busy, busy, busy! or am i slow?

well, its been busy for me as i've been drusin around this last half of nov. drusin is a term coined by my friends anne and alan for when someone is moving quite slow. a prime example of this is me, hence the play on words.

anyway, its been a while and i've done a lot of baking recently, so i thought i would go ahead and post a bunch of photos of things i've worked on.

these first few photos are of two german chocolate cakes i made for my friend martin's 40th birthday. i used a recipe i took from david lebovitz's blog which you can find here. as you may have guessed he like to bike, so i spruced up the top of one of the cakes with a few chocolate cycles. 

 

 

after making these two monsters you think i would have stopped for a bit, but i kept chugging along right through thanksgiving. unfortunately i have to wrangle up some shots of the pies i made for the holidays, but there is plenty of other items to display.

as i posted before i'd been on an effort to perfect my skills of baking french macarons, those tricky french sandwich cookies made from no more then egg whites, almond meal and sugar. i found a pretty good formula on an aussies blog syrup and tang. it tells you how much of each ingredient to use based off the amount of egg whites you have; a baker percentage for macarons.

well, they've been getting better each bake off and i think i hit my stride on thanksgiving, so lets see if i can keep it up. along with macarons i've been exploring another sandwich cookie with a more humble background, the whoopie pie. my first attempt was actually using a recipe i found from a british newspaper. i guess the craze has jumped the pond and landed in london town. europeans scale there ingredients by weight, making things more exact, which is why i clung to this recipe.

finally i'll leave you with these last two photos, one being a slice of a caramel chocolate tart from the book the sweet life by kate zuckerman and a loaf of bread produced in the fashion of chad robertson of tartine bakery fame. I have to thank my friend anne for jotting down the  bread formula the same day i was demanded to make the chocolate tart in order to cure a group of ladies from sweet depletion.

come back in the following weeks to see even more treats as i'm sure the holidays will spark a flurry of baking, maybe even a few drawings and other surprises too.