Thursday, May 20, 2010

Buttercream Frosting and S'mores

Jorg would like me to blog about how he had his first s'more today, and because he's such a nice guy, I'll fulfill his request. The interns are supposed to make lunch one day, so one of the interns from Marblehead made lunch. She made a really yummy lasagna and garlic bread. She also brought s'more ingredients for dessert because she knew that Jorg had never eaten a real s'more before (we learned this fact when we were making the s'more pastries). We roasted the marshmallows over the stove. They burned quite easily since the stove was so hot.


Along with eating s'mores, I ate a lot of buttercream frosting today. Just little tastes here and there, but enough to get me full of frosting. The first encounter with buttercream frosting today was making some mocha flavored frosting for some mocha tart mini-pastries. Basically I just took plain buttercream frosting and mixed it with some instant coffee mixture. The frosting was piped into the tart shells and some plain buttercream frosting was piped on top of that (the little swirl on top). I put a coffee bean on the very top and sprinkled it with some cocoa powder.

The second encounter was choosing a color to frost some mini cupcakes. I chose purple, though the stuff in the picture has a blue tint. To make it purple, I added a whole bunch of air brush dye, and, of course, got dye on my hand in the process. The cupcakes were frosted and I put little white sprinkles on top. I was offered a cupcake to eat, but I couldn't handle anymore buttercream frosting, so I had to turn it down. I'm sure it would have been good since they were strawberry cupcakes.


Now if you subtract the "cream" from "buttercream", you get "butter" which is what you use to make croissants. Jorg makes his own croissants. I came in this morning and watched him preparing some croissant dough (he had just mixed it and was taking it out of the mixing bowl). Croissants are made from laminated dough. Basically, they are lots of layers of dough and butter, and that's what makes them rise when you cook them. Once the dough had risen a bit, we rolled them out on the rolling machine and then put butter on one side and folded the other side over to enclose the butter. Then we rolled it out again and folded it into thirds, which is what you see in the picture. You roll and fold it into thirds three times.


And surprisingly, buttercream frosting (going back to it), is made out of lots of egg whites, sugar, and butter. This is a picture of the mixer with a bowl full of egg whites and sugar (for the frosting). It's a huge bowl and a huge mixer. Some of the mixer things (a whisk thing is shown in the picture) are quite scary looking. The machine can go very fast, and sometimes it looks like the contents of the bowl will spill out onto the floor, which, I've been told, has happened in the past and it quite a big mess.

2 comments:

  1. Mmmmmm frosting. Your ILE sounds so awesome Lily, and your creations look lovely!

    ~Marisa

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  2. Can all these desserts be healthy for a young person going off to college in the fall? They certainly look good in the photographs which fit into the background of your blog very nicely.

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