputation for beautiful beaches, sacred temples, kind people, bustling markets, lush jungles and $5 hour-long massages. But mostly, I went to Thailand to EAT.

And eat I did... I sun-bathed on hammocks and spooned the "pet-pet" (very spicy) coconut milk curries into my mouth while lounging on the shores of the southern islands. I gobbled up "street-food" in Bangkok while standing in the steady stream of people coursing down Khao San Road, ordering plate after plate of pad thai noodles (for less than $0.50 each) from cooks with portable wok carts. I devoured the Chiang Mai regional specialty, kow soi -- a chicken soup with aromatic spices and crunchy noodles -- while traveling through the northern cities of Thailand.

Deep-fried bananas with a drizzle of sweetened condensed milk. Green papaya salad with lime and peanuts. Mango sticky rice. Green curry for breakfast. Savory bundles of chicken stuffed into balls of rice and wrapped up in banana leaves. Sweet. Sour. Salty. Spicy. I did it all.

And then, I learned how to make it myself. My travel buddy and I enrolled in 2 different cooking schools: one school in downtown Chiang Mai and one located on "Sammy's" organic farm. Our cooking teachers took us on tours of the markets explaining why the rice vendor's 12 seemingly identical buckets of rice had drastically different price tags (based on the age and location of the harvest), how a certain Thai fruit (the durian) smells so foul it is illegal to open one up on public transit, why the kaffir lime is superior to all other limes because of its bumpy fragrant skin and flavorful leaves, which varieties of basil should be used to optimize the taste of each dish, and how the production of coconut milk has evolved from squishing the coconut meat between your fingers to using modern machinery to quickly produce liters and liters of this Thai cooking staple.

And now, I dream of Thailand and stir up curries and memories in my Oakland kitchen.

Showering the Bride with Sweets

My good friends, Nora and Shawn, have been dating for almost a decade now. This month, they are going to Michigan to tie the knot in what I'm sure will be a magical lake-side wedding. Unfortunately, I cannot make it out to the Mid-Western ceremony, so I've been doing my very best to celebrate this gorgeous (inside and out) bride here in Oakland before the Big Day, showing my affection in the best way I know how -- baking her lots and lots of sweets!

Nora's Wedding Shower Dessert Menu:

Cacao Nib Cake with layers of Fresh Berries

Lemon Mini-Cucpakes

Mango-Passion Fruit Mousse with Raspberries

Buttermilk Panna Cotta with Strawberries

Christmas in April

When I took on this order for my favorite vintage apron design company, Jessie Steele, I felt ready to bake up anything they needed for their product photo shoot. This meant navigating a different kind of "seasonal" work. While I'm just starting to dig up my summer recipes in anticipation of the first berries of the season, Jessie Steele is staging pages for their winter holiday catalog. To sit beside their festive winter-themed aprons in the photo shoot, they ordered this little fondant-covered, holly-adorned cake and a dozen decorated gingerbread men cookies. All together, it was quite a jolly delivery this morning.

Last night, though, the mood in my kitchen was less merry and more frustrating. I went through three batches of cookie dough, tweaking each one with slightly different ratios of cinnamon, nutmeg, all-spice and cloves. Somehow, nothing tasted quite right. When the smell of these Christmas cookies started wafting out of my oven and mixed into the the warm, flower-scented California air, my senses became flustered. Is it possible that gingerbread cookies actually taste different when eaten on a snowy day?

Happy Valentine's Day

In years past, I've been known to make a wedding cake each Valentine's Day. February 14th is, in fact, my favorite and most anticipated day of the year. But this year I thought about how to optimize my enjoyment of this most wonderful holiday. Did I really want to spend weeks leading up to the Big Day with my neck craned over the careful work of sculpting roses out of gum paste? Did I want my fingers to cramp up at each knuckle from holding those tiny paintbrushes meticulously dusting edible glitter onto the edges of sugar flower petals? Did I want to stay up, alone in my kitchen, on the 13th of February shuttling pans of batter in and plumped up cakes out of my single oven all night?

I decided the answer to all these questions was, well... "no." Instead, I invited two dear girlfriends over to my apartment to decorate cookies. Granted, I had the whole evening prepared -- I had already made the cookie dough and organized upwards of 25 different sprinkle options for decorating. But all in all, the operation was smooth, easy and full of laughter.

I woke up this morning with a hacking cough, sniffly nose and kitchen counters crusty with dried icing from last night. Though not religious in the traditional fashion, I am a firm and devout believer in the Cake Gods -- and this was a sign. Next year, ValenWedding Cake production will be in full swing again!