Indira The Sweet

Too busy to keep up with this… May 16, 2008

When my friend Jackie created this for me and I wrote my first few postings, I promised myself I would post at leat once a week. Well, I missed a week, and almost 2. Oh no! Well the world hasn’t ended and here I am trying to catch up.

The question is where to start??

Last week I was printing every day. Another big magazine job, love that! And then I ended the week doing some fine art printing. Then the fun began…

Last Saturday I began baking up cupcakes for a tasting on Sunday for a wedding in June. My chef at school would have been proud of my mis en place. That is the practice of measuring all the ingredients BEFORE you start mixing. This helps in assuring that you won’t forget anything, and that everything is ready for you, when you are ready for IT. It is really an important method to keeping yourself organized in the kitchen, especially when you are baking 4 different kinds of cupcakes. When the baking was the done, the real fun started…

Bahareh and Jelsen are getting married in June and have hired me to make their wedding cake, provide a viennese table and a surprise item. So they came over on Sunday and tasted some tasty cakes! When they came thru my door the first thing they did was hand me a beautiful bouquet of flowers from the farmer’s market at Tompkins Square Park. Then they got down to some SERIOUS eating. Red velvet with cream cheese frosting, and raspberry frosting, lemon with vanilla frosting, chocolate with coconut-rum frosting, white with chocolate frosting, the list went on and on…

It seemed to have gone very well, they tasted every taste combination I created plus some they came up with them selves. It was a lot of fun, but I really thought, “wow, I don’t think I will be able to face another cupcake for a while!” Ha, little did I realize what the next week had in store for me. Well, actually I did know, I just didn’t remember at the time of that thought. so we move on to Monday….

Leaving sweets… April 26, 2008

When I go to visit friends or just if i am working in a place for a little while, I like to bring something sweet. When I worked at Exhibition Prints Inc. (now defunct), almost every day around 3pm our blood sugar would dip and no matter how busy we were, we would send someone out for a sugar run. Chocolate was always a popular choice.

Recently since I don’t have ONE place that I work, I have been bringing cookies or cupcakes, etc to friends at their places of work. If I am having a lull in my pastry orders or if I have left over cake batter (which happens often) or cookie dough, I love to find an excuse to use those things up. Bringing treats like this either announced or as a surprise always elicits smiles. I took the picture of the cookies on their way to their brief home at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the cupcakes I personalized for my friends at My Own Color Lab, where I have been doing freelance printing.

Not only does it make me happy to help my friends get through their work days, it is a good networking tool as well. I suppose it would work better if I could just get a business card printed. I’m working on it!!

This little piggy went to… April 21, 2008

I created this birthday cake for a woman who has a pot bellied pig as a pet. Happy Birthday Diana! I am glad you enjoyed the cake. The last picture is piggy taking a cab ride to his “final destination” !

Some previous cakes March 31, 2008

Red Velvet with Cream Cheese Filling.

White Cake with Oreos and CreamFilling.

Vanilla and Chocolate Ice Cream Cake.

mini cupcakes are just sooo cute. March 30, 2008

Whenever a cake is baked there is usually a little or a lot of batter left over. I had just a little red velvet left over so I baked off these little gems. I happily gave them to Eric, my friend who helped me deliver the monkey birthday cake to Brooklyn.

To fondant or not….

Here is the first version of the cake I made for a little girls first birthday. The final version had a smaller bow and more flowers. This bow just would not fit in the box!

When the birthday girls’ mom and I talked about me doing this cake last weekend, I suggested covering the cake with fondant ( a sugar dough that covers a lot of cakes you see at weddings and on TV! ) It creates a really smooth canvas for decorating but tastes very sweet. When trying to describes the taste, one might be reminded of marshmallows. Personally I like the way it can look, but I am not crazy about the taste. But a lot of cake designers like to use it. So thinking this is what she would probably want, I suggested it. Over the next few conversations we had about the cake, she out right told me she didn’t really like fondant, to which I replied. “oh, you can just eat around it, some people just peel it off.” For some reason I was not hearing her and still was insisting on using the fondant.

Then on Friday morning while preparing to cover the cake with a baby pink colored fondant, a light bulb went off in my head. She doesn’t like fondant, you don’t like fondant, why are you covering the cake?? I think a cake can look very elegant sans fondant, and I hoped she would too. So I made the decision to just use the fondant for accent decoration, and I am pretty happy with the results. I have to admit I learned a lot about cake decoration working with Anne at, Pink Cake Box, but what I need to remember is that I was making and decorating cakes before I went to culinary school and met Anne, to the delight of my friends and family. Fondant can elevate the design of a cake, but is not always necessary to make a beautiful and sophisticated cake. It is nice to be able to come to these revelations by myself sometimes, as opposed to having someone else point them out to me! -(Thank you Tanya!)

Happy Birthday Dylan! And thank you Meg, for your Birthday party brought Dylan’s mom and I together and created the possibility for this cake opportunity!

thanks are ALWAYS welcome! March 7, 2008

“Hi Indira.

Well, everything went as planned, and your cake was a great success. Only problem was, we were still eating cake Saturday, Sunday and Monday cause there was so MUCH of it!

Another complaint, I think our guests all thought your pastry & decorating were more impressive than our anniversary, so just watch it.

Anyway, I think you’re gonna have more customers before long.”

It is always nice to get “complaints” like this!

 

baking a little anniversary cake February 28, 2008

My dear friend Ethan sent his half brother, (Peter) and his wife, (Peggy) to me to create a 24th (!!) anniversary cake.  Technically it is only their 6th anniversary because it falls on leap year day!  The cake is chocolate cake with alternating fillings of chocolate and caramel buttercream. The design was inspired by Peter’s gift to Peggy. He hand painted a vase yellow with pink dogwood blossoms. I hope they all enjoyed the cake and the vase equally! 

                                                                  

HAPPY BIRTHDAY INDIRA! February 22, 2008

I hope you like it, but I created a website for you, and set you with your very own blog!  All of these fake blogs can be deleted when you are ready to type your own!  I created a bunch of categories for you, and the begin to look like links!  You will learn how to use all of this quickly, it is so easy!  If you have a flicker page you can add photographs of your cakes as you please, and write updates on your business as you see fit!  This is a great way to get started!  Use pink cake box as an example!  Because that website is a blog to start anyway! So, for your birthday, I have paid for the registration of the domain name and am hosting it on my website until you want to move it out on your own (well, when it gets too big it will have to move somewhere else, we’ll talk about that later!  

So who is baking those cakes over there?

Why that’s just little me, Indira!

 I have a 24th Anniversary cake to create this week, so keep checking in for how it goes this week.