A FRIDGE FULL OF FOOD...

Day -1: The Cake Aftermath

The party was a success. The kids were almost shocked by their cakes. When they first walked in they weren't even sure I made them. It was really funny.  I've now got my marching orders for all pink and butterflies for Sydney's cake and a Barbie with a pegasus for Kalyee's cake.  We're going to do a double birthday part for them in mid-August.

Click below for party pics and a video of Isaac cutting his cake "to look like wreck".

Day 0:The Cakes are Finished.

The party is today at 4pm but I finished yesterday. I'm glad. This give me a chance to enjoy my hard work for a while before we take a knife to them.

So here they are. Jordan's:

And Isaac's:

Jordan's took about two hours yesterday to complete and Isaac's took most of the afternoon.  I'll walk you through it.

Day 1: The Cake Countdown

Yesterday was a bit long on my knee.  First, I went out to lunch with a couple of friends from work which was very fun.  We went to a place downtown I'd never been to before that's either still owned or was owned by that guy from Springfield who was on The Bachelor. Funny, I don't remember his name at all because I never watched that show but it was big watercooler talk around town that season.  The restaurant's name is Trolley's. I liked it. The interior is fun, the food is great, and hanging with my friends...priceless. :-)

The afternoon was spent getting layers of cake up to the point of being able to spend today sitting at the table decorating.

I'll show you where I am now and then I'll walk through it step by step. Remember Jordan's cake will be a black/white 8" round and Isaac's is a sculpted Kenworth cab:

Gene pointed out that I lost a little perspective at the bottom of the rig and he's right. IF I were selling this cake, you'd probably have pics of me making Gene hold up the thing on spatulas while I added another layer to the bottom. Instead I'm going to cheat and regain perspective on the bottom by hiding it.  You'll see how I do that tomorrow.

All of this prep getting them to this stage took about 3 hours, counting the trip to Party City for extra supplies.  Usually I'm fairly organized but sometimes you forget what you have and what you've run out of. I ended up having to go buy this plastic tray for Isaac's cake because I had no rectangle cakeboards in the house.  Rounds, but no rectangles. But then, neither did Party City, which was disappointing. There must have been a cake decorator run on them.  They had tons of the big ones that are about 24" x 20" but I wasn't in the mood to cut in half scalloped edged cardboards and I wasn't in the mood to spend another hour driving across town in 4pm traffic to Michael's, so instead I bought this plastic tray for about $2.50.  It will come in handy later for a potluck or something.

Day 2: The Cake Countdown

Made the fondant ball border for Jordan's cake tonight but I didn't leave them out to airdry the way I would have flowers.  I want these to be dry and easy to manage when I go to place them and brush them with pearl dust food coloring but I don't want them rock hard to eat either, although the kids might like that.  Jawbreaker cake. 

They're about the size of malt balls, maybe a little bigger.  The way I calculated how many to make was two parts math and one part shrug.  I was watching Scrubs at the time so I just kept rolling them. The circumference of a circle is C=2(pi)r  so doing the math that's 2 times 3.14 times 4 which equals 26, rounding up.  I have double that here but I guessed (the shrug part) that these are about 3/4" in diameter so if you figure X times .75" = 26 then X equals 35ish.   Slightly more than on one plate but I'd rather have extra than not enough.

Jordan got a surprise party in her apartment complex community room yesterday. Her mom decorated the room and had a cake waiting for Jordan when she got home from school.  Then, later, Suzanne, Jordan, Sydney, and I all went out for a girls' night dinner at Red Lobster, Jordan's favorite restaurant.

Here are some pics of birthday girl:

Jordan's cake from a local bakery. I thought they did a nice job.

Jordan in frosting wars....she won.  Dakota lost.

Go to my personal blog to see the video of Jordan walking in to the community room.

Also, couldn't sleep because of my silly knee so while I stayed up into the wee hours watching movies and trying to bore myself to sleep, the red roses got another layer of petals.

And by the way, in the middle of Jordan's party tonight Sydney informed me that her cake (in July) is to be "all pink with butterflies".  I said "What flavor?"  She said "Pink."  Okay, do I know my girls or what?  I said the pink gerber daisies would work and she's a butterfly girl.  So once I get through these cakes, I'll start designing the all pink extravaganza with (probably) royal icing filigree butterflies. Maybe. Don't know yet.

Day 3: The Cake Countdown

Yesterday there was nothing that needed to be done for Jordan and Isaac's cake per se, so I worked on some extra flowers just for fun. These will probably end up on Sydney's cake later in the summer. Every year she either wants Barbie or butterflies so I think I'm covered either way. Or, it's nice to have a few flowers on hand just for any time I feel like adding a little extra oomph to a cake for a potluck or whatever.  The flowers keep forever as long as they're stored in a cool place in plastic containers.

Day 4: The Cake Countdown

Technically, I only had one thing that needed to be done for Jordan and Isaac's cakes yesterday so I played around with making some flowers for the fun of it. The beauty of fondant is that it dries out and lasts forever, practically. The biggest thing is keeping the flowers in egg cartons or plastic tubs so that they don't get dust on them.  There's nothing in them to go bad as far as food.  They can be stored in a nice cool, dry place for weeks.  The one thing you don't want to do is try to refrigerate or freeze them. That only draws in moisture and they basically wilt and fall apart.

I'll show you how I made the three rosebuds (to be added to later), three stamens, and one free form rose...and the strings for the bow for Jordan's cake.

Day 5: The Cake Countdown

As I said on Sunday, this is the week of my niece Jordan's 15th birthday and my nephew Isaac's 7th birthday.  I'm makin two separate cakes for them for their mixed family birthday party at my house on Sunday.  So far I have the black and white flowers made for Jordan's cake and have sketches and photos of the Kenworth cab for Isaac's cake.

I ran a test run on marshmallow fondant the other day and it's sitting in the fridge, wrapped up patiently waiting to be used.  I've worked a bit with fondant but have usually bought the Wilton pre-made.   I have made it from scratch but it was time consuming a pain in the buttend.  I'd seen decorators talking about marshmallow fondnat for a while and finally gave in to trying. They kept saying it was tastier, easier, and cheaper to make than traditional fondant.

Click below for step by step photos and the recipe.

Doctor's Kitchen Monday: Celiac Disease vs. Gluten Allergy vs. Gluten Intolerance

   I'm going to be real honest here. I started researching this topic for my own curiosity. I started writing it hoping it would be as interesting to you as it was to me.  But somewhere along the line,  at about the 2,000 word mark, I realized that this was more than a simple blog post. I'm a freelance writer and this is an article so I'm not going to post all 3,000 words this article is turning into, complete with references.  Instead I'm going to market the article but I'm going to share with you guys right now the personal stuff and the heads up on the basic differences.  When I sell it, I'll let you know and maybe even reprint it on the site but until then I really can't print the whole thing here because then it would be considered already published.

     Is it just me or are there times when certain names, products, places, or ideas that you’ve never heard of in your life (you think) suddenly pop up on your radar and suddenly you see them everywhere?  I’m that way with celiac disease. I’d heard of it before but not paid much attention until lately.  For the first time I had two patients right before I took medical leave for my knee with celiac disease. Then a friend of mine was diagnosed by her massage therapist.  A couple of years ago both my sister and I were tested for a barrage of allergies by an M.D. Allergy specialist and we both take allergy shots.  I have no allergies specifically to any foods, mine are all things like grass, dust, mold, etc. My sister is allergic to just about every pollen and mold known to man, plus wheat, corn, tomatoes, and a few other foods I don’t remember.  Corn. Boy, isn’t she screwed with all the high fructose corn syrup in every box, bottle, and sack on the shelves of the grocery? 

     In the last month or so I’ve noticed a few gluten-free blogs on the net. To be honest, I’d seen those blogs before but I’d never paid attention because I’m not celiac, gluten allergic or intolerant, so I just didn’t pay that much attention.  Let’s be honest. We’re all naval gazers. We only really pay attention to what suddenly becomes important to us or that we have to deal with.  As a respiratory therapist, I don’t have to deal with food issues in the way of feeding patients but there are a few heart and lung meds that are inappropriate for patients with peanut or iodine allergies, so I do tend to look at the chart to see if there are any med or food allergies, etc.

     Let me state from the beginning here that my whole mission in this post is to share information. I’m not advocating a gluten-free diet, nor am I dismissing its use by anyone not officially diagnosed with celiac disease or gluten allergies. So use the information and anecdotes in whatever way they work for you.

Preview of the Week to Come

This week is going to be a little different in the posting arena for me.  So the day to day stuff might get a little confusing if you don't see the big picture of where I'm headed. 

Tomorrow, for Doctor's Kitchen Monday, I'm doing something a little separate which will be  sharing what I learned about celiac disease after spending a morning in the hospital library.

For the rest of the week, I'm going to post each day of what happens in the world of creating a birthday cake.  As I've mentioned before, one of my nieces, Jordan, and my nephew, Isaac, have birthdays only days apart so we're having a family party to celebrate them together, this Memorial Day Sunday.  Their parents will provide most of the food and I'll bake/decorate both cakes.

So far, here's where I've gotten.  Jordan, who will be 15 on the 24th requested an all black cake with black roses/flowers, sort of a goth thing. What she said was "I want something cool, not like anything anyone else has."  I can work with that.  I talked her into letting me do it in black and white because black flowers on a black cake aren't going to show up well. I need the white to really accent the black.  So far, I have the fondant flowers made.

For Isaac, who will turn 7 (or 8, can't remember for sure, bad aunt) on the 28th, I'm sculpting a Kenworth cab...not Peterbilt or Mack, "KENWORTH" he said and then he also said....(fill in the blank here with stuff I have no idea what he meant) big stack (don't know what that means either). All I know is I spent a half hour at the Kenworth dealership sketching the new sleek models because they look really cool, I found this pic on the net at the Kenworth web site, and it has to be blue, Isaac's favorite color.

Wish me luck with that one, will you?  I have a feeling I'm either going to succeed brilliantly or fail miserably, but either way it's going to be done right here on the web for everyone to see.

The only thing I've done so far on the Kenworth is to make a trial run of marshmallow fondant which is pretty cool. I knew I'd need to sculpt this thing in fondant, not buttercream, or I'd end up insane but everyone in my family, including me, hates fondant. So I looked around the net for some alternatives.   The marshmallow fondant is a good substitution in taste. It tastes a little like old-fashioned divinity to me.  I'll find out later in the week if it works up in the same manner as traditional fondant.  Here's a pic of the trial run marshmallow fondant. I'll post later in the week how to make it and the recipe.

I have done one other thing now that I think about it. I have pre-bakeed all the cakes so that I have less to do this week, especially since I have an appointment with orthopedic surgeon on Tuesday to tell me what exactly is to be done with my knee.  If I do end up with a scope, which I'm pretty sure I will, I can't imagine that they would get me in so fast it would take place this week but I like being prepared anyway.  For Jordan I have 2 thick strawberry 9" layers that will be torted and filled with strawberry cream (recipes later in the week) and I have a 9"x13" chocolate cake with a 4"x8" vanilla cake set aside for Isaac's truck. He requested marble but I was too lazy to marble them in the big pan since I knew I'd be cutting it up to mix and match pieces for the sculpture anway. 

That's where I stand.  Starting Tuesday, I'll be doing a little something cake decorated every day until the showdown party this Sunday.  Keep your fingers crossed. It's been a long time since I was able to do any cake decorating of this magnitude. The kids may end up with a candles in Little Debbie cakes but I'm hoping not.

Doctor's Kitchen Monday: Mechanically Pressed vs. Chemically Extracted Cooking Oils

In the comment section of my post on “Herbalicious” where I made my own infused oils, I was asked what exactly “expeller pressed” meant.

Expeller pressed designates an extraction method.  “Cold pressed” should mean the same thing but since “cold pressed” has no legal definition, manufacturers can use it misleadingly.  Actually so can the term expeller pressed since the manufacturer can still expose the oil to high heats, or hydrogenation, but I feel comfortable as long as I stick with certain brands I trust like Spectrum.

Expeller pressed refers to a mechanical rather than chemical extraction of oil from the seeds, or olive flesh, in the case of olive oil.  Expeller pressed is literally a pressing and centrifuging of the material to form oil.  Some heat is still applied but not at the same high temperatures as in chemical extraction. In chemical extraction, high heat sources are used along with chemical reactions to extract the oil.

Hydrogenation, the result of  the high heat manufacturing process, increases shelf life and makes oils resistant to higher cooking temperatures.  The process literally adds hydrogen atoms to the ends of the fatty acid chains which makes them saturated.  So even though the oil may be vegetable oil instead of animal fat, it is now saturated with hydrogen. Saturated fat has been shown to increase cholesterol and be a contributing factor to heart disease.