Adopting in Ashburn

And to continue my photo blogging in the midst of actual other activities this evening (like winning a volleyball game - Go Foxchase!) I present the end result of the multi-step petit fours process from a couple weeks ago and a team photo from our pizza outing.

Today I tried again with the petit fours. All in all, even my mistakes worked out well. First, I made a yellow cake. I'm not sure why, but the cake I make from a box tastes better than both of this weekends homemade cakes. This is my first time going from scratch on cake batter like this though, so I just need to figure out how to get a bit more moisture in them. All in all, they are pretty good - just not heavenly. My fist attempt at the ganache today didn't go well. Either I was distracted by having to talk HOBY during baking, or I am generally not all there, but I used 100% cocoa bars. This is bad because it means there is no sweetness whatsoever. So I added 1/3 cup sugar and 1/4 heavy cream with 2 tablespoons of butter (boiled). The result was not ganache. But, it was truffle batter. My first major mistake of the day turned into a tray of over fifty truffles that I am going to dip in the leftover white chocolate ganache and tomorrow's milk chocolate. Yeah for ...

My first try at making petit fours tonight was mostly successful. First - a petit fours (French for "little ovens") are small, individual cakes. Think fancy-shmancy bakery style individual cakes that have fondant (icing that is sculpted or laid on as opposed to spread on with a knife). The chocolate cake, made from scratch, rose and came out of the pan without breaking. It is moderately moist (oven temperature was too low, so it took a long time to cook) and not at all burnt. Unfortunately, it is only a 50% success because the cake is too big. Tomorrow I need to make them in the same size pan, but use two pans for the same amount of cake so they are thinner and therefore bite size. As a note, I cannot just cut the big cake into smaller pieces, because then there are lots of crumbs, which mess up the icing. The other major part of the petit fours is the icing. I decided to go with a ganache (a pourable icing that is basically melted chocolate and enough cream to make it l...