Christmas Decoration Class

Holiday seasons!

This time, I taught how to decorate cupcakes and cookies with Christmas theme. We made two kinds of cupcakes, and decorated two kinds of cookies.

The flavors of the cupcakes were vanilla lemon and carrot cake. Both baked very well.

There weren't enough time to bake cookies in class, so I baked vanilla and gingerbread cookies the night before and took them to the class for decoration.

Since this was everyone's first time to decorate cookies and cupcakes, it took more time than I planned, but many of them turned out very cute, and the class was very fun.

The cream cheese frosting with the carrot cake tasted very good, and the cookies were so cute!!!

This would be a good class to have in different seasons with different themes, so I would love to held more of them in the future.

Happy holidays!!

Appetizer & Hordorve Lesson

There was a request for fancy looking appetizers and Hordorves lesson for home parties, so I taught two kinds of terrines, a Vegetable Consomme one, and a salmon one.

We used fresh vegetables from a farmer's market. With the vegetable terrine, we made a dressing using citrus vinegar and maple syrup. This terrine holds together with gelatine cooled in a refrigerator.
With the salmon terrine, we made yougurt dill creamy dressing which also would go well with the vegetable terrine. This one was cooked in a water bath in the oven. Both of them were done right on time, so I was really relieved when we could try some after the class. Usually terrines taste better after sitting at least for over night.

While we waited for both terrines to be done, we made three kinds of hordorves.

The first one is buckwheat mini pancake topped with smoked salmon and creme fraiche. Creme fraiche is something similar to sour cream, but is lower in acidity and higher in fat. It is a common cream used in Europe.

The next one is America's favorite, "Deviled Egg". The name comes from "strong, spicy taste". In order to add the hot flavor, we used tabasco this time. The red color on the top is the sprinkles of powdered paprika.

The last one is mushroom tapanade. Sauteed mushrooms with different herbs, ground and spread over miniature toast. This one has a really good flavor, and it sure will become a nice accompaniment to wines.

All of these will be a popular starters for your holiday season parties!!