Holiday Cookie Tips

If you were in my holiday cookies class at Sur La Table, you heard me say "Vodka!"

Let me explain. We were flourishing the royal icing onto gingerbread, and I was giving caution that these white icing surfaces need time to dry before painting designs on top. If you missed how alcohol entered the conversation, here it is:

To paint any design on the royal icing of your cookie, first let it dry completely. To apply the paint, mix a little gel food coloring with a splash of vodka. You can stir it up with a toothpick until you get the color you want. The vodka helps hold the gel paste in suspension for brushing.

Simply mix - I use an old muffin tin and mix in the different muffin holes - then apply with a brush. If you want to check your color before committing yourself on the cookie, use a broken cookie or one you don't like and make it your test version. Practice on that.

Friends, it can be hard to get everything said in a 2-hour class, so let me offer a pledge that if clarification is needed, I'll use this space to add background. Helping you get a handle on breads, French pastry, macarons, cupcakes, chocolate, all things involving butter, sugar, flour and eggs is a pleasure and a joy.

Please let me know what I forgot to blurt in class, and let's get it solved.

Head to your rolling pins and take off!

(Photo: Hand-painted Highland Park Scots and tuile-batter peppermint sticks)

The Breads of France

My head is reeling with thoughts of the Coupe du Monde de la Boulangerie in early March. Have decided to wear a copy of  "The Breads of France" by the late Bernard Clayton Jr. With that under my arm, I can't help but start a conversation with people I don't know. They'll see it and want to know where I got it since the paperback is hard to find and truth be told, I won mine for helping a chef at Le Cordon Bleu. She has great taste in books.

The big awkward about going all the way to Paris for a bread competition is this: I don't know a soul. Most of the world's best bakers have thrown flour together for years. I picture them glad-handing, back-slapping and standing each other to a glass of bubbles as they call out "Tchin-tchin!" in perfect French.

There I'll be, wearing a book, standing apart and looking pasty. I am prepared to discuss, if asked, my favorite recipes in the book. See those little twists above? They are Gateaux au Poivre - pepper cakes. Clayton called them tiny twisted golden wreaths of yeast-raised dough, speckled with pepper and formed around your index finger. They have the 3 attributes that are good to have in bread: great taste, quick turn and ease of execution.

These cakes can translate into an appetizer (I imagine weaving in strips of proscuitto), and they freeze well, too. I battered them with Grains of Paradise, a spice my Denver sister introduced at Thanksgiving. She claims Alton Brown uses it in his apple pie as his secret ingredient. Some day I'll tell you about Karen Berner's "Real Deal" apple pie and why I think it stands above all others. Karen is Food Editor at Taste of Home magazine, but don't let me digress on how good the Real Deal really is.

Shoving thoughts back to Grains of Paradise, it's also known as alligator pepper, atar, baking pepper, Guinea pepper, melegueta pepper and Roman pepper and is native to the coast of West Africa, according to its label. Find it at savoryspiceshop.com. And since I'm giving out pointers, dash over to Crate and Barrel for their mini pepper grinder, to fill with the Grains of Paradise. Perfect size, perfect price ($5.95) and good at reducing paradise to manageable heaven.

Racing onward toward more thoughts of flavor, consider the Pain d'Epice from Clayton's book, with similar attributes and made fragrant by the use of anise seed. Learn more about anise in the December issue of Taste of Home magazine. I wrote the headline, "Almighty Anise," while I was externing there and so if anybody asks about anise, I'm prepared to remark on how the Romans broke anise cakes over the heads of their brides for good luck. The result of this aromatic bread infused with anise, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, rum and orange rind  reminds me of Swedish Limpa Bread.

One last tout to a jaunty bread that's ready the same day and easy to make. Judith Jones in "The Book of Bread" describes Earl Grey Tea Rolls. The use of tea and lime zest will surprise you; I prefer the smokier Lapsang Souchong tea and an extra squeeze of lime juice along with the zest, but taste as you go and see what you think.

Bread flavored with pepper, anise and tea are good ideas on how to increase flavor without proofing and retarding dough for days and hours on end to fully develop the essence locked inside the various flours you use. Only think of what the Coupe bakers will know, if I can just get them to open their bouche.

Bread Stenciling: Do That Not This

Did you ever think you could do something and tried it, looked at it and thought "what was I thinking?" That's how it is with stenciling bread. I thought if I took a template from a Hawaiian quilt pattern, cut it out and laid it over the bread, I would have a marvelous design the world would embrace as pure genius. (I still believe in the concept.)

Lucky for you I made all the mistakes up front with my ukulele pattern, so you don't have to.

Here's how I will scale the pinnacle of success next time:

1. Cover the proofing basket with cloth to diminish effect of flour rings. Rings just distract from the template design.
2. Learn from YouTube video on how to stencil bread. You don't add water, butter or egg wash to the bread surface, apparently, to make the flour stick. For the reverse view on this, shift over to The Fresh Loaf for a discussion on why some people do mist the bread.
3. Don't use your hands to glom the flour over the stencil, creating rustic volcanic fissures. Use a small sieve and gently tap the flour onto the stencil.
4. Score the bread. At least that way you control the splits in the crust.

Or how about this: Rise up and go watch the artisan masters and learn from the best in the world. That's my next scheme. I'm jumping across the pond to the Coupe du Monde de la Boulangerie March 3-7 in Paris. This is the Olympics of bread, and you can follow Team USA: Harry Peemoeller on artistic design (keeping my eyes on his hands r.e. stenciling), Mike Zakowski for baguette and specialty breads and Jeremy Gadouas for viennoiserie. Shout out to the Bread Bakers Guild of America for telling me all about it. Read more about the Europain trade show going on during the Coupe for a look at how Europe rolls. My plan is to attend said Coupe and Europain, tour bakeries and make the devoted pilgrimage to the palace of wisdom, Poilane Bakery, in five days.

All right oui, so Paris is a long way to go to embrace a loaf of bread when we have Empire Baking in Dallas, Central Market, Whole Foods and Eatzi's, to name a few fine loafers, but where will I find the best breadmakers from the USA gathered in one spot in a fabulous location? This is a "gotta go," dump everything else from the bucket list and get thee to hallowed ground strategic planning. They'll talk to me, won't they?

Why not? I'm an amateur with a heart full of flour.

Sugar Works

Please don't eat the sugar. The idea is to play with it.

In the photo are four examples of sugar that's been pulled, piped, poured or made into a sugar paste known as pastillage.

If you've never heard of pastillage, think of it as a happy medium like working with Play-Doh. You've seen pastillage if you've ever popped an Altoid mint. Though it starts out in paste form that can be molded in many ways, pastillage dries to a hard result, which makes it a swell choice for display pieces.

The great Careme championed pastillage because he figured out that this original form of flavored candy could be used (if glued together) to make architectural showpieces known as pieces montees, some of which ended up on Napoleon’s table. Today pastillage is mostly made of powdered sugar and can include gelatin, an acid such as vinegar, water and cornstarch.

Make a batch, keeping it covered as you work so it doesn't dry out, and try your hand at flowers, 3D pieces, anything you like. For glue, whip up some royal icing (also keeping it covered so it doesn't dry up). 

Pastillage looks grand in its pristine white form, but you can paint it or airbrush it after the pieces have fully dried.

You'll find countless recipes online for how to make pastillage. For best results, make the pastillage at least a day before you plan to use it. After you've formed it into a big ball of paste, coat it with a little shortening, wrap it in plastic wrap, then a piece of wet paper towel, then more plastic wrap. Keep it stored in the fridge. When ready to use, knead it a bit to soften it up, then lightly dust your work surface with cornstarch (flour is too drying) for rolling it out. 

What can you do with pastillage? How about a peacock and an antique hair comb for an Art Deco feel on a cake? Go ahead, play around.

Good Gravy, Not This

It's a long way from sculpting a cake into a Chanel purse, as we saw in the last post, to finding this plate of shocking proportions. Let's not get into how I went from the classroom at Le Cordon Bleu to a small town up north near the Del Monte processing plant. We'll hash that in another post. For now, I am mystified how any roadside attraction could call this dish breakfast, much less an order of biscuits and gravy. What you see is what it is.

Let's assess blame. Should I have said I wanted gravy on the side, that it was important to me to see the biscuits? This unfathomable plating suggests that the biscuits are so bad, they cannot be shown. Is this a cultural thing, the literal translation of mopping up? Or is this how they like things in Illinois?

I'm having trouble putting into words what is so upsetting about this food. I had trouble putting it in my mouth. It's bad in every category worth scoring, according to me, the one who sent the Bloody Mary back at an airport bar because the celery fainted.

Good or bad, gravy should never cover an entire plate, nor should it resemble mashed potatoes. A good gravy stands on its own, never swims or worse, crawls.

Grady Spears has a terrific cracked-pepper gravy from A Cowboy in the Kitchen, using 5 tablespoons of flour to 1/4 cup unsalted butter and enough milk, salt and pepper to achieve creamy, hearty results.

But I digress, since my subject is the plate of breakfast from hell's kitchen. Let's hurl invective at the gravy.

Pan gravy is a sauce made with drippings of the meat or poultry with which it's being served. Similar to brown sauce, it's usually made from pan drippings and roux, plus stock, water or even milk or cream. Can you have a gravy without the drippings? Of course, as seen in the example above, where the cook threw in sausage.

The idea is to get a good balance between fat and flour, so that they thicken beautifully whatever liquid you use. A classic roux for thickening is a mixture of equal parts by weight of fat and flour, which is then cooked slightly as part of the gravy-making process. Notice I didn't say the fat and flour are the same amounts. There must be enough fat to coat all the starch granules, but not too much fat or it floats to the top and looks greasy.

As to the biscuits, please don't present them like the contents of a cat box. If you have to cover them up, you're making them wrong. If that's the way your momma did it, momma was wrong.

Use any reference you like, starting with cookbooks and online resources, but use something other than what you're using now.

And if you're the diner visiting roadside attractions, learn from your mistakes and ask good questions or, if the waitstaff looks harassed beyond belief, then see what they can do with waffles.

Note to Self: Stop ordering biscuits and gravy out of town.

In search of Chanel and the creative spirit

Have you waded into the book "Inspiration Sandwich" by Sark? Find it.

The best boss I ever had, whose secret name is Princess Papuli, sent it to me in the mail, along with a card and a warm scarf. She is wise beyond her years; she reads the wind and knows when a gal needs a wink and a smile, or a morning of hats and gloves, tea and two lumps of sugar. After reading just a few pages of this inspiring work, I jumped from the bed, threw on the Pop-Eye apron that says "I yam what I yam" and fried a batch of leeks, as outlined in Alton Brown's "Good Eats, The Middle Years." Then I felt better.

There's something gentle and engaging in this book, stuffed with reminders of how to find great pleasure in simple joys. No typed words, either, it's all spelled out in handwriting. If you haven't visited some of your early memories as a child, pack a sandwich, make a tent over a few chairs and get under it with this book.

The trouble with culinary school, as I have experienced it, is that you go into it with this eager, enormous hope that it will be a journey of sensations and discovery. You're living the passion! You'll shout "voila" and mean it. You'll discover the inner you, who has real talent, and you'll amaze even yourself.

Good reader, that's not how it goes. Even the sculpted cake pictured above in the style of a Chanel purse, from the cakes class, should have been a crowning moment of personal magic - something I made with my hands and then admired. And then came the chef's opinion of its worth, dashing the creative spirit like the snap of fingers. I lived the entire cakes class in fear of the critical reply - and that's what I got. If this is living the passion, I'm the creator of Ratatouille. Does that mean I should give up on passion? Hell to the no, as classmates say.

I need books like "Inspiration Sandwich" to remind me how to rekindle happy thoughts and moments. I need Princess Papuli and her legion of resources to point me in the right directions.

My favorite passage in the book so far is this:

"I like to think of my fears being driven away in a Rolls Royce (for it's true that once you face a fear, it loses all of its stuffing, and will sit quietly in the back seat and do as it's told.")

What color is your Rolls? Mine is white and black, ever so Chanel.

Circle of Croquembouche

This life we're in. Is it delicious or bitter? Sour or savory? Are we tasting the fruits of our labors or grubbing for leftovers? Are we building anew in daring ways, like this cream puff croquembouche you see here, or are we melting down like wet spun sugar?

Reason I ask is, my life has gone circular on me. Before Dueling Margaritas was conceived in the sweet lil town of Dubois, Wyoming, as a partnership with a fabulous editor from a major magazine, I was a cubicle-dwelling, fully employed person of a company con health insurance. I worked on big accounts and was a bit smug about it. Perhaps you've heard of Coca-Cola. Pizza Hut. Samsung. Boy, does my resume look rich.

Then came the gelatinization of the economy. Let's not dwell there. It's enough to say I'm one of those Americans you've heard about and crossed yourself that you didn't lose your job in mid-life, with two kids in college.

When I tanked, similar to the narrative in "Then We Came to the End," I had nowhere to turn, so I entered culinary school. (I've often said it's the adult's version of running away to join the circus).

On the side, I now work for a gourmet-to-go market and bakery. It has given me new perspective on the work that people do to pay their bills. In food service, the hours are long, the pay is low and the pains are unceasing. If you're not burning yourself, you're banging your elbows. At the end of a shift, you hurt all over - in your hair, in your eyebrows, in the fingernails.

I haven't written a word about working for this new company, because I never want to say anything that could reflect a point of view that is not consistent with its brand position. See how working in advertising pays off? It's enough to say the food is fresh, fast, and I know how it's prepared, so it's safe. I have a high regard for their artisan breads, and the "chocolate oblivion" flourless cake with mousse, caramel and Heath chips is a chocoholic's delight. With the company's help, I've managed to work an early shift, then go to school. It's not a life sentence, right?

Here's the circular part. Not one but two companies who previously freed themselves of my expertise have reached out to hire me on a contract basis. It gives me great pleasure to help one of them (after all, I can't take on three jobs can I?) By contractual signature I cannot say who or what I'm doing, but it is sweet as cherry pie to be needed again.

Maybe that's what I'm getting at here: Losing one's career is a bitter bag of brussels sprouts. Moving forward when you don't know where you're going is a tall glass of vinegar with sprigs of Swiss chard.

Paula Deen told me the harder you work, the luckier you'll get. And with luck, maybe your life can take a turn and maybe it's circular. Maybe what you lose along the way can come back to you.

And maybe, just maybe, there will be cream puffs in this, with a marzipan rose or two.