We made this small, 9″ chocolate cake for a friend last night and decided to leave most of the surface undecorated except for a shell border at the base. We really liked how smooth the cake looked. This morning I snipped a few purple johnny jump-ups (which are edible by the way) from our balcony for simple adornment. Mark’s been telling me that I’ve been eating a lot of buttercream lately. Um, thanks, Captain Obvious, but what else are we going to do with leftover buttercream?

Thanks for all your comments to the last post. I feel better today (actually, I don’t really feel like such a great mom today, but that’s a whole ‘nother long post). I think part of my problem, and one that I’ve always struggled with, is that I’m super goal oriented and I’m a bit scattered in my interests. For some reason I have a strong need to do everything, and so I don’t ever focus on just one thing, and what often ends up happening is that I don’t get anything done. Mark’s the opposite of me. He can be quite content with the situation on hand, whereas I start pacing around looking for the next challenge. I suppose that’s why it works for the most part. I would probably KILL another me!

I spent the day at the Central Park Boathouse yesterday, my former workplace for those who don’t know. Hard to believe it has been over six months since I last set foot in the kitchen there. Their search for a new Pastry Chef has proven a bit harder than anticipated, so they called me in to do a bit of consulting on a new menu. Most of the items on the current menu have been there since I left last November, and over time they seem to have evolved into desserts that I no longer recognize as my own. Garnishes have been eliminated, recipes have been changed to make production easier, and so on. I know the job better than anyone else, so I was happy to help them out for one or two days a week.

My first task is to redesign the entire dessert menu. I actually managed to put together four new desserts yesterday - it’s amazing how much you can get done when you’re not worried about the day to day operations of the restaurant and can just focus on creating. I made a raspberry-almond tart, a ricotta cheesecake with tarragon roasted peaches, some roasted pineapple with lychee gelée and coconut foam, and a chocolate almond torte with dulce de leche and spicy peanuts. They all need some minor adjustments, but in general were very well received by all who tried them. Alas, the owner is on vacation, so the final and most important judgment will have to wait until then. I’m just happy that I can still find my way around a restaurant kitchen after being out so long!

One more thing has changed at the Boathouse since I left. They have started a recycling AND a composting program, which is very admirable, especially for a restaurant of that size. I have long felt that restaurants are one of the most wasteful industries, but if the Boathouse (which is not really known for being well-organized) can keep it up, they will certainly set a good example for others. Apparently most of the Boathouse’s trash was either compostable or recyclable, so now their current garbage output is a mere fraction of what is was before. Kudos!

I could eat these ice-cream filled mochi bites all day. The kids love them too. My favorite is green tea, but too bad they are kinda pricey and precious because I can eat 2 boxes of a dozen each all by myself. All in one sitting (sorry, mom, for eating all your daifuku!).

We had a pretty restful weekend without cookies, but came home one day early on Sunday because my mom’s internet was down (yeah, those first few hours without connection was filled with mild panic, I have to admit, and we ran to the nearest Starbuck’s for WiFi first thing in the morning like geeks). But you know what? I actually got a lot of client design work done for a Monday deadline, and we even got our first full 8 hours of sleep in months. Strangely enough, however, we woke up this morning more tired than when we get 6-7 hours of sleep, so that made we weirdly relieved that perhaps I’m not missing anything by sleeping less (stupid logic, right?). So it just goes to prove how much time I waste and how grossly distracted I am when I’m working with my email and browser open. I can be so much more efficient and sleep an extra hour or 2 each night if I didn’t bounce around online. Oh well…

Even though Mark makes a seriously delicious cake, we aren’t expert cake decorators by any means (though I will try and work on that), but we made this cake for our friend Unha’s daughter’s 100 day birthday. Koreans still celebrate the passing mark of the first 100 days of a baby’s life because it used to be a benchmark in a time when the infant mortality rate was high that a baby’s survival was good. Of course in true fashion as the 2nd child, Mia’s first 100 days was celebrated with much fanfare, but Claudine’s just passed (sorry baby!!).

I have been waiting for rhubarb for a long time. For whatever reason the season seems to have started much later than usual this year and I did see a sign for rhubarb at the Union Square Greenmarket a few weeks ago, but I was told that they had sold out. My apologies were offered to Mia, who seems to like rhubarb just as much as I do and I promised her a pie as soon as I could find some. I finally did track down rhubarb at Provisions, a market in Fort Greene, and with Mia’s help, (she had her own setup with a toy rolling pin and some dough scraps), assembled the pie for a dinner at a friend’s house over the weekend. Rhubarb is one of my all-time favorite foods, going all the way back to my childhood when I would actually eat it raw from my grandmother’s garden. When I use it I never combine it with anything else - to me that just dilutes the flavor. I’m very happy that Mia likes it too. Claudine, however, true to form, rejected her first taste of rhubarb and only wanted the ice cream. I really hope that her pickiness lessens as she gets older as I just can’t imagine anyone growing up without rhubarb.

Rhubarb Pie (makes 1 10-inch pie)

Pie dough for a 10-inch two crust pie
6 cups rhubarb, washed and cut into 1/2-inch pieces
3/4 cup sugar
4 teaspoons cornstarch

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees. Roll half of the pie dough to 1/8-inch thickness. Press into the bottom of the pie pan. Mix together the remaining ingredients and pour into the pie. Roll the remaining dough and lay on top. Crimp the edges to seal, and make five small cuts in the top with a small knife. Bake for 1 hour, until the crust is golden. Cool completely before slicing.

Pastry chefs always seem to get stuck with more extra work than others in a typical restaurant kitchen. Someone in the dining room was served the wrong entree? Give them free desserts. Need something extra for a VIP banquet for 300 people tonight? Have the pastry department whip up several hundred petit fours. It takes superb organizational skills and excellent improvisational skills to be a pastry chef which is probably the main reason they are able to handle such things. Here is maybe the most common example: the chef approaches the pastry chef and says, “I have 3 cases of something that’s going bad - use them up.” That’s an easy one, just make some ice cream.

I always like to think that anything can be made into an ice cream, so whatever extra ingredients you have on hand can be used to whip something up. Since I’ve been making many marshmallows lately, especially for the FiFis last Tuesday, I’ve had lots of extra egg yolks lying around, plus some lemongrass, heavy cream, and even some toasted coconut from something I can’t remember. That sounded like a winning combination, one that I may have even tried before, so I made it using my basic recipe. It had a very smooth, warm tropical flavor and the lemongrass gives it that extra something that you can’t quite put your finger on. If you have an ice cream maker and want to try it, just use your favorite vanilla recipe and substitute plenty of fresh lemongrass and toasted unsweetened coconut for the vanilla. Strain it out and proceed as usual. I have a feeling I’ll be making lots of ice cream this summer.

We braved the heavy rains and buses with the girls today to make a trip to One Girl Cookies over on Dean Street. It’s a charming, inviting storefront and Dawn and Dave, the owners, were kind enough to email us and invite us over for a chat. Not a bad way to spend a rainy afternoon. With a tour of the kitchen, some treats from their wonderful line of 2-bite cookies, and plenty of advice and encouragement, we left their cozy shop dreaming of the possibility of owning our own space one day. Although I am sure it complicates business operations (mainly costs and overhead), all we could see was how easier life would be if we had access to a kitchen whenever we needed to bake without having to watch the clock and haul supplies and food back and forth to our hourly rented commercial kitchen. But one step at a time…and we’ll have to pay our dues. They gently warned what I’ve been thinking a lot about these days: sustaining this momentum that we seem to be riding on recently. While there have been a flurry of activity lately, the challenge is to keep it going long term.

Lots to chew on, but one of the nicest things to have come out of starting this business is the myriad of people we have met. We used to go out a lot before we had kids and socialized with other foodies in the restaurant biz, getting comped meals at 3 star restaurants and the like, but when Mark started working days, that sort of thing stopped since chefs tend to socialize late at night after the restaurants close down. We haven’t felt a part of the food scene in a long time so it’s been really nice to get re-acquainted, but from a totally different perspective and even on a more local, Brooklyn level - lots of small artisan bakers, chocolatiers, and specialty food producers. Everyone has their own story and path to how they got there, and everyone has been so supportive of each other. Makes you want to keep on going.

You would have never guessed from Sunday or today’s weather that sandwiched in between those 2 days was a cold, bitter and rainy oddball of a day. Despite the bad weather, Mia was a trooper and trudged her way up the hill to school and back, a rather longish walk if you’re walking with a 4 year old. The sun, however, is back, dazzling and bright and it’s supposed to creep back up 20 degrees warmer than the previous day.

Things have calmed down a little bit this week, which is a nice relief, though there was still a flurry of packing and trips to the post office yesterday. I need to turn my focus back on work and I admit feeling a moment of panic yesterday when projects and orders seemed to pile up, but today I feel calmer (for no reason, really. Nothing has changed). There have been many moments lately when Mark and I have looked at each other and said “this is crazy!” and “what are we doing?”, but we need to take in the calmer moments as they come, despite how short they may last. Mark’s back in the kitchen today filling some special orders. I’m going to do some work and then take a walk in the afternoon. There’s supposedly a new second hand clothing shop in the neighborhood where a kid’s clothing store used to be. Maybe I’ll check it out.