Cake class!

I've had an ongoing love affair with cake as long as I could remember.  So of course I couldn't wait to go to cake class at the local Culinary Institute this weekend.  I definitely learned a few new tricks, and enjoyed playing with all the commercial equipment and materials.

Yellow Chiffon Cake

The chrunchy looking stuff on the sides is a type of sweet rice.  It makes up for my lack of frosting talent and makes the cake look fancy ;-)

I got home all inspired to cook and made a dozen pizza crusts so the kids can have pizza throughout the week.

And of course I had to make homemade tomato sauce to go with it.  I read about this neat trick to tomato sauce the other day - putting home grown tomatoes on the grill for a few minutes before cooking them.  I am most definitely hitting the farmers market for more tomatoes this weekend since my tomato plants are refusing to be productive members of my household.

Cookie Class

Cookie class was loads of fun – we made 7 different types of cookies in three hours. The best part, in my humble opinion, was getting to use the very cool kitchen, having utensils show up as I needed them, and having them disappear after I dirtied them. There were 10 people in our class and we went through at least 60 cookie sheets.

Food porn....

I can't WAIT to go to cake class in two weeks. We make 5 cakes, all to be taken home :D. We got a nice tour of the culinary school. The regular program is 18 months and $30,000. I think I'll stick with the leisure classes for now.

I love my husband

A water pipe broke along our servitude last week and we were pretty sure it was ours. Terry started digging it out to fix, along with the help of one of our neighbors. Come to find out it wasn't our line, but the line of our other neighbor, a guy that's been very sick and on dialysis this last year. My wonderful husband didn't miss a beat, went out and rented a pump and fixed the line. Now my husband is a professional Mr.FixIt Guy (as he often reminds me), but he HATES plumbing. Actually it's a mutual hate. Every time he gets roped into a plumbing job things go wrong, leak, bust, and otherwise end up costing lots of money and, occasionally, the assistance of a Plumber. This job thankfully went well and the neighbor was forever grateful. And to top it off, the other neighbor (the one that helped fix the line) is a shrimp dealer and gave us 30# of fabulous raw shrimp.

So yeah, I'm pretty proud of my hubby for fixing the busted line that wasn't ours without much grumbling even though he's been working long hours AND it's been freaking hot outside.

Oh yeah, also pretty excited about my cookie class at the Chef school this weekend, also in thanks to my husband as it was my birthday present J