Sure Fabergé eggs are beautiful, bejewelled and intricate as all hell, but you when you bite into them they really hurt your teeth. Perhaps the surreal sculpted cakes from Zhanna, a St. Petersburg baker are informed by the same passion that fueled the eggmaker to the Tsars.

Lord knows they're certainly detailed enough. Among the 50-plus intricate cakes pictured on English Russia are numerous structures, including bridges, cottages, a kitchen, a Pizza Hut and the Eiffel Tower. I'm not quite sure who Zhanna's clientele is but, based on the eye chart and mouth cakes, I'm guessing it includes eye doctors and dentists.

Many of the cakes sport distinctly American imagery including a blue Reebok sneaker, a Big Mac and numerous depictions of stacks of $100 bills. [via Boing Boing]
See the jump for a few more of these insanely creative cakes.

Admit it. At some point in your foodish life, even if for a fleeting moment, you dreamt of opening a restaurant. Or perhaps a cute little cafe. Maybe it was to become a star chef. For us, Slashfoodies, a dream job is in food, right?

Snap out of it. You have bills to pay, screaming kids demanding your attention, and you still have eleven things on your to-do list that you were supposed to do yesterday.

And work in a job as a chef? Please. What you really need is a vacation.

Well, now you can do both. Vocation Vacations is a combination of a dream vacation with your dream job. They've put together lists of "vacations" all over the world that incorporate a few days of "work" in a dream job, and have a whole slew of food-related dream vocation vacations: brew master, baker, star chef. Personally, I'd love to be "restaurant critic" and fly all over the globe, eating in a different delicious restaurant every night.

But that one's not available.

Personally, I don't mind having a lot of cookbooks around, but even I have to admit that it can be easier to find exactly what you're looking for when things are a little more compressed. The Baker's Dozen Cookbook: Become a Better Baker with 135 Foolproof Recipes and Tried-and-True Techniques gives you that convenient compression by providing recipes from 13 different, outstanding bakers all in one volume.

The concept arose when a group of accomplished cooks - including Flo Baker, Marion Cunningham and Alice Medrich - got together to share recipes and techniques for baking. Today, that group has grown to over 400 members, including the authors listed in the book, still sharing their knowledge of and love for baking. In the spirit of sharing, the book is well-laid out and easy to understand. There are some pictures of finished products, as well as many illustrations that explain some of the more difficult concepts (like beating egg whites, for example). Both types of visuals will guide a reader through the baking process, but it is the prose and instructions from the actual recipes that really get the job done here. Recipes include Butter Cake with Creamy Chocolate Frosting, Blood Orange Chiffon Pie, Fran Gage's Spicy Cornmeal Crackers, Cinnamon Sugar Donuts, Apple Brown Betty and Raspberry-Lemon Tart.

If you know how to bake really good chocolate chip cookies or everyone loves your lemon bundt cake when you bring it to parties, odds are that you've had at least one or two people tell you that you should go into the business of baking and open a bakery. Perhaps you've even thought about it on your own a few times. It'll be easy, right?

"Easy" is subjective, so you can judge for yourself. Egullet has two threads that chronicle members starting their own bakeries. One of the threads followed every detail that went into building (physically) a Portland bakery, attracting a clientele and working through the first year of he business. Unfortunately, Criollo Bakery has now closed, but the level of detail and dedication that went into it was phenomenal and truly awe-inspiring for a would-be baker.

The second thread, a newer thread, follows a couple that moved from San Francisco to New Jersey with dreams of opening their own bakery. With pastry backgrounds, a generous relative who is happy to help them with accommodation, and a lot of hard work, they are just starting out on their journey to open The Sweet Life Bakery. So far, after only a couple of months, it sounds like they are really building up momentum. It's another interesting read, especially since it will be on-going as their journey progresses.

[via browniepoints]

Ed Atwell, an experienced baker and donut maker, has just patented the first donut in Canada. Now, it's not the recipe that is patented, but the technique used to make the two-tone pastry. The donut is exactly half chocolate and half vanilla, with the two batters touching but not blending together. When he baked up the prototype batches, Atwell remarked that "they were the most beautiful doughnuts [he]'d ever seen."

The donuts are sold under the name "Sunnymoon" and are unmistakably distinctive in their appearance. The inventor remains optimistic about sales because Canada is the most competitive donut market in the world, with the number one rate per capita of donut consumption. From all appearances, however, the Sunnymoons are off to a good start in terms of sales and, if they become family favorites, Atwell can be sure that his "beautiful doughnuts" will not be forgotten.

A Suffolk town refused to give permission to build a Tesco superstore in their neighborhood in 1997 and, since that time, local businesses and agriculture have flourished. Despite an overall decrease in the number of smaller, independent stores throughout Britain, the number of businesses in town has remained the same and the number of local/regional food suppliers increased from 300 to 370, meeting the demand from local butchers, bakers and greengrocers. The local shops primarily source from local sources, and have not found themselves to be limited in what they can offer their customers. In fact, they have slowly been expanding into more diverse foods and vegetables as suppliers find people to grow them.

Over the past decade, many other store proposals from developers have been turned down and the locals' position gets stronger after each refusal. The hardest part is shaking the mindset that values convenience and sometimes price, over quality and belief. The locals would rather know where their food is coming from, who is selling it to them and that they are supporting quality food in their community, than save a few pennies on carrots from elsewhere in the world at Tesco.

Stores like Waitrose and Marks & Spencer have already put effort into sourcing more local ingredients, which has made customers and local business people alike very happy as well as demonstrating that local foods can be utilized on a larger scale. This is useful to note because it is not possible for the Suffolk strategy to work everywhere; some areas are simply not suited to agricultural purposes. What the Suffolk example does show is that the local food movement can still thrive in a modern environment as long as people are committed to it.

 

Sara Lee has just released a new line of hot dog and hamburger buns in time for the summer grilling season. The buns are made along similar lines as their best-selling Soft & Smooth bread, which contains whole grains but has the same texture and flavor as white bread. The names of the buns are a mouthful -  Sara Lee Made With Whole Grain White Hot Dog and White Hamburger Buns - but if the success of their Soft & Smooth bread is anything to go on, it is a mouthful that consumers are eager to take.

How do they make these breads? Spencer Wise is a food scientist for Sara Lee who is credited with the creation of these breads and buns. They are about 24% whole grain, made using a "white whole wheat" flour developed by ConAgra to feel softer and look similar to white flour, and contain 6 grams of whole grains per bun. Wise says that while the basics like flour, oil and yeast are important, any baker could work them out, so "the real secret recipe lies in the amount of monoglycerides, enzymes and other additives, " the combination of which allows the bread to be made successfully on an industrial scale.

Adding potato to bread doughs gives them a moist, but very light texture. Potatoes are on the bland side, though, so Gemma, the Part Time Pro-Bono Baker decided to add a little more flavor to her potato biscuits by adding cheddar cheese and topping them with poppy seeds for a bit of crunch. They take mere minutes to put together, and even though the potato needs to be cooked in advance, boiling one potato doesn't take much time. When I bake things that call for adding potato to the dough, I will often just use reconstituted potato flakes, which you can buy at the store. They turn out the same consistency in the finished product - and these biscuits are a finished product I wouldn't mind seeing on my table.

Has your baking bug bit? Here's one way: take a peek in a vintage cookbook, especially one like Amy's beautiful Fleishmann's pamphlet. It makes me just want to head to the kitchen and bury my fingers in flower, butter, sugar and lots and lots of cinnamon. On my schedule for tonight's late-night baking fix: either orange-lemon bundt cake or toasted hazelnut cake from Patricia Wells' Trattoria (I'm in love with Patricia today). Hmm...

Are you inspired to bake in this gray, drizzly, cold days?

Rose Levy Berenbaum has entered the blogosphere with her Real Baking with Rose website. Ms. Berenbaum is the author of such staple baking cookbooks as The Cake Bible and The Pie and Pastry Bible, in addition to six other books. On her blog, which is sponsored by General Mills, she will answer reader questions and help to troubleshoot recipes. She has been answering reader questions by mail for years and this is the first opportunity for everyone to read her responses. I'm thrilled to see her blog, not only because she posts very often, but because her insightful responses are helpful and interesting to read. Her blog is sure to become a great baking reference for anyone who has ever overbaked a batch of cookies or had a cake fail to rise in the oven.

I know Christmas must be coming when I break out one of the few unitaskers in my kitchen: the VillaWare Prego Pizzelle Baker. I'm sure if I thought hard enough I could come up with something else to make with this small waffle iron (small waffles, maybe?). Last weekend I devoted an entire afternoon to cranking out dozens and dozens of pizzelles--thin, crisp wafers studded with fennel seeds. Up until now, I'd used the recipe from the instruction manual that came with the iron, but since I wanted to make a larger batch to give to friends, I decided to try the pizzelle recipe from Mario Batali's Holiday Food. The batter is a simple combination of eggs, flour, sugar, oil, baking powder and fennel seeds.

All in all, I turned about roughly five dozen pizzelles, two at a time. Since the iron took several minutes to reheat between batches, it was slow going. Still, I kept reminding myself that it could be slower, I could be using the single-pizzelle stovetop model pictured in Mario's book. I also recently noticed that VillaWare now makes a four-pizzelle iron. I don't know that I can justify buying another one though.

[Photo Nick Vagnoni]