Catching up!

I apologize profusely for not updating more recently. Spring break and stuff has taken over. You would think I would have had more time/motivation to write over spring break, but it just did not happen.

Okay, so let's start with QCLX! I had decided since I couldn't come up with any grand ideas that I just wouldn't make anything. However, once our wonderful hosts found out that I baked, I had to! So I was sort of in a pinch, and just went with something I had done before- sunflowers. Sam helped as well :) They turned out alright. I was really in a hurry so I didn't have much time to pay attention to detail, but I think they look decent, don't you?



They went over really well. Sam and I actually ended up staying an extra day in Charlotte because I had spring break and he had a furlough day on Monday. On Sunday, we left the afternoon dance a little early because we were so tired. So we decided since he loves coffee and we both love baked goods, that he needed to find a coffee shop and I needed to find a bakery. We just searched the GPS, so all we had to go on were names. There were about 10 bakeries, and the one that sounded best to me was Amelie's French Bakery, and it was only a few miles away. So we went. At first we couldn't find it, and I was about to give up on it, but Sam insisted that if we drove down the street again it would be there. And sure enough, it was. We walked in and I'm pretty sure I gasped audibly. It was gorgeous. They have a huge corner space in a shopping center, and they decorated it with French antiques and a lot of do-it-yourself type items. They made some lamps from old busts, and honestly, I would decorate my house like that. It was perfect. And they had 4 cases full of tasty treats! One thing I really liked was they had miniature versions of many of their desserts so you could sample a few things. I didn't do this though because I noticed they had a chocolate mousse cup with a chocolate covered strawberry on top. Chocolate mousse is my favorite, so I had to try it. It was heavenly. The strawberry was one of the best I have ever tasted. Sam ordered a Napoleon, which has layers of moist wafers and some sort of sweet cream. It was topped with melted white chocolate with a dark chocolate drizzle. At first I was hesitant to try it, as I thought the filling was cream cheese and I hate cream cheese. But Sam assured me it wasn't, so I gave it a taste and it was delicious as well! We were both so happy. And while we were eating, I picked up one of their old French books they had on the coffee table and started reading it. I could not have been happier. It was glorious.

Since we ended up staying an extra day, we decided to go back to Amelie's for lunch the next day. Sam got a roast beef sandwich and I got un sandwich jambon avec fromage. He also got some coffee and I got some hot chocolate with salted caramel. Delicious. And of course, we got dessert. He got a salted caramel brownie, which was really crumbly, delicious, and light. I got two little things: a little lemon tart with a raspberry on it, and a chocolate peanut butter petit four. Both were yummmm. It was so heavenly. We sat at a little table by the window and played Set and ate our delicious treats. When we were leaving I bought some spreadable cheese that they make there. It was roasted garlic and feta and I got some bread to go with it. I've been putting it on sandwiches and it has been really good. I also got a San Pellegrino lemon soda that was really good too. So yeah, Amelie's was a huge success.

Anyway, now back to what I have been baking! Last week was my friend Brandon's birthday, so I made him a cake. I used Paula Deen's Savannah Chocolate Cake, Alton Brown's cocoa whipped cream, and Emeril Lagasse's chocolate ganache. It turned out really light and yummy. And pretty :) The writing is white chocolate, by the way.

In fact, it was so yummy that my friends requested more, so I made two smaller cakes the other day:



And THEN this week, we had three girls with birthdays at swing night, so I made a cake for them too! For sake of getting this blog post up, I will post pictures of it later. It's a lemon cake with raspberry filling frosted with lemon whipped cream.

The recipe for the lemon cake I used is technically a lemon bar recipe, but every other time I've made it it came out more cake-like than bar-like. Of course, as life would have it, this time when I tried to make it as cake, it came out really dense...like a bar. It was still alright though. It wasn't quite as lemon-y as I wanted either. I think next time I'll just find an actual lemon cake recipe.

Up next: lemon tart. I've been thinking about that one I had at Amelie's ever since we went there, and I want to see if I can recreate the deliciousness. Swung is going up to stay at a cabin in Blue Ridge this weekend, so perhaps I will attempt it then.

As far as the business/job side of things goes, still no word from anyone. I made a fan page on facebook and I've gotten a pretty good number of fans for it just being up for a few days. About 95% of them are people I know, but hey, it gets the word out. I also made a temporary logo and am in the process of getting a friend to make a permanent one for me. Here's the temporary one:



After I have the permanent logo I'm going to make some business cards to put next to my cakes when I take them places. Hopefully all of this will be done by next Friday because that's ATLX (Atlanta Lindy Exchange) and I'm making a cake for that. There will be a lot of people there so it would be great to have my cards out then.


Also, I think I have officially decided that I want to do this for my career. I realized that a lot of my hobbies and talents from my childhood up until now have prepared me for this. Even when I was a little kid I loved creating things. My mom can attest to the fact that I was always working on some project or another. I made all kinds of things. I also loved cooking and baking, and even made my own little "restaurant" one time, entitled "Le Petit Cafe." No wonder I loved Amelie's...it was Le Petit Cafe all grown up! I am still going to finish school, at least my undergraduate degree, and we'll see what happens from there. I won't even be finished with that until May of 2012, so I could be making wonderful cakes by then and making enough money for it to be my only job. That would be ideal. If that's not the case, and I don't have money to open a small bakery, then I will do my extra one year to get my master's. Then I could do counseling while I really try and get my business going.

I do have one "real" job lined up: I'm making the groom's cake for a wedding I'm in this summer. It's going to be a Georgia Tech cake (yuck!), but hey, it's a job.

I toyed with the idea of taking the Wilton Cake Decorating classes at Michael's, but honestly I just can't afford it. It's $90 for course one, plus the book and supplies. And I would need to take all of the courses I can. They have at least three right now, and there is no way I can even come close to affording it. Plus, I seem to be doing alright just teaching myself, but even that is getting expensive. Supply costs are beginning to add up. Also, I need to bake stuff to practice, but I really don't want to bake a whole bunch of stuff and let it just sit at the house. It would either get wasted, or we would eat it, which we don't need to do. I lost a lot of weight last semester, but recently I have gained a few pounds back and I want to prevent that from continuing as much as possible, so unless I'm baking for an event, I'm trying not to bake. But doing that is curbing my progress. So, I'm sort of at a catch-22. It's a little discouraging, but if I have to, I could just buy some styrofoam and practice my icing skills on that. I'd rather not, but I could. It seems like a waste of food, which I hate.


Well, this has officially been the longest blog post ever. Sorry about that. I'll try and update more often so it's not quite so much at once.

Side note: my new friend Sarah made a wonderful plum buckle and sent some to me (via Sam). It was delicious. I'm glad to have someone to trade food with. :) (P.S. If you click on her name, you will be taken to her cooking blog!)

I think that's all for now.

'Till next time,
The Flower-Haired Girl

Purple Rose

First of all, post titles are not my strength. Sorry. Maybe I'll get better at it. Today, since I am actually wearing a flower in my hair, I decided to put what kind. :)

I have done no baking this week. Tests took over. Also, Sam got me hooked on the new video game, Heavy Rain. Now you must understand that I am not a gamer. At all. My single attempt at Halo, if it had been recorded and put on YouTube, would be all over the internet with people laughing their heads off. I'm terrible. However, this game is more like an interactive movie. It's a serial killer mystery, and you play multiple characters. How the story ends depends on how you play the characters and what choices you make. Perhaps this game grabs my interest because of my theatre background. It is sort of like a play. It's a lot like the movie Saw, just a LOT less gory.

ANYWAY, Sam and I did make lemon-lime sorbet last night. It's...interesting. He had made lemon sorbet before, so we figured, do the same thing just use half lemon juice and half lime juice. Makes sense, right? We thought so. We of course wanted to use fresh-squeezed lemon and lime juice, so Sam bought a lot of lemons and limes. So he starts squeezing lemons and I'm getting some lemon and lime zest to add into the mix. When I finish, I decide to try to squeeze the limes. I thought, "Lemons: citrus. Limes: citrus. They should squeeze about the same. Sure, limes are smaller so it will take more, but it should work about the same." False. So false. If you have never squeezed a lime, you may not know this, but limes do not like to be squeezed. They are infinitely tougher than lemons and nearly impossible to get any considerable amount of juice out of. Sam tried too, but to not much avail. So, we developed an official stance on limes, which I will not disclose here. It is the third of four points that are the foundation of our relationship, the others being:

1. Red Robin (a burger place) is highly overrated. (Their jingle on their commercial should sing: Reeed Robin...ehhh...)
2. Pickles are vile, disgusting, and evil.
and
4. Get me a fox.

Hm..3 of the 4 points have to do with food. I guess that's fitting. We both love food.

Back to the sorbet! So yeah, freshly squeezed lime juice did not happen. Luckily Sam, being pretty much the smartest person in the world, bought lime juice. He didn't realize it was key lime juice, but it's lime juice nonetheless. If anyone knows the difference between lime and key lime, we would love to know. We realized we have no idea. So, fresh lemon juice, key lime juice, lemon zest, lime zest, simple syrup (water and sugar boiled together) go into the fridge to cool, into the ice cream maker, then get moved to a container and frozen overnight. We tried a little bit of it when it came out of the ice cream maker. It tastes, as I said, interesting. Not bad. Not as good as plain lemon sorbet. It has an intense tartness about 3/4 of the way through the tasting process. It's like, "Hmm...lemon, lime, sweet, OH MY GOSH SO TART, sweet lemony-limey." So I guess that would be called a little bit of a tart kick. It's kind of cool though. He and I haven't tasted it since it froze overnight, and we haven't had a whole bowl of it, which is the real test. The tart kick may be fine for a bite or two, but it may be too intense to eat a whole bowl of the stuff. (Much in the way that Pepsi tastes better to have sip of, but Coke is better to drink an entire bottle of...with the exception of Pepsi Throwback, which is liquid heaven.) So the jury is still out on the lemon-lime sorbet, but we will see. We still stand strong to our stance on limes though.

Up this weekend is QCLX - Queen City Lindy Exchange. If those words sound foreign to you, I will break it down. "Queen City" is a name for Charlotte, NC. Yeah I had no idea either. "Lindy" is short for "lindy hop" which is a type of swing dance (the best type, in my opinion). So a "Lindy Exchange" is a weekend-long event at which a bunch of swing dancers get together for a weekend full of dancing, getting to know people, dancing, and more dancing. I only started dancing in September, and this will be my first exchange, so I'm really excited. It's really neat because we don't have to get a hotel or anything- dancers in the area offer housing to people coming in from out of town. The last weekend of March is ATLX (Atlanta Lindy Exchange) and then in May we're going to CHEX (Charleston Exchange) and possibly DLX (Denver Lindy Exchange). So lots and lots of dancing. Not to mention I got invited to join Swung, the swing dance performance group of the UGA Swing Club. So there is a whole lot of dancing in my future, which is very exciting! (If you have never done any kind of partnered dance, you should. I highly recommend swing dancing, but any ballroom is fun as well. It's not as hard/scary as you would think, I promise!)

For QCLX this weekend, I'm going to make some sort of cupcake. The theme is sort of gold-rush-ish, so I'm still working on ideas. I mean, I could be super un-original and just make cupcakes and put those little chocolate coins on top. But come on...lame. I have grand ideas for ATLX, and I will probably make something for CHEX as well, which is Wizard of Oz themed, so that shouldn't be difficult, as I will have lots of options.

I'm really excited about going up to Charlotte. We're going to have a fun weekend. And then it's spring break!! Hooray!

Oh! So I found out today that Alton Brown is speaking at UGA's commencement this May. I am so upset that I am not graduating! I'm going to try and swing a ticket to go though. I just want to hear him speak. Also, he needs to do a book signing sometime soon. I've been reading his "I'm Just Here for More Food: Food x Mixing + Heat = Baking" and I've been learning a lot. I could probably tell you more about eggs than you would ever need to know! It's really good though, it helps you understand why things are baked the way they are and what each ingredient's real job is. Who needs culinary school when you've got Alton Brown?!

Still no word from either bakery...I may call Bee's Knees today.

'Till next time,
The Flower-Haired Girl