Goodbye to A Piece of Cake

I recently (like yesterday) left my position at A Piece of Cake Bakery. Here are some pictures of cakes I did while I worked there. I rarely did a cake start to finish, so I had help with several of these, but many I did not. 

Wedding Food

This weekend I catered a wedding for a friend from church. She had decorated the church hall with lanterns and lights and a drop-ceiling canopy. It was beautiful inside. It was also kind of dark, which is why the pictures aren't very good :)

I served, left to right, Meatballs in a spicy tangy sauce, puff pastry bites, spinach salad with strawberries and candied walnuts, mixed fruit salad (honeydew, nectarines, pineapple, mango, kiwi, red grapes, and blackberries) and a platter of ham, cheddar, and havarti with dijon, whole grain mustard, and mayo, served with pretzel rolls. We served a lemon blueberry punch and cold water with lemon to drink.

Puff pastry bites with boysenberry jam and brie cheese

punch was on the end of the table and cups (snap-together wine glasses) were on a small table to the side

I put out little frames with information about the food, but it was kind of dark and people kept asking what things were

I bought some dishes from CB2 for service and am sure I will use them again and again, especially the ice tongs.

The spinach salad had a poppyseed dressing

I made these plate stands for a bridal shower in October and just changed the color of the ribbon to match the wedding on Saturday. They are made from table legs from the hardware store and squares of wood and fit a square dinner plate on top. We have four of the plates, so it is easy to switch out a full and hot tray with an empty one.

Left-over rolls

The wedding went really well and I really wasn't stressed much at all. I guess that's what happens with experience!

Pretzel Madness!

I am catering a wedding this week and one of the items is a build-your-own ham and cheese sandwich on a pretzel roll. Yep, a roll made like a pretzel. I made a HUGE batch (YAY! for access to a 60 quart industrial mixer with a dough hook!!) of dough on Tuesday, let it rise in four 5 gallon buckets (gotta leave lots of room for rising) then boiled and baked 200+ rolls today. They taste great, and we even had left over dough that Mom made into small odd-shaped pretzel bites. Mom helped a lot, weighing out dough pieces for me to roll and boiling the rolls as I washed, salted, baked, and cooled the pretzels. 

This is half the dough. It was more bread dough than I had ever made.

First you divide and roll the dough, these were 60-65 grams each

Then you boil them in a mixture of water and baking soda for 30-45 seconds per side

Then you brush with egg, cut an X in the top (to allow for expansion in the oven) and sprinkle with pretzel salt

Bake until golden brown and delicious

Let cool

Wash, rinse, repeat, and soon you have this, which is only part of the 200+ rolls we made

And these are the little ones Mom made.