1st wedding cake

As I had mentioned previously, the week at home after leaving Paris for les vacances was spent making a trial wedding cake. Well, the big day finally arrived which involved hauling my ass up to Edinburgh and spending a few days there beforehand making the actual cake. It was particularly special as this was the first wedding cake I have ever made and also for a close family member, my brother.....no pressure, huh??  After the trial baking sesh chez Chan, I was fairly confident that the cake was going to taste pretty good but unsure about the decoration. I had started to think about the design months ago while I was still at Ferrandi and had come up with a design revolving around a dragon and phoenix - very traditional Chinese symbols for marriage. Having had a few go's at painting this, I finally gave up and decided that it wasn't going to work so had to ditch design no. 1. After much procrastinating, I then came up with design no. 2 (bizarrely, in the shower!) which was to paint a modified version of an Asian-looking print that my bro had used for the wedding invites. However, trialling this turned out to be yet another disaster. At this point, there was around 10 days left before the wedding and no design, cue more sleepless nights. Finally, I had a leaf through one of my cake decorating books and finally decided on a piped flower design instead - not exactly very Chinese-looking but I guess they do slightly resemble cherry blossoms which give it a quasi-Oriental feel. A quick visit to the shops to get piping tips, flower nail and another practice session gave me some comfort that I would be able to reproduce the design again once in haggis-land.

I was a little nervous about taking on this task as it would not be in the comfort of my own kitchen - luckily, my bro was driving up to Edinburgh the day before I arrived so I was able to ask him to take up some of my tools and also my trusty Kitchenaid (thank God, cos I had considered making everything by a hand mixer which would've been a complete nightmare!). I had managed to order marzipan, cake boards, etc to be delivered north of the border which was a blessing and also armed Jools with a list to buy all the ingredients so I could hit the kitchen as soon as I arrived, well, almost......

Day 1: 

Flight from Heathrow to Edinburgh amazingly landed on time at 1pm. Dropped off luggage and ingredients with bro's best man (was staying with him in town) before being invited out to lunch. As a result, didn't start work until 4pm, which meant not finishing until past 1am!!! Goal was to bake all cakes, there are 3 tiers ( 2 tiers chocolate, 1 tier lemon) each of which has 2 layers therefore needed to make 6 cakes in total. Ideally, would've made both fillings but only managed to make chocolate ganache. Have a pretty spacious kitchen which is a luxury and also the choice of 3 fridges!! The oven is a little dodge as the markings for the temperature have been half scrubbed off which means "guestimating" oven temperatures for cakes. 

Day 2:

Woke up early after a semi-sleepless night and headed into the kitchen early. Had been a little worried about the oven last night - couple of weird things happened. My chocolate cake had 80% crust and then 20% Aero-bar crust for no apparent reason?? Luckily, could trim the top off but still curious as to how it happened, especially when I took the effort to turn the cakes every so often? The lemon cake had an weirder outcome, not 1 but BOTH ended up with a crater in the middle!!! WTF??? This did NOT happen chez Chan! Luckily, there were trimmings so in the end, had to do a quick patch-up job, char! Filled and covered with ganache/buttercream ("merci" to chef for always getting us to practice our scraping skills at school!!) and covered with marzipan.

Day 3:

Covered all cakes and cake boards with fondant. Piped 300+ flowers from royal icing and spent an eternity trying to mix the right colour for the stamens of the flowers to match the ties of the groomsmen. After 2 attempts, still not exact but its gonna have to do.

Day 4:

Positioned iced cakes onto boards - the chocolate ones were a real pain in the bum with the threat of rogue ganache smearing my pristeen fondant. Not entirely perfect positioning with the largest cake as it was so bloody heavy!! Decorated cakes with flowers and ribbon and voila! C'est finit :)

So how did I feel about the whole experience? It was pretty exhausting work but I did enjoy it a lot which is encouraging now that I have decided to do this as a future career. I think in the future I need to stop being overly-critical of myself and be able to enjoy the moment once a cake is made - I did get lots of compliments for it when it was done but all I could see at that point were all the flaws that I had not managed to hide (air bubbles, lopsided sides, etc). I did give myself a little mental "pat on the back" at the wedding after people had tasted the cake and said that they really liked it :) 

Have also learnt that I will also need to be a little less ambitious also for future cake designs cos apart from taste, the other most important thing about a wedding cake is to be able to make it look as beautiful as possible.....got another 3 months or so to think up another design for yet another wedding cake :)

Finally, a big "多謝" to Mr and Mrs Chan for giving me the opportunity to make your wedding cake and I really wish you every happiness in your life together :)

California eating

OK, playing serious catchup now on blog entries. Its been more than 2 weeks since we got back from LA and I still haven't provided the full lowdown on all the places we hit during the holliers. In the words of Jackie Mason, the most obvious thing that comes to mind about food in the US is......the POITIONS!! (aka. portions with a New York twang!!) It is very rare that you will leave a restaurant hungry, you're more likely to be going home with doggy bag in hand and also missed dessert ....bizarrely enough, I think the restaurants know this and so, the desserts are never any good. California cuisine is generally very pretty and ambitious when it comes to flavour combinations; sadly, more often than not, they don't always work and that can sometimes be a little disappointing. We did try our fair share of ethnic cuisines whilst out here and they were pretty good. So in no particular order, here's a quick run-through of some of the places we hit whilst in town:

Sol Food -  casual but great little restaurant in Marin County (in the town of San Rafael) serving homely Puerto Rico food in generous portions......plantain heaven!! Very amusing customer letter framed at the front door complaining of the colour of the building, a vibrant lime green! Some folk think that it doesn't really fit in with the town....see for yourself!

Turtle Bay Taqueria - recommendation from our kayak instructor for a yummy Mexican lunch in Monterey. Burritos all around this time, I plumped for a tasty fish kind :)

Cracked Crab - hugely popular crab restaurant in Pismo Beach (we waited 1 hour+!) Their speciality is the Bug Bucket for 2 where you pick 3 types of seafood which is steamed and served with spuds and corn (a bit cheeky as the better types of crab have an additional supplement) in a bucket; the contents get dumped on your table and off you go. Very impressive collection of utensils to get all that crab meat out!! (also some crayons for us to doodle with, I is the one on the left with the rotund belly :))

Edomasa - local Japanese restaurant in Santa Barbara which serves an individual katsu curry fit for 2 and a beef sukiyaki fit for 3!! Nice sushi also and great value.

Urth Caffe -  a personal pilgrimage since we are both HUGE fans of Entourage and this is where the boys hang out in LA. JD noticed something really funny when we were here for lunch; the place is order by the counter and then busboys (mainly Mexican) bring out the food to your table. In Entourage, the guys are always served by a hot waitress (yeah, right!) that Vince usually ends up shagging so hate to break it to you, but the reality is not exactly like it is on TV :) 

Coffee comes highly recommended by JD!

Chosun Galbee - swankyish looking Korean restaurant in Koreatown, where I made the eternal mistake of ordering too much food and we ended up rolling out of the place :) 

Great bibimbap, panchan coming out of our eyes and generous BBQ portions - did I mention the gargatuan fish casserole for 2 as well?? Oops!

Trastevere - last meal in LA at a very good Italian located in Santa Monica, can highly recommend that seafood linguini!! 

All in all, a great holiday and a lovely culinary experience, the only 2 bummers were a regular reader of my blog telling me afterwards that he might've been able to get us into the French Laundry (char!) and also Anthony Bourdain hitting SF after our visit - some good recoms on the programme and also the fact that there were taco trucks galore in Oakland! 

Having said that, our experience of a taco truck was pretty funny; we rolled up to a taco truck in our Go Car in Golden Gate Park in SF thinking it was serving to the general public but it was actually hired out for a private function!!! The people who had hired it out had miscalculated how much food they would need (too much!) and insisted that we get something from the truck so thats how we ended up with free tacos!! Muchos gracias chicos! :)

Chez Panisse

When we decided to book our holiday to Cali a few months ago, I had lofty ambitions to get a table for dinner at the French Laundry. Having tried ringing a few times and spoken with a fellow gourmand friend who assured me that it is near impossible to secure a reservation at Thomas Keller's eatery, I then attempted to secure us a table for dinner at Alice Waters' famed restaurant, Chez Panisse. Luckily, I managed to ring a month in advance and got us in for an early sitting.

When the day finally arrived (August 7th), we had to navigate our way from downtown SF out to Berkeley via the BART (surburban train network). To be honest, I had not imagined Berkeley to be the way it was but its probably a little unfair for me to be judging the town on the basis of one street (lots of half empty Indian restaurants with the occasional student hangout, what Gourmet Ghetto??).  

The restaurant itself is very cosy and has more of a feel of someone's dining room; this and the open kitchen (which I was able to go into and have a goo around post-dinner) provided a very relaxed and enjoyable setting for dinner which was complimented by some lovely service. Chez Panisse operates quite differently to other restaurants by only offering a set 4-course meal, which changes daily using ingredients which are most in season (the price of dinner increases towards the end of the week but still very reasonable at 95 dollars).

Our dinner consisted of the following:

Melon and cucumber soup with lime and mint

I wasn't expecting to like this as the film of oil on the surface looked a little off-putting but deliciously refreshing and the perfect way to start the meal. 

Pan-seared King Salmon with Indian spices

Very good and delicately spiced - here, they really meant to incorporate spices into the dish unlike the many lame attempts of trying to give a dish an "exotic twist" that you see so often in Paris.    

Grilled Wolfe Ranch quail with tomato chutney and black eye peas

So yummy I could've eaten 2 birds!! Think the secret was the way the quail grilled on an open grill which gave it its distinctive barbecuey charcoal flavour. 

Rose geranium ice cream crepes with nectarines and mulberries

Everything tasted great but having worked in such close quarters with Ispahan at PH, I felt they could've given the ice cream a much stronger rose flavour, a little too timid for my liking. Also slightly disappointed with the slight lack of sophistication in the dessert (the chocolates and petits fours were forgettable) but clearly, I have high expectations :)

I think this was easily the best meal of our holiday; each dish was carefully crafted and all the flavours worked on the plate without jostling for position (smthg that I found much too often in Cali cuisine) topped off with a lovely relaxed atmosphere in the restaurant.  I also have to mention the grape juice that is served as an aperitif for non-alcoholic drinkers - Navarro Gerwurtztramminer, think non-alcoholic dessert wine, a must try! All in all, well worth the visit :)

Note. Am afraid that the pics are not my finest as I was trying to take them as quickly and unobtrusively as possible without flash.

Les Vacances - San Francisco

Been slacking a bit on the ol' blog updates, oops! Its been a busy few weeks.....I am currently on a break from my stage at the moment as the shop is closed for the month of August. After a weekend of chilling in Paris with friends, I headed back to the Emerald Isle to visit Ma and Pa Chan for a good week which was nice. It actually turned out to be a pretty busy week as I was mostly in the kitchen working out on a trial wedding cake that I will be making in September. It felt a little bit daunting at times as I had never made cakes that big before but in the end, they turned out pretty well. I made one chocolate cake sandwiched with chocolate ganache and one lemon cake sandwiched with lemon cream. I was happy enough with the way the cakes turned out taste and texture wise. As I am still debating how to decorate the cakes, I only iced them and placed them on a cake drum with some ribbon. They looked good but I will need to make sure that the royal icing for the real cakes is a bit stiffer - good to have this practice under my belt :)

As usual, the week at home flew by and before I knew it, it was back down to London to see JD, which was lovely as we hadn't seen each other in 4 weeks or more. Some last minute shopping for our holliers and then it was off on another plane, an 11 hour epic to San Francisco! Yep, am here in the US at the mo for a summer holiday with JD touring the west coast from SF to LA.

So far, we have spent a few days exploring SF. Then, we hired a car and crossed over the Golden Gate Bridge to Marin County and spent a few days there seeing the sights. Foodwise, we have been pretty spoilt by the choice and quality of food; this applies mainly to SF and less so to Marin County.

Some of the places that we visited in SF include:

Farmer Brown - a funky restaurant on the edge of the Tenderloin District (not exactly the nicest part of town) which serves chic-looking soul food. This was our first meal in SF and we were not disappointed. As we were still slightly jetlagged, we just ordered mains of fried chicken and pork chop, both were mega-yummy, highly recommended.

Bocadillos -  a laid-back tapas bar which does a pretty good breakfast. Handy for us as it was only a few blocks away from our hotel in the Financial District.

Mifune - very famous Japanese noodle shop in Japantown - yummy noodles which I think they make themselves and generous portions, zaru udon and sushi set pictured above for peanuts! Japantown is a little out of the way but worth the trek once you get there!!

The House - small and busy Asian fusion restaurant on the edge of Little Italy and Chinatown. Their miso cod (made famous by Nobu) was the richest and most tender fish I have ever tasted. Unfortunately, the desserts weren't up to much; I ordered the mango tapioca expecting it to be like a tasty mango 西米露 but what I got instead was a bland, sugary mess - the classics should never be messed with :)

Taqueria San Francisco - a great little place that serves what is supposedly one of the best burritos in the city, it gets the thumbs up from JD! (I plumped for some tacos instead, see above)

A16 - megabusy Italian restaurant in the posh-ish Marina District recommended by a friend (a native San Franciscan!). The highlight of my meal was tonarelli cooked in squid ink but not all JD's choices were that great.

Cafe de la Presse - our last meal in SF was here before we picked up our rental car. Lovely French-style cafe which does great breakfast, can highly recommend their pain perdu :)  

Crumbs - have we REALLY eaten this much already?? Can feel the pounds piling on ;)