Southern Dinner

Every Sunday night my neighbors and I take turns cooking dinner then watch True Blood on HBO. Since the show is set in Louisiana, we always love the subtle nuances about the South. My culinary heritage is based in Kentucky where my mother, grandmothers and great grandmothers all learned to cook. This week it was my turn to make dinner and I thought it would be fun to prepare all the dishes I so fondly remember enjoying in my great grandmother's house in Glasgow, Kentucky. The menu included baked, smoked ham, fresh coleslaw, collard greens that had been simmering for hours in smoked turkey stock, corn pudding and fresh buttermilk biscuits. I made baked beans too but forgot them in the kitchen! During the show I served Nilla wafer pudding - homemade vanilla pudding with fresh, sliced bananas and Nilla wafers. It was addictive!

The Weekend

Not a lot of cooking going on today. Thought I'd post some photos of last year's trip to Martha's Vineyard. We love going to the pick-your-own farm and creating our own flower bouquets.

The essential cake components

Today I'm showing you the basic building blocks of a really good cake. It's not just the spongey goodnes but also the filling, frosting and decoration! Here are images of a deep, rich, decadent ganache - made of chopped, melted bittersweet chocolate and heavy cream. That's it! once it cools it become spreadable like frosting. I use ganache to fill my chocolate cakes - just like you would find in a truffle. Next comes the frosting. I'm very particular about this - I never use shortening! Always butter. The best I can find. My favorite frosting has white chocolate, cream cheese and butter - no confectioners sugar! I use it on my very special cakes or on cakes in the hot days of summer - the white chocolate really holds up well. Next we have decorations. I'm a big fan of melted white chocolate. I can draw anything with it and then infill with any color that suits the design. Here is an example of the chocolate dyed blue and drawn very free-hand into multiple "doo-dads". These components were all used in the Dark Chocolate Wedding Cake earlier in my postings.

Bruins Cake

In honor of their Stanley Cup win I am bringing back the Bruins themed birthday cake that I made a couple of years ago.  Congratulations Bruins!

This cake was for a 6 year old who is a big Boston Bruins fan. His birthday party was at an ice skating rink and they needed a vanilla and a chocolate cake, so the hockey puck was created! The decorations (doo-dads as I call them) are made from molded chocolate. My favorite pieces are the hockey stick candles.

Cookies, cookies everywhere!

One of my friends works for a company whose logo is a wolf. So I've been making these custom shaped cookies for her to take on her trips to design firms. I attach one of her business cards to each package and it makes a lovely, personal gift for her customers. Her son loves Thomas the Tank Engine so I created cookies with all of Thomas' friends for his birthday party.

Red Sox Cake

This was a groom's cake for a friend who is a fanatical Red Sox fan. Their wedding day was a scorcher - high humidity and high temperatures! This cake is my special lemon butter pound cake with a lemon cream and fresh raspberry filling - very refreshing on a hot summer day.

Baby Shower cake

This isn't your typical baby shower cake! We took a departure from your every day decoration of booties, bottles or blocks and used baby animals with bright colors. One of the party games was to make a baby using play-dough. A room full or architects were very creative and molded baby alligators, baby Simpson's and baby birds - still in the eggs!

Pies for the 4th of July!

These pies represent the colors of the American flag; red (cherry), white (s'mores cheesecake) and blue (blueberry of course!) I used a lobster cookie cutter to get the shapes on the top crust of the cherry pie.

Butterflies everywhere

These butterflies are made from white chocolate that has been dyed with food coloring. The technique is quite simple; draw the outline with dark chocolate then fill in the wings and body with colored chocolate. The whole process has the look of watercolor painting - which I love.

Butterfly cake

This cake was created for the 70th birthday of a woman in my neighborhood who does so much to give back to her community. Her friends and neighbors wanted something that was as special and significant as she is. I wanted this cake to have lots of movement - and the butterfly wings certainly helped achieve that!

Chocolate wedding cake

Four tiers of dark, rich chocolate cake filled with a bittersweet ganache filling, iced with a white chocolate cream cheese frosting and decorated with colored white chocolate "doo dads". These doo dads are my signature decoration. I can do almost anything with white chocolate!

Wedding Cake

Hello!

This is my first post and I'm excited to display the many cakes I've been working on these past few months. I've had a wonderful time and each one shows my attention to detail. But most importantly - they all taste great! This first photo is of a wedding cake I recently baked in North Carolina. The design was inspired by the flowers the bride carried: hydrangeas.