I showed you how to make génoise Sunday morning. For those who were there and offered comments about the gluten-free cake, thank you! Here's a video about making génoise from Gourmet's Test Kitchen.

Sunday we covered a lot of ground. We compared whole wheat flour to all-purpose flour to cake flour, then standard sugar to caster (super-fine) sugar to powdered sugar. And we compared Madagascar vanilla paste to Tahitian vanilla extract. Then we tasted some Vanilla Shortbread Cookies made with the two vanillas and topped with vanilla sugar.



As for techniques, I showed the new… Continue

Today's class covered basic knife skills. Not a lot to write about, really. But I do have a couple of video links for you. First is How to Slice Batonnet and Alumette Knife Cuts. If you cut across the batonnet at 1/2-inch intervals, you get 1/2-inch dice. Not surprisingly, cutting across the alumette at 1/4-inch intervals yields 1/4-inch dice.



If you have a whetstone and European- or… Continue

I'm getting ready for Sunday's class—Knife Skills—and I thought further ahead to Essentials of Baking. What would you like to learn about in the Essentials of Baking class? I plan to cover basic techniques (stirring, whisking, folding, creaming), how to prep pans, how to load a pastry bag, and the stages of meringue. Plan on learning about different pans, why you must have a scale, and equivalencies. We'll probably do a vanilla tasting, if I have more than one kind of vanilla available and time… Continue

No longer patient with recipes, I mostly create my own on the fly with all the tips from the best cooks. Enjoy ALL food but have an aversion to sweets.

I am currently on a Daily Meal Plan regime: Whole Foods mainly, cooked from scratch with a special emphasis on fat <30g and fiber>30g per day.

Thoroughly enjoy Gareth's cooking demos.