In May,I had joined Fondant and Gum Paste class. I didn’t know what a gum paste or fondant is before joining this course. After I finished my course-1 and course-2, I directly joined this course and skipped course-3. This course turned out to be a bit disappointing for me initially because I always love to do things from scratch and this course does not teach how to make these two kind of icings at home. My main concern was how to make these when I return to India in future. I think these ready made stuff might not be available there. But since I wanted to do all courses, I joined anyway.
This is more expensive than other classes. I forgot to take a cake for class-1. Then in class-2, I had hard time rolling fondant because it gets too hard very soon. I missed class-3 because I had to plan for our long weekend trip. When it was time for class-4, I thought I had lost this whole course. I was very busy that day and I thought of missing it again. But last moment, I decided I had to go for this class.
This class was amazing. The final cake turned out to be very good. To start with, Barbara was very happy that I returned to the class. I absolutely love this lady, so I was happy when she showed happiness for seeing me. She said I can attend class-3 with the next group of students. The fondant was in perfect shape this time, since I had all the things like shortening etc to keep it from drying. I had missed the fondant coating on the base because of less time, but I did all other decorations.
I added some extra violet flowers on it and Barbara said those flowers looked very good on it.
Other pleasant surprise was, Barbara gifted me a book ‘Cupcake fun’. It has some amazing pictures and ideas for cupcake decorating. Barbara said it is for being “such a good student”. That made my day :).
When I reached home and showed it to my husband, he simply loved it. He even wanted to take a video of it. He spent a lot of time to make a video of it. I will upload it soon.
Updated: Here is the video my husband created. When he saw the cake, he was all excited and wanted to take a helicopter view of the cake :). We don’t have a camcorder, so he took this from our old digital camera. His excitement gives me a lot of encouragement to continue on my hobbies. This video is nothing special, but it shows his excitement. So I thought of posting it here.
Many of you who eat eggs might think I have gone crazy to write this post. But when we take a moment and go back to those initial days of our cooking with an unknown ingredient, we will know how difficult it is for anyone to try a new ingredient. When 4-5 of my friends asked me the same question, I thought of posting this. I have been eating boiled eggs from my childhood. But when someone asked me how to boil eggs, I hesitated to answer. Well, I know how to do it and there were no failures so far, but I am not sure if what I always do is right method or wrong. So I spent some time to Google the correct answer. I learnt many different things which I didn’t know about boiling eggs. I would boil them forever without watching the time and switch off after some arbitrary time. I have seen one of my friend boiling eggs for a lot more time.
When I googled, I read somewhere that, the eggs should be boiled till the water comes to a rapid boil and then switch off the heat and close the lid. Leave the eggs like that for some duration of time and then pour ice on it. I tried it and it didn’t work out. May be the time they specified was wrong or I did something wrong, the eggs didn’t get hard in the center and since we both don’t like uncooked egg, we had to throw them all. So the safe bet would be the following method which has never failed.
Steps to boil eggs 1) Take water in a pan and slide the eggs in it carefully. Do not stack them one over the other. The water level should be 1-2″ above eggs. 2) Cook for about 15mins on medium high. 3) Discard the hot water immediately and pour ice over it. (I didn’t know this step. According to many different sites, ice helps easy peeling of eggs). 4) When the eggs are completely cooled (after about 5-6mins in ice), take them out and peel them.
I have seen some people getting really tensed while handling eggs. For ex, they take forever to peel them or even while making omelets, they think for 10mins before breaking them. With boiled eggs, do not think so much, they are not going to make a mess :).
Few things to remember: – When you keep the eggs in a bowl of water and if the egg floats on it, that means the eggs have gone bad and have to be discarded. (To verify this I googled and found a detailed article about this ). – Fresh eggs are always hard to peel. People who don’t know about this, usually feel eggs are spoiled if the skin does not come out easily. So do not worry if they are hard to peel after cooling.
Here are few very good articles related to eggs – How to hard cook an egg – Nutritional values of egg – Eggs are back! – How to boil eggs
