I'm not kiddin', it's no yoke...

I just came across this great David Lebovitz post: "Recipes To Use Up Leftover Egg Whites."

I figure people might want to see dessert recipes sans egg yolks- not only just because they might be left over. Some people might want to cut their cholesterol, and some people might just be tweaked about the yolk being baby chick goop. Or maybe some people just use up their yolks doing, uh...egg tempera painting?

Lebovitz's entry has so many nice yolk-less recipe ideas, like souffles, macaroons, pavlovas, marshmallows, etc. Check it out, and peruse his site if you have time...it's pretty great.

Molly's Birthday Cake

Hey All, So our own Molly Schnick had a Birthday last week and I wanted to make her a special cake (duh). In one of this summer's issues (the avocado love issue) of Saveur they had this article on the history of Root Beer. There was a little snippet about a southern Root Beer Cake a contributer remembered from a family reunion in North Carolina. PERFECT. I set out to make a three layer and it came out beautifully!! The only qualm I had with it was, well not root beery enough. (However, you can order root beer extract from Zatarain's, the company that makes Nawlin's style rice and bean mixes, apparently they started out with root beer extract!)

I decided I wanted to take it a bit further and make a ROOT BEER FLOAT cake. So I ditched the root beer frosting in the recipe and made a vanilla bean buttercream, which gave it the lil flecks and it looked great. Again, I wished it was more true to it's flavor, I only added one vanilla bean and some extract...maybe two beans next time? Anyway here are some pics. Oh and I made Pecorino Frico for our salads, so easy and elegant...and delish. HAPPY BIRTHDAY LIL' SCHNICK!!

WEDDING CAKE NUMBER ONE

Forgive the poor quality of these pics. Below is my very first attempt at a wedding cake. The cake was for the lovely and gifted Tara Donovan.
As you can see through the construction and completion of the cake at my house, it looks a little wacky! However at the restaurant where the reception was I was able to revive it from the car ride which almost caused it's premature end. I know the pic at the party is very blurry and grainy BUT as you can see, some decorations and the lovely topper that Tara made make it look so quaint and simple and....delicious- which is the most important thing! I heard people at the party exclaiming it was delicious! Imagine me among 140 art crowd folks, wringing my hands over my fennel salad, terrified there would be something wrong with the cake. That it would separate during the speeches, but it survived! Next time I will try the Mousseline Buttercream from Cake Bible as the regular buttercream I used slid off the bottom cake layer en route. (To be fair to the buttercream my inability to accurately level the bottom layer may have contributed to this.) I will try SO much harder next time and I did learn a bunch: crumb coat is KING, level! level! level! your layers, and always bring enough extra frosting (and tools, dowels, etc) to fix any mishaps. Anyhow- here it is.