Class Herbs
Angelo Prosperi-Porta raises the bar for savoury class styles. The sold out class opens with the student tables filled with fresh herbs picked from his gardens at the world renowned Cooper’s Cove Guest House nestled in Sooke, BC. This five hour class rounds out an authentic Tuscan Italian three course luncheon of ricotta flan, braised lamb & sautéed summer squash flowers and the finally of vanilla pan cottas.
Angelo's Flan
Students discovered the value of fresh herbs, the techniques of successfully blanching kales and the details of peeling and purchasing fresh artichokes. All the products on hand were used by the students to create amazing dishes that were later plated with restaurant beauty and filled the air with delectable aromas.
Angelo not only teaches here at Creating Occasions but you can also partake in his classes at Cooper’s Cove Guest House or join him on his yearly culinary tours in the regions of Italy. You can visit his website for more culinary adventures. Angelo will be returning to Creating Occasions September 25th for Authentic Pasta Creations. Keep watching the events page of our website for more of Angelo’s themed classes!
Artichoke Lesson
We would like to extend our thanks to Snap Magazine Victoria for supplying us with such wonderful photos!
Student plate
Does this save you money?
In many situations, yes. The cupcake wedding is a very practical option for home or outdoor weddings. This frees up the cutting and serving time of your caterer or family members and leaves more time to enjoy your wedding festivities as they remain on display from beginning to end. This also provides your reception area with a wonderful decor center piece. The cupcake can also be made in advance by family members and frozen air tight until the big day. It is recommended to keep them frozen until the very last moment so that they have built in refrigeration while first on display.
In other situations … no. More often than not, a wedding is styled by the bride as an elegant affair right down to the cupcake. Fondant wrapped or largely decorated cupcakes can cost a couple more in labour and ingredient charges than a 3 tiered wedding cake. Most cake makers price between $3-$6 a slice for tiered cakes. Elaborate decorating options will increase this base price. The cupcake will start with the same base price of $3 but will increase quite quickly as the labour and food products can increase dramatically with just small adjustments in design.
The ultimate question in making the decission of cake or cupcake will be the fees for cutting and the ambience your are creating. A home or casual wedding calls out for the cute and often colourful cupcake, where ultimate elgance leans heavily towards the beauty and stature of a tiered cake.
Besides how adorable they are, more and more weddings are displaying the wonderful glow of cupcake towers. Whether it is an assortment of pastel buttercream flowers or elegantly wrapped in smooth white fondant the cupcake is still raising questions for many couples…
Why at a wedding:
This came to be as a direct response from the cutting fees that were being placed on couples from the hotels and restaurants. These fees can range anywhere from $1-$4 a slice here in the Greater Victoria area. This can mean as much as 50% of the cost of the wedding cake production or more. So we can see why people are looking for an alternative. Understandably, when a wedding cake is wheeled in from a fine bakery it is now the responsibility of the dining establishment to provide the cutlery, plates, servers to set up and take away the dishes and someone to wash and put them back. This also involves the risk of breakage. That cost incurred has now been passed on to the couple instead of being hidden in the production of cake supplied by the vendor.
Cupcakes beautifully displayed on towering cakes stands provide the guests with a self service option and the room with added decor. This also eliminates the possibility that improper cutting of the cake will not provide enough slices for your guests as the amount is predetermined per guest. 
You know how I tend to complain that I need several lasagne rollers but can only get the pasta machines in a set of three? … Well I will stop complaining now!
The lasagne roller is wonderful as we all know. It can roll out your fondant, marzipan, modelling chocolate, gum paste and pasta just wonderfully! There is nothing better than ensuring that all of your rose petals are a consistent thickness for ruffling and making sure the job is done well. Not to mention the value of an extremely long piece of fondant to cut a lot of items out of!
Less we forget the spaghetti roller? What beautiful strands of hair that attachment makes! If you rub the fondant down with shortening it will not stick inside the machine nor will it stick to each other. You also need to remember to roll your strips out thin. This attachment is more of a cutter than it is a roller. To make sure everything is equal, you could roll out your paste with the lasagne roller first and then cut with the spaghetti attachment. The small strands can then be twirled into a beautiful hair piece, drop strings on a cake instead of using royal icing or put Gum Tex in it to make a hydro line for a gingerbread house!!!
The linguine makes great seaweed ( you need to twist this to look authentic), wood siding, present curly-Qs, individual eye lashes and if you leave the paste a little thicker, it will hold together on the cut lines and give you a great hardwood flooring treatment! … Ok, maybe a ship/pirate plank.
If you’re considering making a lot of cakes in the very near future, a Pasta attachment set is something you may want to invest in.
As Easter approaches and people are drawn back into their kitchens the question of the week is leaning to sugar and its substitutions. First I think we should look at where sugar comes from and how our products are going to benefit from the type that we choose.
White and brown sugars are refined in the same way. Cane juice is filtered, crystallized and washed to remove the molasses (a by-product of the refining process). Brown sugar is merely white sugar that has had molasses added back into it to add colour, moisture and a distinct flavour. Light brown or golden sugar has 3.5% molasses added while dark brown has 6.5%. This added moisture needs to be taken into consideration when making different baked products as it will affect your moisture absorption within the recipe and can cause batters with a maximum saturation to split.
Turbinado sugar, otherwise known as raw, is refined in the same manner as white with the exception that some of the molasses has been allowed to cling to the crystals and it is then spun dried. Demerara is made in a similar fashion but the crystal size is larger. Both of these sugars can be substituted in a recipe. However, it should be noted that they will not give you the added moisture that brown sugar will to your baked product. So that favourite oatmeal cookie will come out crisper and less flavourful.
When it comes to substitutions for health concerns, all sugars are equal. Honey may have the most desirable processing system of clover fields and sprawling bee hives but in the end is a simple carbohydrate.
This brings us to the exchange of liquid sugars. Honey results in the sweetest concentration and can even measure higher on the scale than granulated sugar. The liquidity must be taken in to account when making a substitution. Therefore for 1 cup of sugar, you need to reduce the quantity of honey by 1/8th of a cup and decreased liquid in the recipe by 3 tbsp. Alternately, you’d also need to increase the amount of honey from 1 cup to 1 ¼ cups of sugar and increase the liquid by ¼ cup.
Corn syrup as it sounds is a derivative of corn instead of cane and when dealing with white or light corn syrup, the liquid is clear and flavoured with vanilla and salt. Regular or dark corn syrup has molasses and caramel flavour and colouring added to it. As with honey, the substitution ratios will be the same.
The last sugar to mention would be maple syrup. This can be substituted in a recipe but due to its lower degree of sweetness in comparison to sugar, you will need to increase the ratio to 1 ½ cup of maple syrup to every 1 cup of sugar and decrease the liquid in the recipe by the same volume. At this point, this pastry chef will caution you to look at the liquid you are removing from your recipe. Depending on what you’re making, 1 ½ cups of liquid is a lot to remove from a domestic size recipe … do the rest of the ingredients need a chemical reaction from this product? i.e. the volume builder or fat content from whip cream versus the weight of maple syrup.
Baking is a series of chemical reactions; substitute wisely. Happy Baking!
I may have put this out there before but if you have not watched the movie Food Inc. it is worth your while. Even though the Canadian laws surrounding the Ministry of Health are stricter than the US, this doesn’t mean that we are sheltered from over commercialized food production and the health risks that surround that.
I would not sit here and tell you that my industry is healthy either. Desserts and sweet baking are luxury items and should be consumed in moderation. As with anything, we have the power to fill our bodies with the most whole food products we can find and this includes baking.
I think it is also quite well know what my stand is on the absolution of chemicals when we are consuming organic foods. This is next to impossible; but … we should not discount the environmental and health risk contributions that organic food production has.
As we make decisions to purchase organically prepared or grown foods we are sending a strong message to food manufacturers that we want strict production conditions. We are demanding that livestock sees the light of day, that field over population does not spill large amounts of CO2 and methane gas into the air and waste materials to surrounding farms and water systems, slaughter houses don’t risk the spread e-coli throughout the plant in the course of a single day’s production and of course my all time favourite … that we respect what we are putting into our bodies and so should they! Hey, I’m no scientist but if cancer is cell mutation then is not genetically altered produce not the same thing? … Or at least promoting it? Do our bodies not produce enough hormones? … Must we consume them too?
Having issues with your royal icing? Let’s look at what you’re using and what it is going to be used for. There are definite difference between using fresh egg whites and meringue powder as well as there being an importance to how long you mix the icing.
Two fresh egg whites, ½ tsp of cream of Tartar and enough icing sugar until you reach the desired consistency is all you need for decorating cookies. It will dry perfectly in a short period of time, it is perfectly safe to use and is fast and easy to make. However, are making a gingerbread house or 3D flowers or figures? Then you need to make some changes.
I strongly recommend meringue powder for several reasons. It contains Gum tragacanth which is a strong drying agent used to make gum paste and modelling fondant. This will give your gingerbread house a quick, strong hold so you don’t have to hold your roof on for several minutes while the icing sets. Your flowers or thin projects like a lace butterfly or Eiffel Tower will also dry strong and quickly. 
Meringue powder also has the ability to stay on the counter with a damp towel covering the surface for several days and weeks without spoiling or losing its texture and strength. When using fresh egg whites the water content in the egg will start breaking down the icing sugar and will soften it over night and eventually liquefy the product beyond usage. Since Fresh egg white is not pasteurized, it also needs to be refrigerated when not in use.
Mixing your icing can also cause you problems if it has not been mixed long enough. When looking at your icing it needs to be fluffy and white. This is showing you there is a large amount of air in the icing. The air helps dry your project faster, makes piping easier and gives you a full rounded effect that stays where you’ve put it. When your icing has a slightly translucent look it is showing you that the water is still absorbed into the icing sugar and it will be heavy and harder to pipe. Your projects will also have time to droop before they dry. This can certainly pose problems for the highly sought after rose!
The last thing is Cream of Tartar (a natural acid). This allows your egg white, whether in the form of fresh or meringue powder, to froth or foam up. This creates the air in the icing which allows for drying. Without it, your icing will be soft and slightly runny and will not set properly … thus creating a Christmas decorating nightmare for you.
If you have any other royal icing questions, please feel free to drop me line on the Facebook page discussion board!
Almond Paste is a soft paste made from fine ground almonds, sugar and glycerine. It is used in a variety of cakes and pastries and some European breads i.e. stollen. It can also be softened into a cream and used as a filling in Danishes, croissants and other confections.
Marzipan is a thick pliable dough like product made from almond paste, icing sugar, glucose and sometimes egg whites. You can colour and flavour it and it is primarily used in edible figurines and flowers. Back when fruit cake was extremely popular as a wedding cake this product was used to cover the fruit cake to prevent spice stains from bleeding through into the icing. The fats in the cake will carry the colour from the spices into the icing. It wouldn’t matter if it was a royal icing or rolled fondant … it will still bleed through. The nut base from the almond paste will block the bleed through.
It needs to be noted that when rolling out marzipan, you need to dust your surface with icing sugar rather than flour to prevent sticking. You also need to be cautious of over mixing the dough as the oils from the nuts will rise to the surface and make the dough sticky. You can correct this with a small amount of water and additional icing sugar.
Considering the high content of sugar in marzipan, it will dry out very quickly. You should keep it wrapped and store it in an air tight container. If it does dry out on you, you can remedy this with a little more water but keep in mind that it will also reduce the shelf life of the marzipan. Moisture breeds bacterial and sugar is a preservative but you have just diluted it and reduced its effectiveness.
Recipe 1:
250gm Almond Paste
250gm Icing Sugar
125 ml Glucose (or white corn syrup)
Recipe 2:
250 gm Almond Paste
300 gm icing Sugar
1 egg white
My personal preference is to use glucose for the simple reason that you don’t have to worry about self life other than the product drying out before you have a chance to you it. The egg white version however, will stay softer for a longer period of time. Therefore if you are giving these tasty products for Christmas giving you may want the product to stay soft for a smooth moist consumption. As always … the choice is yours!
Hello everyone … I just want to let you know that our new booking calendar for our classes is being updated with all the names for people that have already signed up. As a result of this update you will be receiving an e-mail confirming that you are registered in the class. Unfortunately it also contains an automatic message that informs you that payment needs to be received in order to maintain your spot. Please disregard this message as you have already paid and your space is secure.
We apologize for any confusion this may cause.
Lora Lonesberry and the Creating Occasions staff.
With baking season here the most common question I am being asked is "What did I do wrong with my Italian Buttercream?" More often than not, my response is "Nothing ... just wait" So here are the steps ...
Place 200 ml of egg whites in your mixing bowl to wait. Then, after you've carefully cleaned out your sauce pot, add 100 ml of cold water and 350 gm of white sugar and bring that to a boiling temperature of 115 degrees Celsius. At that point you will begin whipping your egg whites while the sugar continues to reach the 126 degrees that you need. All of your egg whites should be foamed by this point.
Very slowly add the boiled sugar to your whipping egg whites. Then add your vanilla or other flavouring as this will aid the cooling process. Once the mix has completely cooled add your 900 gm of unsalted butter. Now here's where you go wrong ... You need to whip this until it becomes light and fluffy and white. That could take up to 5 minutes or more depending on how cold your butter is. If it splits ... don't worry ... keep mixing ... it will come back together.
Never throw it out before you call me ... we can fix it! 
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