So we wanted to make something with eggplant for June. And we wanted them to involve maybe a fig, or a date, and some cheese, and maybe balsamic reduction, and maybe be hot but maybe be cold. We came up with the idea to make eggplant pinwheels, which are basically figs or dates wrapped in eggplant and stuck in the oven for a bit and then covered with cheese and reducation.

We wanted it to be delicious. It ended up not working out on round 1.

So I start off with my kitchen research, as one normally does. Corelyn and I discuss it, and we come up with a recipe. Here is the perfect example of when execution just doesn’t match up with the paper.

I buy figs. I buy dates.

The left is a date. The right is a fig.

I taste them both. I like them both.

I get out my cheeses. I thought goat cheese would be good because someone else said so. I thought feta would be good because I said so.

I tried out all the combos.

I recorded my research.

I took my eggplant.

I used our new mandoline to slice up my eggplant. It was so beautiful! Now, here is where things got ugly. I messed up, friends. The oven was too hot! I forgot to spray both sides of the eggplant! I burned them…to the pan. And I didn’t have more to work with, so I went with dates and feta cheese as the appetizer (I was making it all for a party!) and luckily had decided to make a recipe out of the newest addition to our kitchen.

Sheryl, you are a delight. And Chuck, a genius.

Take some avocados.

Scoop out your avocados.  Save the shells.

Smash up up in a bowl. Add some spices (cumin, salt, and garlic powder) and lime juice.

You know, to taste.

Put them back into the avocados!

Put a dollop of salsa on each. Eat with chips. Bring over to a friend’s house and apologize for burning the eggplant they didn’t even know about. They’ll look at you like you’re crazy. It’ll be fun.

Enjoy and forget about your eggplant pinwheels. Unless your me, and you need to figure out the recipe. Then, you know, reschedule the eggplant pinwheel making.

So last night was the second night of the three-day cake that is for Ms. Ellen’s birthday. And no, she’s not a demanding friend. I just was like, “Hey can I make this vertical layer cake with roses for your birthday?” and she said yes. Thank goodness.

So tonight I invited Rebecca over to help me with the cake cutting. Really, I just needed someone else to cut circles in cardboard so I could make the rings for my cake’s vertical layers.

I told her that I needed someone to photograph. And an extra set of hands. I was lying. What I needed was someone to draw circles on a piece of cardboard. As she realized when I attempted and failed horribly.

“Do you want me to…let me do it,” she said. Success.

These cakes were frozen over night wrapped in plastic wrap and tin foil (because Wednesday night had to be the night we ran out of plastic wrap!)

So you take your cardboard piece, and you cut around to get your first layer.

Please ignore the cooling rack lines. Do the same thing on your other cake.

Repeat until you have all the layers cut. You get the idea.

The strawberry cake was made with cake flour instead of regular flour, and was sticker and harder to manage than the other cake, so here I am gently pulling the layers apart.

As you can see here, the cakes were also uneven. No matter. You can fix that with a knife.

Now, because of the fact that I didn’t double layer the cakes (due to the lack of enough strawberry cake) this cake will actually end up kind of checkerboard. You’ll see.

We taped wax paper tightly around the edges and then coated the cakes in some simple syrup.

So now it was time to make the practice cake with the smidge baby strawberry cake and the other layer of the yellow cake. I first cut the yellow cake into two layers, so I’d have a three layer cake.

We made frosting with Trader Joe’s frosting mix, but it doesn’t make that much frosting and it is also oily, so not ideal for decorating. I had to thicken it with more powdered sugar. So noted, and when I make Ellen’s final cake it will be with homemade buttercream frosting.

I stuck the strawberry layer between the two yellow cake layers. Yum.

Do you see the drippy frosting? It was too drippy for a good rose. But you’ll see.

Look at those drippy roses! The horror! They’re melting! They’re melting!!

Ahh, much better. It’s amazing what a little sugar will do!

I think we’re ready for Ellen’s cake. What do you think? Any advice?

A few days ago, I went to yoga with Demi Soeur and we were yoga-ing when the woman teaching said, “I’d like to do a hand balance pose” and proceeded to explain to us how to get into side crow with an extended leg. Basically this:

You may wonder what this has to do with baking/cooking. Well, friends, she proceeded to tell us not to worry, because this pose was “easy.” The following day, DS and I were taking about it at work and decided that the woman was crazy. This pose was not easy. Corpse pose is easy. Walking is easy. Standing is easy. Side crow is not easy.

Side crow is, though, possible. By even me. I have mastered crow, and side crow is my next step. The point is, if I had said a year ago I’d be making a vertical layer cake with roses, I would have laughed at myself. Because I wouldn’t have thought I could do it. And although technically I haven’t yet, I know that I can. And that’s the point, m’dears. It is not easy. But we can do it.

So, bake to the cake. Last night I baked the cakes for my vertical layer rose cake.

Problems? Sure there were. Is it still going to work? Yes ma’am.

First, I cut parchment paper circles. DS also laughed at this, because apparently there is a better way. Such wisdom, she has.

I buttered.  A note about buttering. I always have a stick of butter in the fridge that looks gnarly and like it maybe melted a few times and solidified a few times (which it did.) I keep it next to my regular butter. Periodically Jeff asks what it is for and then as I explain shudders. Alas, it is necessary. You must have this stick. It has rounded ends, and the paper is basically falling off, and you use it to rub all over any pan to start a stir fry or a cake. Just do it.

I floured. Ellen, I hope you know how much I love you. I love you so much I touched flour for you. That’s a lot of love. 🙂

Ready to go.

Yellow cake beginnings. I forgot that I didn’t have sugar (only super fine) so I called DS who informed me that it was OK as long as I weighed the sugar so it’d match regular white sugar, because the volume might be a smidge different. Crisis adverted.

Please excuse the lack of photos from the process. It was basically mixing a bunch of white stuff together, and I was sans-partner, so I was not keen on touching the camera with butterfingers and flour hands.

After these babies went into the oven, I switched it up and made the strawberry cake.

No herein lies the major problem that I had with these cakes. I was planning on making two cakes, one for the party and one for the office, but the strawberry cake was a smaller cake than the yellow cake. This will end up meaning I have a yellow cake with two layers yellow, and one thin strawberry (for work) and a vertical layer cake for Ellen. But, just remember, if you want to make a double layer vertical cake you have to make two cakes with two layers each that are roughly the same size. You can do this by making them at the same time and pouring the batter at the same time so you can level them, or you can just make sure the yields are close. The strawberry recipe, for example, had less flour, so I knew it’d be different, and it called for cake flour rather than all-purpose flour.

Cake flour.

New sifter. Better sifter.

So this is my mini Cuisinart. I bought it a the Treasure Mart in Ann Arbor, MI, for $5. A while back I used it to grind up cloves, which resulted in a semi-permanent clove scent, but I’m OK with that. I forgot I had it, and found it again last night when I didn’t want to have to pull out my big one. Perfect!

Yum. Crushed strawberry.

As you can see, the second cake of strawberry was small. It made a 9″ and a smidge baby cake.

Four cake kitchen. Best place on earth.

Look at that. Magical parchment circles.

A word on cooling: I let the cakes cool for about five minutes, then took ’em out of the pans. I flash froze them for about thirty minutes, then wrapped them in plastic wrap and tin foil (because I ran out of plastic wrap!) and stuck them in the freezer. Which is where they are now, until tonight when we cut them out.

We’re moving into July over here, and that means…cakes! I know, I know, you’re thinking, what? But here in LA we have birthdays year round, not to mention the fourth of July, and that means CAKE. Who doesn’t love a little cake to celebrate independence? I know I do. You may remember last year’s flag cake, the delight of the summer!

Now that was a serious accomplishment, but at the end of the day really was just a sheet cake, with hard frosting to achieve. The berries did most of the work (and Corelyn, if we’re being honest. Which, today, we are.)

But now, ladies and gentleman, I lead you behind the scenes to the next four days, while I attempt (with the help of some good friends) to make the hardest cake I’ll ever make. Or, I’ll ever make in 2011. Or I’ll ever make in the month of July in the year of 2011. You know, something like that.

It all started with reading a blog and realizing I needed to make a rose cake.

This is the cake I am going to make.

So roses, can’t be too hard. Barbra got me a pastry bag and tips a while back, so I’m good to go with that. But how do you make vertical layers in a cake? With two cakes, patience, and a pattern, of course!

This is the cake I’ll make and then I’ll put some roses on it!

So here’s the run down. Because I have a day job, and because this is for Saturday so my time is somewhat limited, the schedule looks like this.

Wednesday – Bake the two cakes (I’m going with strawberry and vanilla cake). Let them cool, flip them out of the pans, and freeze them. (They need to be frozen for at least six hours in order to

Thursday – Cut cakes and reassemble them as shown above. Cover with simple syrup and tie to bind, then place back in freezer. Meanwhile, practice roses a few times.

Saturday morning – Take cakes out, put in fridge to thaw.

Saturday afternoon – Decorate cake at party location with roses, using vanilla frosting.

I’ll make sure to try to update the cake as I go, letting you know what works, and what doesn’t. I may have a lovely assistant tomorrow to help me out, but we’ll see.

Greetings!

I’m sorellasenzaglutine, aka Melissa.  I’ve made some sporadic guest appearances here from time to time; however, today I join you all in a more structured manner as the gluten free guest blogger on Garlic, My Soul!  I am very happy to be here and I’m going to jump right in by giving some background to get us all on the same page.

I’ve been gluten free since September of 2008 when I was diagnosed with Celiac Disease.  Celiac Disease is an autoimmune disease where your body attacks and destroys your small intestine when gluten is present in your body.  Gluten is a long-structured protein that is found in the grains wheat, rye, barley and oats. Nowadays, because so much of our food is processed, gluten also turns up in a lot of other and sometimes odd places.

The only treatment for Celiac is a life-long gluten free diet. You may encounter people who are avoiding gluten for a variety of reasons.  Celiac is different than a gluten intolerance or a wheat allergy. In an intolerance or allergy the body is having an immune response to a foreign substance and attacking only the foreign substance.  In an autoimmune disease the body is triggered by the foreign substance, but then cannot tell the difference between the foreign substance and your body. It gets all muddled and just attacks and destroys everything unilaterally, good and bad.   This is why someone with Celiac has to worry about minute amounts of gluten that can be introduced through cross contamination or the like whereas someone with an intolerance may not have to be quite so careful.

Great, now that we got all that technical stuff out of the way and we’re all up to speed about what gluten is and what it does, onto real life!  So you have been diagnosed with Celiac or you know someone who has been?  First and foremost, you need to know that it’s okay and everything’s going to be fine.  (If we’re being honest the day I was diagnosed I sobbed at my desk at work, but then my wonderful coworker went to Whole Foods on his lunch and bought me my first GF food.  It all works out in the end.)

Admittedly, sometimes GF life is a total drag.  Sometimes it is overwhelming.  Sometimes it takes way too much thought.  But also (and most importantly), more of the time it is totally fine once you get past the learning curve.  It just becomes normal life that you are completely able to be handle, you just have to stick with it.  I have found that the key is educating yourself and educating the people in your life.  Everything is a teachable moment; you will learn something new every day.

Speaking of learning something new, these are some resources that helped me early on (and still do!):

1)     www.celiac.org

2)     www.gluten.net/

3)     www.glutenfreegirl.com/

I am coming up on my three year anniversary of this dramatic life change.  Going gluten free for health reasons or otherwise is not small potatoes, though fortunately, you can still eat those!