"baker" news and stories

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.

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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]

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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.

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