Indira The Sweet

this week’s doings July 26, 2008

Life is fun. How great is it to be able to say that and mean it. Not every minute is perfection, but that is what keeps us going. We can get ourselves through those low times because hopefully we carry in our head the feeling of the better times. And right now for me, I am having a good time. Again, not ever minute, but if I step back and look at the last few months, in so many more ways my life is better than just a few years ago.

In 2004 I decided to eventually ditch my photography job and move on to the culinary world. I was not sure how I was going to do it, but figured I had to take a leap in order to make a change.

Now in 2008, I am working very hard at establishing a catering business and have re-interpreted the photo business to better suit my new life. Nicely enough, it is working. For a LONG time I was so sure that having a concrete plan and a secure job was the best way for me, but not having that for the last few years has made a difference in all sorts of good ways. Am I more scared about what lies ahead? Yes but I am also more excited. In some ways it feels good to have literally brushed away the cobwebs in my head ( read change my everyday routine, wake up, go to the gym, go to work, eat dinner, watch tv… go to bed) and created a life that changes weekly. I have to admit after 37 years, I am a creature of habit and routines do give me some comfort, so I am looking to reign in the crazy a little and get a slightly better idea of the bigger picture at least for the next few months.

So this past week, I created a tasting for a lovely couple living in Long Island City who care getting married in mid September and are looking to create a sweets table.

Chocolate ganche tart with raspberries, ginger cream plum tart, blueberry and peach pie, and assorted chocolate mini cupcakes.

Today I created a cake for 5 different people who are celebrating milestone birthdays in 2008. My friend Meg Scibona ordered it for her family. I am crossing my fingers it makes it safely in the car upstate.

Transporting cakes in these hot summer days is always a bit scary.

I say, congrats to those who have had the courage to make real change in their lives and I can only support and encourage those who are trying to make that first leap. It is down right scary, but we have to remember that, we are stronger than we sometimes believe and we will make it WORK!

I hope all that are reading this are able to enjoy this time. It is summer, the weather forces us to slow down a little, so take advantage. Walk down a street you don’t normally do, take a different train home, look into peoples faces, look at the landscaping around the city (YES there is some amazing greenery!), take note of where you are, watch how people interact and try to be nicer to the next person. Love those you care about. Life is good.

Summer work… July 17, 2008

So we are knee deep into summer finally and I have been incredibly neglectful of my blog. I have been writing entries in my head for weeks, but alotta good that does the blog! You gotta get in front of the computer Indira and WRITE the thoughts, observations, etc down!!!

So let me see how I can condense the last 2 months….

I don’t think I will keep it all in chronological order, that hurts my brain too much.

The biggest news of the last 2 months is Jelsen and Bahareh’s wedding on June 26th. As some might recall, they came to me looking for an awesome wedding cake and a Viennese table in early May. The wedding cake was inspired by a picture from a European magazine they brought to me and then asked for the personal touch of the golden lego pieces as their topper. My dear friend Anne Heap of Pink Cake Box, made the cake in her beautiful shop, and I created a table full of sweets. Coconut -sweet potato tarts, lemon curd tarts, chocolate macaroons sandwiched between a dark chocolate ganache, (the bane of my existence for 3 weeks!!!!!!), mini carrot cupcakes with cream cheese icing, assorted cookies, and croquembouche puffs filled with vanilla pastry cream.

Unfortunately I was so involved in prepping, baking, and packaging all the sweets I did not take many pictures. Lesson learned!!!!!!!! I did manage to take a few in the beginning of the baking madness that was Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday morning…

As I mentioned earlier, this was just a VERY small sampling of what I made. I am kicking myself right now, that I didn’t force myself to take more pictures. It was just a lot to do and I was getting overwhelmed and the clock was ticking. I am only human and I had reached my limit. So I will have to stop kicking myself and just be glad that I have these at least. The picture of the bride and groom and the wedding cake are courtesy of Stephanie Land, a good friend and photographer of the happy couple.

This wedding was my first real big job as “Indira the Sweet”, so I was trying to be as diligent and detail oriented as I have been training myself to be! Some of the prep work was fun and some painful. Fun was ordering new kitchen items like mini tart tins and mini cupcake pans, painful was having to keep buying expensive almond flour to perfect the elusive french macaroon. The chocolate ones proved to be easier than the plain ones. I had to have made about 6-7 batches of the plain variety with very little success. They were turning out flat and not at all round. It was incredibly frustrating. I finally had to give up and just fill in the order with ALL chocolate. I hated not being able to figure it out in time for the wedding, but I had warned Bahareh that I had not attempted these difficult pastries since my days in culinary school way back in 2005!! Sometimes, you have to know when to say “UNCLE” and figure out a new path. Painful, but not deadly. I got everything done in a fairly timely fashion.

I made lists every other day changing one thing or another. It might seem silly, but it really helps to get lists out of your head and on to paper where you can REALLY see how things look. All the lists I made helped keep me stay organized and on schedule. I learned a WHOLE lot on this job, but it paid off in the end. I got a lovely email from the bride herself and then more raves when I saw both Jelsen and Bahareh on July 4th, for one of two BBQ I attended. All the hard work and planning was WELL worth the stress and I look forward to my next…

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….

Dueling tubes… April 28, 2008

A portrait of two personalities drawn by toothpaste tubes!

I chuckled this morning when I saw these two toothpaste tubes sitting side by side in my bathroom. My friend Jen is staying with me for (god help us both!) about 3 weeks and the differences in how we live was hysterically demonstrated by the differences in these two tubes. Those of you who know me will probably be able to guess which tube is mine. I love my friend, but that tube of toothpaste bothers the shit out of me every time I look at it. It looks so distressed. I don’t mean literally… well yes I do.

I don’t want to dwell on it, it just struck me as funny this morning.

Today I find myself at a “trial run” at a photo lab. I cannot lie, it is REALLY strange to be working in some one else’s lab. I never thought I would be doing this, In my mind of course, EPI (Exhibition Prints Inc.) would always be open. Reality bites and that ain’t the case!

So here I am at Pix Point printing various commercial jobs, 11×14, 8×10, and 5×7, etc. They want to see what I am made of I guess. I just cannot shake this strange feeling of being in this foreign space. Stranger still, I am surrounded by men. Foreign men at that! I really mean foreign. 3 are from India and the other is Japanese (maybe). I just couldn’t understand most of what they said to me and I am usually pretty good with deciphering accents

[My Utopian lab (EPI) was basically all women. It was a rarity to have a lab with mostly women printers, but it was a nice oasis in the world of male dominated photo labs.]

So not only am I a stranger in this strange land, but the “natives” are curious as to WHY I am here amongst them today. I guess it can be threatening if you are not privy to the bigger picture. As far as I know I am not here to take anyone’s job. I am only interested in printing on a freelance basis. And God knows I never want to load another rack of film, EVER! Labs need to have an a few good freelancers for those times when they need an extra pair of hands that don’t need “babysitting”.

I certainly do not want to take anyone’s job. But the reality is, jobs in traditional photo labs are scarce, as are the labs themselves. I am just here to pick up some printing work here and there to supplement the slow times in my pastry orders.

Tomorrow I do one more day of this trial. I am not 100% on this job, but I am willing to give it a few tries. It is a bit weird to come into an established lab as an established printer and work under someone else’s methods. I really never thought that shoe would be on this foot!! I am trying to stay open to the idea that I could learn something new, but again, I cannot lie, it is a bit difficult. If you know how to print, you know how, but as in all aspects of life there is always something more to learn.

Wish me luck and the ability to learn new tricks.

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!!

Tired April 11, 2008

Today was a the second of two 8+ hours of straight printing! Yikes, I am beyond tired. Can you tell. I always feel so lucky that I have such a nice home to go to after days like this. Although being at the bottom of those stairs staring upwards and thinking about the 3 other flights I have to climb before I reach my lovely home can feel insurmountable sometimes. The weather tonight felt right considering my mood. It is cold and foggy. I love when there is low fog in the city. It makes it seem like a smaller and quieter place. It has been a hard spring. We had one beautiful day this week, but the chill in the air quickly returned as has the rain as I can hear it bouncing off my air conditioner.

This was an interesting week. Through Facebook I have gotten reconnected with a slew of high school alum! It’s been fun catching up with everyone and to begin planning out 20th!!!!!! reunion. How did that happen? When did that happen? It is hard not to look back over those years and take a measure of what I have done, by comparing to what others have done. I try not to because we all choose to live our lives differently and choose what is important to us. So since we do make these different choices, we really should not feel like we have missed out on certain things because whatever we are doing right now is OUR LIFE and that is good! Don’t say “what have I done in all this time?” instead say, “WOW look at all that I have seen, tasted, cooked, felt, created, traveled to, written, read, sang, painted, and overall experienced since I left those hallways of Friends Seminary!” It is easy to fall into that trap of comparing our lives to others, and I am actively working on not doing that!

Now it is time for bed. Tomorrow is another day of printing and my Mom’s birthday.

Treats April 7, 2008

I have been having some crappy days since my cousin left last Friday and today I decided to self medicate with a treat of a French macaroon from the bakery/cafe, Madeleine on west 23rd street. I met Jen (pictured savoring her coconut with dark chocolate ganache macaroon) for lunch at Monster Sushi and on my way there I passed this cafe that I keep forgetting about, called Madeleine. I came across it sometime last year and was really impressed with their selection of French macaroons and the look of their croissants and tarts. They were producing real French pastries, which always makes me happy. Jen was with me when I first found the place (I think), and I remember explaining the difference between the French macaroon that is made with almond flour and resembles more of a meringue cookie and the American (?) version made with flaked coconut. I was amazed when I read the recipe while in school that this was considered a macaroon. I was very excited to try it, and then was really disappointed when it came to actually make them. First off, it is a cookie that needs to be piped. Right away for me (at that point of my experience) pipping was HARD and MESSY! Second the baking was really precise and with 6 or 7 teams of 2 students trying to get in and out of the oven, it proved to be difficult. We were taught that “classically” the cookie is sandwiched with a jam. We were making VERY pink ones and therefore we had to sandwich them with raspberry jam. I am not sure, but at the time it was just a gross sweet mess. I did not like them much at ALL!

Then came my brief stint as an assistant to the (very French) Pastry Chef at Bouley Bakery. I was only there for a little over 2 months, but boy did I “mis en place” for A LOT of macaroons!!! “Mis en place” is French and means to measure out all the ingredients for a recipe before you start mixing. The chef had me measure out 1 kilo each of almond flour and confectioner’s sugar that both needed to be sifted. Have you ever tried to sift almond flour? It is not an easy task, it is not as fine as flour and neither is confectioner’s sugar. UGH! I grew to hate this process more and more each time I had to do it. I was happy to learn that jam was not the only thing used to put in between these sweet cookies. We made ganaches! YUM. A basic ganache is an emulsion of melted chocolate and cream, then you can add other flavorings, (like fruit purees, nut pastes,or spices), to fancy it up even more! These crazy French raise the fun factor up another notch by coloring the cookies various colors to indicate flavor. Green is usually pistachio (my fave), pink indicates that you will probably taste raspberry somewhere, brown= chocolate. Etc. You get it. So when you walk into a bakery in Paris you will most likely see a large selection of colorful macaroons. You have to be careful because like the coconut version of a macaroon, they are VERY SWEET! I like the ones at Madeleine’s because they are not too big. The ones we made at Bouley were really big. Too much!

Anyway, I was glad to have rediscovered this place and for my waistline’s sake, I hope to forget them soon and then have the chance to stumble across the place again in the future as opposed to making it a part of my weekly eating habits!

I need to mention briefly and then again in more detail later, I was lucky enough to have shared dinner with Jackie and Tom Sunday night. I need to share a picture of this beautiful plate that Tom created. Not only did this look good, it was delicious!

Thank you Tom, what a treat. And of course Jackie, thanks for ALL the help. You guys are great together as you are separately. Love yous.

Family time.

My cousin was in town briefly last week much to my delight. She moved out to Arizona about 2 years ago after living in northern New Jersey for all of her life. She was on the east coast to be “in the office” for a few days, so I only really got to see her in the evenings, but that was good enough for me . On Thursday night we were able to get our little family together at Clinton Street Baking Company for a yummy dinner and more importantly dessert and a shared hot buttered rum.

As you can see our family resemblances are astounding! Here is the way it fits together. My mom and my cousin (her niece) are related by blood. Eden is the daughter of my Mom’s sister. My brother (Peter) and I are both adopted. I was born and adopted right here in NYC and my brother was born and adopted in India. (Long before adopting children from another country was like shopping for a fashion accessory)

So together we make up my family. I am always so happy when we all can spend time together.

who loves you kitty!

How much do I love my kitty! So much, I cannot express in words, only pictures!