It's been a long tome since my last post. We had our holiday baking class then Thanksgiving. My little Lydia had her 4th birthday and now I'm in the last week of regular classes. With finals coming up next week, you can bet I've been really busy.

For the class before Thanksgiving we made some holiday desserts. We made three different kinds of pies; apple, pumpkin, and peanut butter. They were all very good. The peanut butter pie was a bit too rich for me, but Linda loved it. We also made more cinnamon rolls along with apple cinnamon raisin bread, which I still forgot to bring home somehow so I'll have to make that after school is over. We also made some nut roll and poppy seed roll which were both very good.

On Tuesday we made quick breads in class, in my group we made Scones, Corn muffins, and Chocolate chip muffins. There were a lot of other kinds of muffins and breads made but basically, the flavors were banana, blueberry, pumpkin and nut. We also made some plane biscuits, tea biscuits, and cheese and herb biscuits. Needless to say we came home with lots of goodies! We learned three different types of mixing methods the biscuit method namely for making biscuits and the like. The muffin method for making muffins pancakes and waffle type things. And, last but not least, the creaming method. This method can be used for muffins and other types of quick breads. The main thing with quick breads is to not over mix (the teacher made this point very adamantly).

I had my birthday yesterday. As funny as it sounds I made two apple pies, on Saturday morning, to go to Mom's house to celebrate my sister in-law and my birthday. We had lots of yummy apple desserts. Saturday we had apple dumplings, that my sister in-law made; they were really good by the way!! Then on Sunday everyone sang to both of us and we had apple pie and ice cream as well as a jello poke cake. I got a really nice tie from my youngest sister.
It was a very nice weekend. We all had a lot of fun. Other then an incident with my daughter and the emergency room. My youngest daughter had an ear infection that we did not catch and Saturday her ear started oozing. So needless to say we took her to the hospital and she is now on antibiotics and getting better (I think more because the pressure on her ear is not there, but what do I know).

Here are the two pies I made, they tasted better then they look and they look pretty good to me.

I've had pretty bad cold the last few days, so I have not been able to post anything for a while. The week before last we made yeast Doughnuts and cake Doughnuts some of the Yeast raised doughnuts were filled with Bavarian cream with a chocolate glaze, those were amazing. I ate one of the glazed Krispy Kreme style doughnuts in class, and they were melt in your mouth good. I gave most of the doughnuts that I brought home away so I wouldn't turn into a blimp. Each student in the class took home around 22 doughnuts, that's why I gave half of them away.

Last week we made Danish dough and soft pretzels. The pretzels were a lot easier to make then I thought they would be, and forming them was fun.
The Danish dough we had to do over the span of two classes because of time constraints, so last week we made the dough and rolled in the fat (we used a combination of butter and high ratio shortening) and then we gave the dough three, three folds this gives the Danish dough 135 layers, which also gives it the flakiness.

This week we made up the Danishes and Croissants from the dough we made last week. We made several different types; some with filling, some without. But each one came out flaky and yummy. As I described in the slide show to the right, we made some really good looking pastries and they tasted as good or better then they looked.

Feel free to make any and all comments, I love to hear them.

I know It's been a long time. All I can say is I have mid terms and have been very busy.

Last Friday was a very interesting day. It was the ribbon cutting and dedication ceremony of the new culinary arts building at LCCC in downtown Nanticoke. I volunteered to help in the Pastry Arts kitchen.

The pastry department, had some Sara Lee deserts donated and we plated those along with the deserts that our department made. We made bite size Cream Puffs and Eclairs, along with Florentine with sliced Almonds. The chocolate room was pumping out lots of amazing little deserts like Tiramisu filled chocolate cups along with chocolate tulips filled with white and milk chocolate moose, along with the infamous chocolate covered strawberry's. It was an amazing day, there were in my own estimation, over 300 people that came.

I learned a lot about a lot of different things. The main one being people LOVE dessert and will always eat them, if you have an appealing presentation along with quality food to back it up, no matter how much food they had previously consumed.

Another thing I learned is that, giving a way free samples generates ten fold more business then any other advertising could ever accomplish.

The greatest thing about all this seemingly exhausting hard work is that I had so much fun despite the fact that I crashed when I got home.

On Tuesday I had my intro to pastry and bread class at Luzerne County Community College. We made Ciabatta bread, wow that is some good stuff. We also made sour rye rolls, sour pumpernickel bread, along with Fougasse bread. We learned about artisan breads, and using poolish and other types of starters to make the different types of breads. I posted a slide show of different things that I like and the picture of the breads with the bowl of potato soup are the breads we made in class Tuesday.

The other pictures are places I've been or things I've made, along with my two kids. I really love my girls they make me laugh everyday.


My oldest is always ready to pose for a picture and more importantly, eat the yummy treats I bring home.

What can I say about class that I haven't said already. I am really glad I am doing this. Today we made Calzones, Pagach bread, some with Cabbage and onions and some w/ potatoes. We also made Focaccia bread. I think it would go great with stewed tomatoes or some type of marinara sauce. another thing I am very happy about is that I got a 100% on the quiz that took last week, was not expecting that.

The focaccia bread I think I can do with out but the other things we made in class I really like. The calzones I've had before and those were good but the Pagach bread, stuffed with cabbage and onions, was particularly good warm.





since I didn't post last week. here is a quick rundown of what we made. We made Stromboli and three different types of Pizza. All were very good. I gave my mom the recipe who gave it to my sister, so needless to say, Chef Nemetz' pizza formula is now all across the country.