Cake and Bread

Let’s facing it, the valentine, whether you are single and happy, single and on the search, in the first throes of love or settled into a long term relationship, the day can be a nightmare. There are a lot of hurdles to overwhelmed that Valentine’s Day could trip up even the most ardent of lovers. Are you still questioning what gifts to pick up for your boyfriend? Well, the fact is that you are alone.

Some of women find working out what men wish are tough and to get something for their boyfriend is even tougher. They’re not fussy, just that every woman prefer to make their man feel really special and naturally, the Valentine’s gift has to be unique and can assist her convey her feelings for him.

In the situation Valentine’s Day is right around the corner, you may be acknowledged how chocolate gifts can be great idea for valentine gifts to attract men.Who does not like to get chocolates for a gift? Perhaps that’s why chocolates have been a favorite gift for a lot of occasions over the last two centuries. What better way to say, “I love you” to that particular someone than by giving chocolates. Valentine’s Day is an occasion when people all across the world express their love, not only with hugs, kisses and cards, but also with chocolates. You are able to give your special someone a whole variety of chocolate gifts on Valentine’s Day.

We see them on the Food Network every day.  Rachael, Paula, Emeril and others zip around their kitchens making quick work of fabulous recipes.  In no time, they’ve whipped up three or four dishes that look so appetizing you can almost smell them through the TV.  As thoughts like “I can do that” ramble around in your mind, you begin dreaming about the glory of becoming a professional chef.  Can you do it?  Are you professional chef material?

Like all great things, obtaining the title of chef takes time.  Both formal training and hands-on experience need time to cultivate in order to bring your skills to the level of a professional.  That means culinary school and an apprenticeship or externship may be necessary as part of your training.

<B>Characteristics of Great Chefs</B>

Some of the best chefs are found in Hollywood, California.  Culinary arts school instructors in this area of the country are quick to tell would-be chefs what characteristics play a vital role in their quests for professional status.  From personal observations of those in California who have attended a cooking school and reached the level of Executive Chef or Master Chef, the first two traits that stand out are hard work and creativity.

Becoming a chef will require dedication to the time and tasks of completing culinary school, working through an externship and gaining years of experience through frontline work in restaurants.  As you build your cooking and baking skills, you’ll incorporate the physical tasks of chopping, slicing, mixing and others into the creative tasks of developing recipes and plating your dishes with unique presentations.  The end result is a multisensory experience of sight, smell and taste that truly brings pleasure to those who eat what you’ve prepared.

What else is required?  The ability to work as part of a team.  Yes, even though Rachael and Emeril appear to be going it alone on their shows, they have an entire staff behind the scenes that assists them.  A professional chef must be able to delegate responsibilities, supervise the work of others, coordinate every step of the menu and culminate the efforts of everyone involved into wonderful dishes that are served hot, fresh and on time.

A love for food is also needed to be a great chef.  Do you wonder about how different seasonings and textures work together?  Are you always experimenting to find new combinations of spices, herbs and sauces that bring out the flavor of your dishes?  This curiosity and love of food will certainly work in your favor as you strive toward your goal.

Do you possess some or all of these characteristics?  Then who knows . . . with the proper training and experience you could one day own your own restaurant or be the next up-and-coming star!

Ingredients (serves
* Melted butter, to grease
* 145g (3/4 cup) raisins
* 1 1/2 tbs Cointreau
* 1 tsp fresh orange juice
* 1 x 520g sliced raisin loaf
* 40g butter
* 150g good-quality dark chocolate, coarsely chopped
* 5 eggs, lightly whisked
* 250ml (1 cup) cream
* 160ml (2/3 cup) milk
* 1 tsp vanilla essence
* 1 tsp finely grated orange rind
* Icing sugar mixture, to dust

Method

1. Preheat oven to 180°C. Brush a square 20cm (base measurement) cake pan with melted butter to lightly grease. Line the base and 2 opposite sides with non-stick baking paper. Combine raisins, Cointreau and orange juice in a bowl. Set aside for 10 minutes to develop the flavours.
2. Spread 1 side of each slice of bread with butter and cut in half crossways. Arrange one-third of the bread, buttered-side up, over base of prepared pan. Sprinkle with half the raisin mixture and half the chocolate. Top with half the remaining bread and sprinkle with remaining raisin mixture and chocolate. Top with the remaining bread.
3. Whisk together the egg, cream, milk, vanilla and orange rind in a jug. Pour the egg mixture over the bread and set aside for 10 minutes to soak.
4. Bake in preheated oven for 50-55 minutes (cover with foil if cake is browning too quickly) or until custard is set. Remove from oven. Set aside in the pan to cool. Dust with icing sugar and cut into squares to serve.

From: http://indiabite.wordpress.com/2008/10/15/orange-chocolate-bread-butter-cake/

Though the health benefits of whole grains are well known, plenty of people still can’t get over the taste.

Accustomed to the puffy softness of white breads, some people balk at the strong flavor and chewy texture that comes with whole grains, especially in whole-grain breads. There are easy ways around this.

First, try baking whole-grain bread at home, where you have more control over the consistency of the final product. Second, try a transitional recipe, one that blends whole-wheat and white flours.

Johnson & Wales University baking instructor Peter Reinhart has developed an innovative technique that makes it relatively simple to produce whole-grain breads with rich flavors and pleasant textures.

Reinhart uses a two-day method and creates two “pre-doughs” that separate the functions of flavor development and leavening. On the second day the two doughs are combined into a final dough, which then is formed into loaves and baked.

This technique gives you more flexibility. Traditional bread must rise several times, then be baked without delay. With Reinhart’s method, you can create the two pre-doughs, called the soaker and the starter, in little time, then hold them in the refrigerator for up to three days before combining them into a final dough for baking.

This recipe for Transitional Cinnamon Raisin Bread from Reinhart’s book, “Peter Reinhart’s Whole Grain Breads,” looks daunting but requires less than an hour of hands-on time.

The resulting bread is moist with a crisp crust and pleasant texture. Whole-grain skeptics and lovers will appreciate the comforting cinnamon flavor and the personal touch that goes into home baking.

Transitional Cinnamon

Raison Bread

For the soaker:

21/4 cups whole-wheat flour

5/8 teaspoon salt

3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons milk, buttermilk, yogurt, soy milk or rice milk

11/3 cups raisins (optional)

For the starter:

21/4 cups unbleached bread flour

1/4 teaspoon instant yeast

3/4 cup milk, buttermilk, yogurt, soy milk or rice milk, at room temperature

1 large egg, slightly beaten

For the final dough:

3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons whole-wheat flour

5/8 teaspoon salt

21/4 teaspoons instant yeast

1 tablespoon honey

1/4 cup melted butter

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1/4 cup cinnamon sugar (3 tablespoons sugar mixed with 2 teaspoons cinnamon)

To make the soaker:

In a large bowl, combine flour, salt and milk. Mix for 1 minute, or until all the flour is hydrated and the ingredients form a ball of dough. If using the raisins, knead them into the dough.

Cover bowl loosely with plastic wrap and leave at room temperature for 12 to 24 hours. If it will be more than 24 hours, refrigerate for up to 3 days. Remove it 2 hours before mixing.

To make the starter:

In a second large bowl, mix bread flour, yeast, milk and egg until they form a ball of dough. Knead the dough for 2 minutes in the bowl. The dough should feel very tacky.

Knead it for another minute. Cover bowl tightly with plastic wrap and refrigerate at least 8 hours and up to 3 days.

About 2 hours before mixing the final dough, remove the starter from the refrigerator.

To make the final dough:

On a lightly floured counter, use a metal pastry scraper to chop soaker and starter into 12 smaller pieces each. Sprinkle pieces with flour to keep them from sticking together.

In the mixer bowl of a stand mixer, combine the dough pieces with flour, salt, yeast, honey, butter and cinnamon. Mix with the paddle attachment (preferable) or dough hook on slow for 1 minute to bring the ingredients together into a ball. Switch to dough hook and mix on medium-low, occasionally scraping down the bowl, until everything is well-combined, 2 to 3 minutes. Add more flour or water as needed until the dough is soft and slightly sticky.

Dust a work surface with flour, then roll dough in the flour to coat. Knead by hand, incorporating only as much extra flour as needed, until the dough feels soft and tacky, but not sticky, 3 to 4 minutes. Form into a ball and let it rest on the work surface for 5 minutes while you prepare a clean, lightly oiled bowl.

Resume kneading dough to strengthen the gluten and make any final water or flour adjustments, about 1 minute. The dough should have strength, yet feel soft and supple, and very tacky. Form the dough into a ball. Place in prepared bowl, rolling to coat with oil. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and let dough rise at room temperature until it is about 11/2 times its original size, about 45 to 60 minutes.

When dough has risen, lightly coat 2 standard loaf pans with cooking spray.

Dust work surface with 1 tablespoon flour and gently transfer dough to work surface with a plastic bowl scraper (try not to rip or tear the dough).

Divide dough in half, then roll each piece into an 8-inch square about 1/2-inch thick. Sprinkle each square with some of the cinnamon sugar. Tightly roll up each square. Place loaves into pans.

Mist tops of loaves with cooking spray, then cover loosely with plastic wrap and let rise at room temperature until the loaves crest above the pans, about 1 hour.

Meanwhile, heat oven to 400 degrees. Place pans on middle rack of oven, lower temperature to 325 degrees, and bake for 20 minutes. Rotate pan 180 degrees and continue baking, until the loaves are a rich brown on all sides, sound hollow when thumped on the bottom, and register at least 195 degrees at the center, another 25 to 40 minutes.

Transfer loaves to a cooling rack and allow to cool for at least 1 hour before serving. Makes 2 loaves.

Source: http://www.courierpress.com/news/2008/sep/22/healthy-bread-combines-best-taste-and-texture/

Although, as it turns out, Marie Antoinette’s famous saying was actually a rumour perpetuated by the revolutionaries, these four words best epitomise the callous indifference of those in any position of wealth or power (the haves) towards those who cannot afford bread, let alone cake (the have nots).

And, when people ask me about my impressions of India after returning from the US after 12 years, although generally positive, time and again I am reminded of these four words. Presumably, being able to afford a nice apartment in a gated complex with a gym and a swimming pool, I’m a ‘have’ and a chill runs down my spine imagining if some day my head will roll off the sharp blade of a guillotine.

But India is prospering, they tell me. Double-digit growth. Low-cost tech capital of the world. Largest democracy. Superb banking and financial institutions. Special Economic Zones…The list is endless, they reassure me.

Recently, we bought a washing machine and refrigerator from a swanky store in a beautiful mall. When I had left India, I didn’t know what a mall was. Now, standing in the middle of an architectural marvel of glass and steel, I felt confident. India was on the rise. My wife and I were treated like royalty by a flock of smart men and women serving us tea and coffee and reassuring us that delivery would be free and within 48 hours. And lo and behold, within 48 hours there was a telephone call from the security gate to inform me that the men had come to deliver our washing machine and 260-litre refrigerator.

I opened the front door slightly and waited. And waited. Five minutes rolled into ten and then 20. I peeked outside a couple of times to ensure that the elevators were working. They were. When no one had showed up after 45 minutes, a vein of irritation began to throb in my head.

Then there was a light knock on the door and a man, younger and thinner than me, stood outside, panting, wondering if he had the right address. On that hot, humid afternoon, he stood sweating as if he had just stepped out of a shower. His perspiration made his clothes stick to his body as though they were painted on him. He asked if he could have a glass of water for himself and his friend, still struggling up the stairs, lugging the washing machine on his back.

I was shocked. Why hadn’t he used the elevator, I asked. The security guards downstairs wouldn’t allow it, he replied matter-of-factly, as if the error was in the unreasonable request not in the guard’s denial. I was flabbergasted. Using the elevator to ferry a couple of heavy objects up six floors was a privilege, not a right? What if we had lived on the thirteenth floor or bought a 300-litre refrigerator?

Anger welled up inside me and I felt tears of outrage sting my eyes. I marched down to the security office. The guard informed me that he had simply followed the estate manager’s rules. Rules? There was a rule saying that people couldn’t transport heavy appliances on elevators? Yes, the guard informed me with a serious face, there were rules. He justified his concern saying that appliances tend to have sharp edges that could scratch the paint or dent the elevator walls.

What if the man had twisted his ankle or what if the refrigerator had fallen on him and crushed him, I asked the big, burly estate manager who had shown up. The manager missed my point completely and informed me that the company would surely replace the damaged goods free of cost. This is the new India where customer is king. The delivery man, damn it! Don’t worry, he reassured me, the company would find ten more people like him to do the job.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

I argued, trying to educate him on the basics of humanity, humility and human rights. After a few moments of dodging my pointed questions he said that other tenants of this upscale complex might not want to share elevators with sweaty delivery boys and smelly milkmen. And that’s when visions of murderous crowds with hatchets and spears baying for bourgeois blood begin to fill my head.

Upstairs, my wife was feeling equally sorry for the delivery men. I found them sitting in a corner of our living room, muching on something. The men were hungry, my wife informed me, and, since we didn’t have any bread, she had given them some leftover cake.

Source: http://spoonfeedin.blogspot.com/2008/09/india-let-them-eat-cake.html

Have you ever wondered why some cakes or pastries that you buy from pastry shops have that “X-factor”, both in taste or texture, which can’t be reproduced at home no matter how hard you try? The reason is because professionals have access to an arsenal of specialized additives that enable them to push the envelope of taste and texture in their creations.

The subject of additives is a very technical one and covers a broad spectrum of products ranging from emulsifiers, gelling agents, sweeteners, cake and dough improvers, flavor enhancers, and others. I do not claim to be an expert in these areas nor is this blog posting intended to be an exhaustive discussion on all the additives used by professionals. My objective is, based on some of the additives that I have used in the past, to provide a brief insight into how pastry chefs achieve professioal results using some of these additives.

Pastry chefs use many types of additives to enhance flavor, extend shelf life, and improve texture. Some of the more commonly known additives that are easily obtainable in the retail market are items like flavoring oils, liquid glucose, sheet gelatin, bread softeners and dough improvers. Very common within professional pastry kitchens but very difficult to find in the retail market are items such as trimoline, ice cream and sorbet stabilizers, atomized glucose, and pectin NH. A more obscure additive that I have used in the past that is not a common sight even within professional kitchens is an emulsifier called Peco 50.

As you can imagine, different additives are used in different situations to obtain specific results. Additives are generally used to obtain results that will typically fall within these three categories:

- Extend product shelf life
- Improve product texture and volume
- Enhance taste

Trimoline is a very common and extremely versatile sweetening additive that is used in confectionary, cake, and ice cream making to add sweetness and to help retain moisture which, in turn, extends the shelf life of the product.

Products like cake improvers will help to retard moisture loss and increase the volume of sponge cake batters. Emulsifiers such as Peco 50 will help to reduce mixing times, retard moisture loss, extend shelf life and homogenize cake batters for better stability and tolerance.

Very high quality flavoring products like those from Sevarome can elevate the taste of the finished product and provide that “X-factor” that could otherwise not be achieved with more mediocre flavoring agents.

Unless you are operating a pastry business, you will not need many of these additives if you are baking at home and will be consuming your goods within a very short timeframe. Many of the additives are designed to be used in very high volume production environments where goods produced will eventually be stored for sale over an extended period of time. Also, restaurant pastry kitchens will use additives to produce certain effects for their plated creations that are typically not feasible or practical to be reproduced at home. Molecular gastronomy is one such practice that comes to mind.

When used properly, I do believe that pastry and baking additives are essential ingredients that can lift a product from mediocrity to excellence. Ultimately, the end result is to use the right balance of ingredients to produce goods that are highly palatable and visually appealing at the same time.

I’ve provided a list of a few vendors who supply additives to the professional market:

Danisco
Danisco A/S
Langebrogade 1
1001 Copenhagen
Denmark
Tel: +45 3266 2000
Email: info@danisco.com
Web: Danisco
Presence in more than 40 countries

Sevarome
Z.A La Guide 1 43200
Yssingeaux Z.I. La Guide
France
Tél : +33 4 71 59 04 78
Fax : +33 4 71 65 54 24
Email: info@sevarome.com
Web: Sevarome

Patisfrance
Parc d’affaires SILIC
46 Rue de Montlhery- BP 80179
F 94563 Rungis Cedex
France
Tel: +33 (0)1 45 60 83 95
Fax: +33 (0)1 45 60 41 44
Email: info-export@puratos.com
Web: Patisfrance

Aromatic
Bryggvägen 12-14
SE-117 68 Stockholm
Sweden
Tel: +46-8-681 56 00
Fax: +46-8-18 29 79
Email: info@aromatic.se
Web:Aromatic

Source: http://stickofachef.wordpress.com/2008/09/21/baking-and-pastry-additives-for-the-professional/

American pastry shops and other suppliers have discovered Chinese moon cakes as a new profit center. For other businesses, the pastries are great networking tools.

Special correspondent Joanne Yao, a freelance writer based in Beijing, reports on business developments in China and other parts of Asia.

Meet the moon cake: China’s version of the Christmas fruitcake–a dense, filled pastry that is sliced and served every year during the Mid-Autumn Festival, a Chinese holiday that honors longevity and family unity on the day the moon is brightest. Though some say moon cakes resemble chewy hockey pucks in shape, weight and flavor, the 700-year-old tradition of gifting and eating moon cakes has stayed firmly lodged in China’s cultural gullet because the unwieldy pastry was the tool of revolutionaries–according to an age-old anecdote.

In the late 1300s, following 97 years of Mongolian rule in Northern China (the Yuan Dynasty), Han Chinese rebels cooked up a last-ditch effort to drive out the invaders. During the Mid-Autumn Festival, the rebels distributed hundreds of moon cakes to local families under the pretense of celebrating the holiday and the longevity of Mongolian rule. The Mongolians didn’t eat moon cakes, so they didn’t get the memo hidden inside the gooey centers: Kill the Mongols on the 15th of the eighth lunar month. On the day of the Mid-Autumn Festival, thousands of villagers ate the evidence and rose up to chase the invaders out of China. The rebel leader, Zhu Yuan Zhang, became the first emperor of the Ming Dynasty.

Now in the weeks before and after Sept. 14, pastry shops, supermarkets and hotel restaurants in China, Singapore, Hong Kong, Vietnam and Japan are battling over consumer taste buds with different plans of attack: Some are baking classic Cantonese-style moon cakes, with a glazed, toasted exterior, and lotus paste and whole egg yolk interior, while others rely on quirky modern twists–using fillings of imported cheese and cherries, champagne custard or spicy beef while exchanging the pastry skins for shells of chocolate, jelly or rice cake.

Networking Tools

In 2006, 250,000 tons of moon cakes were sold in China, producing an estimated revenue of $1.42 billion for bakeries, hotels and manufacturers. In Beijing alone, moon cake sales in the three-month purchasing season from July to September generated $20 million in revenue.

It’s not because these cakes are irresistible (though Haagen Dazs does make an ice cream moon cake). Sending cakes with luxurious ingredients is a subtle way to curry favor. Chinese consumers don’t just buy a tin of moon cakes to share with the family. They send them to business partners, clients, bureaucrats and even their children’s school principals–whomever a networking boost would benefit, following an unspoken etiquette.

As the festival approaches, the reception areas of businesses become inundated with colorful packages of moon cakes. In fact, rejecting moon cakes is on par with walking into a Japanese household with muddy sneakers, as microchip maker Intel Corp. learned when it unwittingly offended the company’s Chinese suppliers by snubbing their moon cakes based on company policy toward gifts.

Moon Cakes Reloaded

For bakeries such as Beijing’s Wei Duo Mei, or “Beautiful Taste” bakery, moon cake season is the busiest and most profitable time of the year. In 2007, the bakery chain hired a French chef to re-imagine the ancient holiday food and then offered moon cakes filled with dried Japanese scallops and New Zealand cheese. It sold more than 60,000 moon cakes that season.

This year, Wei Duo Mei is selling out of its buttery, blueberry-filled French moon cakes. More than one-third of its cakes are nontraditional, and the gold and crimson sets sell for $15 to $40. Tai Pan Bread & Cakes, a bakery chain with 40 branches in Hong Kong, has enjoyed a loyal clientele since its opening in the 1980s in Hong Kong’s Kowloon Bay. It’s well-known as the first to create a moon cake made with a rice cake skin, in 1980. It still sells the popular Snowy Moon Cake, which won an award for most innovative marketing in 2002 in Hong Kong’s MEDIA magazine.

Moon cakes are not just business for bakeries–even China’s five-star hotels try to one-up each other to make the best-tasting and most innovative moon cakes of the season. Most Chinese business owners can tell you which hotels are best for moon cake, and more than a few even judge a hotel by its moon cakes. Singapore-based Raffles Hotel is famous for its snow skin (rice cake-covered) mini moon cakes with decadent champagne and white chocolate filling, and Shangri-la hotel is known for quality.

“Our moon cakes are not only a food promotion, but a way to show respect to Chinese culture,” says Judy Wang of Shangri-la hotels, a leading luxury hotel chain in Asia that has offered moon cakes since opening its first China-based location in 1984.

Wang believes that Shangri-la moon cakes are popular due to the prestige factor–because customers associate the Shangri-la brand name with luxury.

Shangri-la’s Beijing Kerry Centre Hotel offerings include the Benevolence collection, $20 for a set of four cakes filled with lotus paste and egg yolk. Its Inheritance collection, priced at $52 for nine cakes, includes a fusion of flavors–from green tea and date to pomelo and beans, sea moss, and rum and black currant.

American Companies Benefit

Although these tastes sound right out the Mad Hatter’s tea party, Yuki Lee, a marketing and communications manager at Raffles Hotel Beijing, explains that certain flavors are developed to fit market niches.

The Raffles collection offers a spicy beef moon cake that was specifically designed with Muslim Chinese in mind, while other flavors are low-fat or sugarless, in stark contrast to traditional moon cakes’ heavy use of sugar, oil or lard. Even Shangri-la’s eyebrow-raising pomelo and beans–filled moon cake was developed to attract increasingly health-minded consumers in China, where obesity is becoming a problem.

The tendency toward healthy moon cakes and unique fillings hasn’t just benefited the health conscious. In fact, a February 2008 report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture concluded that China’s moon cake market may offer “a golden opportunity” for U.S. ingredients. Where do you think those cheeses and cherries come from?

Imported ingredients are gaining favor as fillings for China’s booming moon cake industry. In fact, American companies such as Starbucks, Haagen Dazs and Ocean Spray have been manufacturing and selling moon cakes in China for a decade.

Whether you’re conducting business in China or exporting your products, China’s love of moon cake culture is sure to affect your operations even if the dubiously flavored moon cakes remain uneaten on your receptionist’s desk. The fierce evolution of moon cakes from holiday treat to networking tool holds sway over people and businesses during the autumn season.

Source: http://www.entrepreneur.com/startingabusiness/successstories/article197044.html

Makes a 900g (2 lb) loaf

Source: http://rosiebakesapeaceofcake.blogspot.com/2008/09/cornish-saffron-cake.html