Work baby shower

Decorating a boardroom on a budget that would barely cover lunch at most Manhattan delis can be a little difficult, but we did our best. The pom poms are from good old Martha Stewart, which I'm pretty sure is also where I saw the circle and triangle garlands. I put two slits in each circle or triangle and threaded them onto white yarn, then waited until we were in the boardroom to move them around until I was satisfied with the spacing. Then I cut the yarn and we taped them up. We also used some blue crepe paper to spruce up the room.

Brownie cupcakes

Martha's version

My version

I absolutely loved the latest Martha Stewart Living with the section on cupcakes. I decided to try the brownie cupcakes a few weeks ago, but I thought it was too soon for the Valentine's Day theme so I went with something a little more general.

Work party

I volunteered to plan my department's work party, and was given two incredibly able assistants to whom I delegated most of the work. Three cheers for them!

With the economy being what it is, our party was pot luck and all of our decorations were made out of office materials that were headed for the trash bin.


Plenty of food, an entire table of savories and another full of sweets. We had people sign up so that we could make sure it would be roughly even, which it was.


Festive tables


And some of the decorations made from old crate stickers and old memos and such

A template for the snowflake can be found here

Christmas cookies

I wanted to make sugar cookies for my department's Christmas party and I wanted to try a new recipe. This basic one was pretty good. I rolled them out half an inch thick and cut them out with a shot glass as I couldn't find my round cutters.


I coated them with a semi-sweet ganache and refrigerated them overnight


And in the morning I coated them with luster dust




They were perfectly soft and chewy and everybody loved the gold.

Cristi's cake

Cristi wanted citrus and berries with her cake, so I chose Martha Stewart's 1-2-3-4 lemon cake which I'd been wanting to try for a while.

Martha Stewart's cake

My cake

Next time, I'll line the sides of the pans with parchment as well as the bottom. My cake didn't come out as gracefully as I'd have liked. That combined with my thin lemon curd meant that the cake simply had to be covered.

Then the seven minute frosting and I had a fight. The frosting won. This doesn't do it justice, but if you look closely you can see that the melted sugar didn't so much become one with the meringue.


Not the unqualified success I'd originally planned, but I was pleased all the same. And more importantly, the birthday girl seemed to like it just fine.

Perfect cookies

What is the secret to perfect cookies? Okay, one of the many secrets?


These will turn this



Into these


Which end up looking like this


Which is, by the way, about four inches in diameter and an inch tall. Now that's a cookie.

Pumpkin swirl brownies

Pumpkin swirl brownies from Martha Stewart, made sans nuts. Not my favorite, but still pretty good. I liked the brownie part more than the pumpkin part, maybe next time I'd substitute a different pumpkin recipe. And I'd be less careful with the swirling, it it was more like layers here.

Work bake off

Or, a relatively successful attempt at a pumpkin charlotte. It needs work, but frankly, I found it irritating enough and not quite tasty enough, that I probably won't try again. At least not this year. Martha Stewart's chocolate-coconut charlotte was my inspiration, though I wanted it to be based around pumpkin flavors.


So I started with ginger cake (can't remember which recipe I used) and made a mess of things. If I'd done my research, I would have known that cake butter plus extra flour doth no ladyfingers make. Honestly, Ann.

The second attempt at making ladyfingers went a little better, turns out whipped egg whites really help. Adding pumpkin puree probably doesn't, but I wanted the flavor. I didn't use a specific recipe for those, which I bet would have been a good idea. I need some practice with piping, speaking of which I also need to find my proper tips, cutting the end off the bag isn't the best method.

I also piped discs, but apparently didn't photograph those. They were the layers, with pumpkin mousse (super delicious) and cream cheese mousse (good, but not great) alternated in between and these ladyfingers around the outside, then some whipped cream on top and a ribbon around it all. So maybe the ribbon sort of took over the cake, it was what I had.


I still don't know why my ladyfingers curled, and I should have lined the ribbon to keep the moisture from seeping through, but I'm over it.

As my first attempt at the charlotte didn't work so well, I ended up using those ginger layers and the left over pumpkin batter and mousse to make an extra little cake.


It definitely needed something to cover the mess, so I whipped up some seven minute frosting and I couldn't resist sticking a bow on it


I put them both into little cake boxes from the New York Cake & Baking Supply and they traveled surprisingly well.


I won an honorable mention for presentation. I really should have stuck with my initial idea of warm and gooey pumpkin bread, turns out comfort foods carried the day.

Blocked

So, I don't have access to blogger at work anymore. So I don't really blog anymore. But hey, happy election day!

Consuelo Vanderbilt's wisdom

In Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt, Amanda Mackenzie Stuart quotes an article Consuelo (who was, for a while, the Duchess of Marlborough) wrote for the New York Journal regarding entertaining. Apparently the clipping Stuart found was undated. The following paragraph is taken from the book, and combines quotes from the article with Stuart's summary.

"'To be a good hostess, one's dominant preoccupation should ... be the pleasure of one's guests, not the vanity of one's person. The woman who entertains because of her Lowestoft service, her lace tablecloth, her old English silver, her hothouse flowers, her epicurean meal and the vision of herself in her newest gown and jewels is not likely to produce happy reactions,' she wrote. The quality of the food was more important than the table décor, for 'hunger cannot be assuaged by a display of china.' A party of six or eight was the ideal number because conversation could be kept general. Music should not be an adjunct to conversation - this was an insult to the musicians as well as the conversational powers of the guests. Asked by the magazine to provide a perfect luncheon menu for a warm June day she suggested 'Cold madrilène soup, coubilac de saumon made with salmon, rice, eggs and pastry - a chaudfroid of chicken with a salad, and an orange dessert'. One could reduce the likelihood of problems by never accepting invitations one did not wish to return, and 'eliminating bores and bounders'.

I particularly enjoyed a few points made here:

1) the guests are always the primary focus of an event

2) 6 or 8 is absolutely the best number, I couldn't agree more. I love being able to have one conversation at the table, that way nobody gets left out. I think it's the absolute pits when you go to a large dinner party and everywhere you turn there is somehow already a conversation in progress, and you seem to be the only odd one out. Again. And by "you" I guess I mean me.

3) I have a very hard time hearing more than one thing at a time, so I always think of music as being highly distracting during a conversation. I love the idea that one can have great powers of conversation, and that they should be allowed to shine.

4) As for that menu, I don't even know what most of it is. I'll have to look it all up later. I like to think that she listed all that off the top of her head, barely pausing to collect her thoughts before she began.

5) Dude, whatever happened to the idea that invitations and visits were always returned? No wonder we're all so disjointed and dis-unified, we spend so little time in each others' homes and you never know if, after having somebody over multiple times, they will return the courtesy or choose to forget you ever existed.

6) And yes, those who have no sense of humor and those with no manners should certainly not be inflicted on congenial company.

Gaby's cake

I knew when I saw the post on Smitten Kitchen about the chocolate peanut butter cake from Sky High that I wanted to make it the first chance I got. So, imagine my delight when I offer to make Gaby's birthday cake and she mentions chocolate and peanut butter being one of her favorite combinations. It turned out to be quite simple, as promised, quite rich, and incredibly delicious. I highly recommend it.

Troll 2: You Can't P*** on Hospitality

My friends Kim and Ryan hosted a Troll 2 party last night, complete with a bevy of snacks and treats mirroring those in the movie. While none of us ate our double-decker baloney sandwiches, we all polished off our apple crisp and homemade vanilla ice cream! Did I mention that they even picked the apples themselves?

Thanks for a highly amusing evening, Ryan and Kim. You can be sure that none of us would ever dream of p***ing on your hospitality

ps- Troll 2 has been voted The Worst Movie Ever by imdb.com and most definitely deserves the honor. I've never seen a movie so fantastically terrible.