Last weekend I headed up to the city to peruse the Fancy Food Show with Nora and Liisa. It’s the Comic Con of food, spanning the North and South Hall of the Moscone Center. We started by chatting up the purveyors that we already use as well as a few candy places we wanted to sample. After that it was off to the cheese and cured meats. We filled up fast but still had plenty of meandering to do. Six hours later we headed home with full bellies, full bags, and a burnt tongue (Republic of Tea was too hot!)

It’s also been a very busy week at the patisserie with lots of celebration cakes and custom Year of the Dragon cookies!

Here’s some pictures!

Here’s some pictures!

I made a super cute cake based on a Team Fotress 2 mod for the folks over at OOO.

Speaking of OOO, Spiral Knights won Best Online Game Design at GDC Austin this week too! Awesome!!

Saturday at work I did a mega large and heavy cake with Disney’s Cars theme. The bottom tier was 16x16x3 and the whole thing was red velvet cake so it weighed a damn ton! I think it tured out great though!

Saturday night we went down to The Tank for my first San Jose Sharks game and Ian’s first hockey game period. I was, of course, cheering for the St. Louis Blues, who ended up winning. Ian looks super cute in a hockey jersey!

Finally we spent Sunday and Monday hanging out with my friend Andrew from Ireland! Lots of fun had by all! Here’s some pictures!

Unfortunately that character wasn’t an option to sleep with in Dragon Age 2, so I picked his quirky doppelganger from the expansion. Unfortunately he turned out to be an Emo, whiny, sissy pants. The first panel of the comic is a snippet of how aggravating he was.

Ian’s romance option turned out to be super creepy, because during the romance screen her neck broke and became all weird and elongated.

Anyway, there’s a bunch of stuff that you don’t really understand just to tell you that I did a comic! Hah!

I’ve also got a picture from the trippy rain we were having and a couple from the store. One being the tons and tons of decorated cookies I’ve been doing and the other of our new fall window display!

Enjoy!

The first couple are from a Mario themed cake. It was a lot of little work but it turned out really well.

Next are icon cookies for Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIN. They were very time consuming but turned out well. Though if I’m asked to do them again, I will really need to invest in an airbursh.

After that is a wedding cake for Omni Hotel.

This week was also one of Ian’s coworker’s birthday. He tends to wear a hoodie covered in eyeballs. So i made him a cake….covered in sugar eyeballs.

Next was a baby block cake. I hate hate hate making square cakes. They make me crazy OCD. But I thought I turned out ok none the less.

Ah the next three…….It’s a centennial celebration and cake was needed.  The tiered cake not only has sparkly stars on it, but the little sticks sticking out are also sparkler candles……..understated yeah? Needs more cowbell….. The full sheet cake then also went with it.

Final are a couple cat pictures. One of Schrodinger looking super intelligent and one of Pixel helping us put the laundry away…….

That’s all for now!

We were really expecting it to be roasting hot down there because Morgan Hill is south of San Jose, but the weather was actually wonderful and breezy. Though there was not a cloud in the sky, so even with SPF 1 million on I still managed a sunburn…..

Upon arriving we got a history lesson on the orchard and Andy himself. Then we were let loose to taste samples of 40 to 50 different kinds of stonefruits from the orchard. So many plums, nectarines, peaches, and pluots, as well as some hybrids I didn’t know about (peach-plum hybrids mainly).

After stuffing ourselves with samples we were given boxes and began running amok among the orchard itself….with a tour guide of course.

All and all it was a super fun and interesting day. Here’s some random pictures!

This weekend I did two drastically different looking cakes with very similar tastes. The first was a three tiered black and white cake inspired by anemone flowers. Because the real flowers themselves are so fragile out of what and bloody hard to find, I made them out of fondant. What a pain in the butt! Anemones are suppose to have about a bazillion stamens, but I interpreted them a bit differently to safeguard my sanity. The flavors of the cake were pretty yummy. Two tiers of vanilla cake with lemon mousseline and raspberry jam and chocolate cake with  mocha mousseline and custard. Nom nom.

The other wedding cake this weekend was a sweet and simple cherry blossom design with doves. All buttercream and all yummy! Its flavors were vanilla cake with lemon mousseline and raspberry jam and chocolate cake with cream cheese icing and raspberry jam.

Over the last week I also helped celebrate friend Cephalopod’s birthday with bacon, corn, maple chiffon cake with maple cream cheese filling. It was a really fun experiment and the best version of the cake I’ve made yet. It was received surprisingly well at Three Rings despite the employees healthy eating habits. The birthday boy described the cake as being “alarmingly bacony”. That’s a success!

Thanks to Mr. and Mrs. McConville for the wonderful covered cookbook stand! It helped very much in keeping my weird recipes nice and clean while I destroyed the kitchen!

I think that’s it from here! We’re off to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 tonight!

Happy Anniversary Mom and Dad!