almond irish coffee bites and job training

this past week i've been training for work, and it's just been busy busy busy lately. it's hard to imagine how busy and rushed we'll all be once the restaurant actually opens! there are quite a few things i learned from training, though. for one thing, a lot of times prep cook = slave. okay, maybe that was a slight over exaggeration. but you know how slaves do the same menial tasks over and over again? that's kinda what i was hinting at. okay, maybe it's not really AS BAD as slavery, because we get two days off a week, we don't get physically harmed or anything, and at some point we'll start getting paid for doing this! so i take that last statement back, because i like money! and i also enjoy not wasting away at home all day hahaha.

so let's move on. another thing i learned from training: always, ALWAYS wash the vegetables! ESPECIALLY if it's organic! no joke, dude. because some of the things i saw in there are just NOT pretty.

one more thing i learned: quality over quantity (or at least while it's still training time)! i learned this after making tray after tray of shitty-looking ravioli. i don't know why the HELL i thought i had to rush, it's not like they told me to make a certain amount or anything. once i finally slowed down and put more care into each ravioli, they actually started to look pretty decent :)

anyway, onto this week's dessert! it was actually a result of two ruined sheet pans of biscuit jaconde (siiighhh). basically they just decided that they did not want to separate from the paper, so after scraping piece after piece of the cake off and deciding i didn't want to waste any of it, i crumbled it all and combined it with some irish coffee buttercream that i whipped up, compressed them into a large square, and cut them into cubes. it's basically the same principal behind cake balls, but i just got tired of making them round.

i know i know, they look like rice krispy squares. well they're not, so cut it out!!

my original plan was to dip them in white chocolate ganache so that you couldn't see the sides and then just decorate the top. well, as you can see here, that didn't work, as my ganache turned out to be too runny. well, EFF YOU, white chocolate. why do you always have to eff things up for me?!! pfft. what i ended up doing was just brushing the tops with some thick, glossy dark chocolate sauce that i had left over, which was also thick enough to pipe a little design on top too. see that, white chocolate? dark chocolate will ALWAYS be better than you. don't even think you're better, you supremacist jerk!


things i learned from this experiment:
1. i officially HATE white chocolate. YOU'RE NOT EVEN REAL CHOCOLATE! what percentage of cacao do you have? that's right, zero! get out of here, FAKER!!
2. apparently coffee and chocolate are a winning combination for my dad, who seemed to enjoy these more than some of my other experiments...
3. i found an egg with 2 yolks in it! okay, maybe i didn't learn anything from that, but it's still cool in my book! they're like twins!!! :D

4th of july feats and flops!

happy (late) Independence Day! my independence night was spent at a party at my uncle's house, and i had my first go at making american bbq beef (feat!) and i attempted to make mini chocolate pound cakes (flop). the beef was SOOOO goood and i actually got to cut a good amount of hours cooking it by just using the pressure cooker instead of the slow cooker or oven. the chocolate pound cake on the other hand, well, just keep reading.

looks pretty, right? yeah NO. i thought they looked good when they came out of the oven too.

a cross section... it turned out to be really dense, but REALLY dry. also, the recipe i used was SO deceiving! the picture they provided made it look like it was really dark and moist and chocolatey, but i KNEW that it could never get that way without any actual chocolate!! (the recipe only uses cocoa powder).

another problem i came along while i was mixing it: I RAN OUT OF SUGAR. WTF. so not only was it dry, it was barely sweet. siighh. i thought i could make up for the lack of granulated sugar in the batter by just mixing in some powdered sugar and then topping it with powdered sugar later, but that just made it only somewhat bearable. oh well. i brought it to the party anyway, and the kids seemed to like it! so at least i didn't have to bring a full pan of that back home :)

so, just to recap: no sugar in the house. this means, no baking until i go grocery shopping on wednesday :( hopefully the next thing i bake won't make me so miserable!

chocolate chunk blackberry sour cream ice cream: flop of the week

it seemed like a good idea when i saw it! i saw a recipe for blackberry sour cream ice cream, and seeing as how i had blackberries AND sour cream i thought "what the hell, why not." probably bad judgment on my part because

a. blackberries are sour
b. sour cream is SOUR

PROBABLY should have opted for the custard with eggs in the recipe, but at the moment we didn't have any eggs in the fridge (but just as fate would have it, yesterday my mom bought 5 DOZEN eggs, LORD KNOWS WHY, and now i have no idea what to do with them -___-)

at least it looks good right? the color looks really good too. i garnished it with some fresh blackberries and mint leaves, and also one of the tuile cookies we made in class on ice cream day. it tastes like a waffle cone! :D

blackberries simmering away... one thing i should have done after blending all this stuff is strain it, but alas, our fine mesh strainer is about the size of my fist (probably meant for tea leaves) and also i was feeling lazy that night.

the mixture before i put it in the freezer...

a close-up of it all. since it was so sour, i served it after the BBQ today and pitched it as "blackberry frozen yogurt" since it tasted more like yogurt than ice cream :/ one thing i DID like was deciding to put chocolate chunks in it, even though some of the chunks were honkin' HUGE and some were really small. but still good! chocolate never seems to fail me :)