Peach and Hazelnut Cake

Hazelnut cake topped with roasted peach and brushed with red currant jelly.

I Love Puff Pastry

Puff dough is a wonderful thing. Flaky, buttery, and what's most important, it makes practically anything taste good. Although I don't make my own puff pastry ( I still haven't even mastered croissant dough yet), it's easily bought in the grocery store and work very well.

These are just stuffed with apples cooked with some sugar and a vanilla bean. Sprinkled with more sugar, they make a good breakfast or snack.

Pistachio Rose Cake

Someone had asked me to come up with a cake that featured a floral taste. I picked rose and paired it with pistachio. This is a pistachio mousse with a cherry rose compote (originally I had thought of strawberry), rose tea jelly underneath, pistachio dacquoise, and feuilletine base. The outside is sprayed with velvet spray and I sprinkled on some candied pistachios on the side.

These pistachios make great snacks too!

Candied Pistachios

80g sugar
30g water
100 g sliced or slivered pistachios

-bring the sugar and water to a boil and cook for 1 min. Add the pistachios and stir over medium heat till the sugar crystallizes and turns white. Spread onto a tray to cool.

Macarons

The IM method of macarons filled with a hazelnut ganache. Thanks to Chef Bruno for the great recipe!

Also thanks to my sister for all the recent photos and more to come.

Peach Tart

Peaches macerated in some sugar and ginger atop quark cheese. The tart is an ultra crumbly brown sugar sweet dough.

The Wedding

For the past month, I've been thinking about this one event that happened this past long weekend. My sister's friend's wedding. I was happy to take on the challenge of making a wedding cake along with some cookies for the reception and it would also be another step into creating my own business.

The bride wanted a bit of an Indian theme but not overtly so, and the cake had to match the bouquet and restaurant a bit. Being as the restaurant was highly decorated (I'm talking a different elaborate wallpaper on every wall), I had to tie in some of those colors into the cake. I was inspired by an Indian lace pattern that had a lot of swirls and stars. I airbrushed some gold flecks onto a cream colored background and went ahead on layering the design onto the fondant. Some red and purple swirls, gold stars, and red detailing. I ended up having to make four 1/2 sheets of cake as well because of the sheer number of guests (upwards to 400). This was the kicker. Everything was so much heavier than I thought it would be. I was stupid enough to think that, "oh, I can lift it up with one arm, it should be fine!". Nope. Lifting was no problem. It was the many trips of carrying it down the hallway of my apartment, all the way down to my car. I think it was 7 trips total with the cookies. Good thing I put in extra time to do this.

I also made Chai spiced madeleines and orange shortbread cookies as well which were very well received and I thank all the people who helped me put them on the place settings. 25 lbs of butter, 40dz eggs, and 3kg of sour cream later, everything was done and went well.
The wedding reception was great! Good food, good entertainment, met some really nice people, and of course, the bride and groom looked amazing!

Thanks again to E and H for helping me take these awesome photos! You can visit their flikr sites here and here.