TED Talk Reflection

So I guess I'll work my way through the bullet points on the assignment sheet and how I think I did on each one.

1. Four to five minutes? I hope so! During my many practice runs I usually got anywhere between 4:30 and 5 minutes flat. During my presentation I remember telling myself in my head to slow down, but it was probably much closer to 4:30 than 5. 
2. Visual Content? I used a keynote and I was pretty proud of it to be honest. All of my pictures (besides what the Tart was supposed to look like) were personal photos. So either I or someone with me took all of them. I wanted to make it more original and more like it came from me. This applies especially with the slide full of cakes made my my Dad. Unfortunately when I tried to plug it in I had some technical difficulties, but thanks to Ms. Campagna, it wasn't a problem at all. (I also kept pointing my remote at the screen behind me and not the computer which was annoying.)
3. Content? I tried to convey that you should find something that you enjoy doing, even if you aren't that good at it. This didn't specifically relate to baking, but it was how I kept making desserts every week. I don't know how well this really was communicated through my presentation  so that wasn't really how I had planned it. I definitely showed my product, the cheesecakes turned out to be a big hit and I got rid of all of the ones I brought to school throughout the day (people were like ambushing me for them, but I guess that means they really liked them right?) 
4. Organization? I tried to refer to my dad and his cake decorating/baking/food making hobby periodically throughout the presentation, and I think that went well, although my transitions were lacking for sure. I didn't like my conclusion either. The whole "I want to leave you with 3 things" thing was stupid but I didn't know any other way to finish it off. 
5. Delivery? I hate giving presentations and I am never ever good that them. The period before I presented, I was running through my note cards and practicing, and honestly I was very confident then. I could give my speech without reading off of the cards, and only glancing maybe once or twice per card. I practiced in from of my parents, my friends, my math teacher even, basically anyone who would listen, and I read enthusiastically, confident, and was almost funny. However when I got on the stage things just went bad. I was stuttering and reading straight from the cards, this time looking up once or twice per card when it should have been the opposite. I just get scared in front of people and I definitely need to work on that, I just hope this didn't hinder how passionate and how much fun I really had throughout the process. 

In total, I think my TED Talk deserved maybe a 26 or 27 out of 30. Though I really disliked my delivery, I was truly proud of the content, which is something I normally can't say about a presentation I'll give. Also the cheesecakes were a hit and that was something I was worried about prior to the project. 

Again, I wasn't proud of my public speaking skills, and I wasn't even up there to do something as brave as play an instrument or sing, but for me, just speaking was an accomplishment. Though it wasn't perfect, it wasn't horrible either, which is definitely a plus! 

Possibly the worst thing that has come from my kitchen, Ever.

Last week, I made brownies! For some reason I was in the mood, and we had all the ingredients already at home. Unfortunately, no one was available to help me document the process, also unfortunately, I do not have the recipe! It was a family recipe that my Aunt has been making for years, and she pretty much just told me everything as I went along. I do have a picture though! (They were great!)

I was super excited to make something from a recipe I knew instead of one from the internet, and it turned out great!

Then things took a turn for the worst.

I decided to make a dessert from South Africa, called the Chocolate Milk Tart.

Recipe

Ingredients

1 tin condensed milk

750 ml milk

45 ml corn flour

60 ml cocoa powder

5 ml vanilla essence

2 eggs

45 ml butter

1 packet of coconut/tennis biscuits

Method

Reserve 125ml of the milk and add the rest of the milk together with the condensed milk to a medium saucepan and gently heat until hot and steaming - not boiling.
While the milk is heating, combine the reserved milk, corn flour, cocoa, essence and eggs. Add this mixture to the hot milk very slowly, whisking over moderate heat until thickened. This should take no more than 5 minutes.
Remove from the heat and stir in the butter.
Place a layer of biscuits into a greased tart dish. Spoon the hot custard over the biscuits and dust with cinnamon.
Allow to stand at room temperature to set for about 45 minutes to an hour or chill in the fridge.
Best served at room temperature with good coffee.

Makes 1 milk tart.

Well my first issue was the ingredients were measured in milliliters (and because of how lazy I am) conversions were a pain. The second issue was I COULD NOT FIND CORN FLOUR ANYWHERE OR TENNIS BISCUITS??? So I used Corn starch (which an unreliable wiki answers source told me was a substitute) and Nilla wafers instead of tennis biscuits (also a really bad decision.) 

Everything started off well, I added what was supposed to, and I was on the right track with heating up the milk. 

Not much to explain at this point, I combined them:

Ok, so here is where things got a bit tricky. I was supposed to mix the two together and whisk them until they thickened. It was going to cool for a while where it would set, so it wasn't supposed to be too thick yet, but obviously not the consistency of like water. So it for real was not working and it was like chocolate milk and not good at all. I honestly didn't know what to do here, so I figured I would just move. THIS IS DEFINITELY THE PART WHERE THE CORN FLOUR/CORN STARCH WOULD BEGIN TO SHOW PROBLEMS. 

I laid down my pie/cake/tart crust thing and realized that this is probably why Nilla wafers wasn't going to work, because when I poured the mixture in...

The Pie crust floated to the top omg. The pie crust was literally floating on top of the unset (basically chocolate milk) tart mix thing. 

SO I JUST PUT IT IN THE FRIDGE AND I THOUGHT THERE WAS NOTHING MORE I COULD POSSIBLY DO. 

Yeah so this really didn't go well I'm not gonna lie, I screwed this one up pretty bad. 

After like 5 hours of setting, it was still chocolate-milky. 

But hey enjoy these photos of my cousin and my Dad theatrically eating (slurping?) the tart (it was not a tart at all if you think about it, it was more like melted ice cream. My cousin really enjoyed it though!

Overall, It's a really good thing that my project is not based on improvement, and more of an experience type thing, because by these standards, I got worse?  

Vlog!

Wow I say "really" about 900 times but oh well. 

Jenna's Vlog! from jenna rollins on Vimeo.

Don't be a Fool, Eat my Blueberry Fool! (Title again provided by Brooke Rhea)

For St. Patrick's day, I made a traditional Irish dessert: Blueberry fool. Oh my god it was amazing. According to this source, which is also the recipe that I used, certain Irish locals know where to look when they are in need of blueberries. This recipe was created when those blueberries were mixed with Whipped cream, vanilla, and sugar!

Ingredients

1 pint fresh blueberries

2 cups whipping cream

¼ cup plus 2 Tbsp. sugar

1 tsp. vanilla

Directions

1. Put the blueberries and 1/4 cup sugar in a saucepan over medium heat and cook just until the berries release their juice and some start to burst, 3 to 4 minutes. Remove from the heat and cool completely.

2. Whip the cream with the 2 tablespoons sugar until soft peaks form. Stir in the vanilla.

3. Pour the cooled blueberries and their juice over the whipped cream and fold the fruit in lightly, allowing streaks to remain. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and chill for 2 hours.

4. Spoon into serving bowls or glasses.

I have never cooked blueberries before and was surprised when the directions called for me to wait for some of them to "start to burst." Although, when the blueberries and sugar were heating up, they were really pretty.

While those were cooking and eventually cooling, I started on the whipping cream. I have to say, after these past weeks, my electric mixer is my best friend. I have used it with every dessert, and will probably use it for the upcoming ones as well. So the whipping cream was to have "soft peaks form." I let it whip and it looked like it cloud.

At this point, all my ingredients were ready to be mixed, I had the soft peaks, and the juicy blueberries. But the blueberries were still pretty warm, and the whipped cream was starting to wilt a little bit. I put both of them into the refrigerator and took a dinner break. When i pulled them out again, they were ready to mixed. 

With the two of them finally together, it was pretty funny how my camera couldn't pick up the colors of the blueberries next to the bright white of the cream. Mixing them was difficult because I needed to mix them not too much where it would kill the whipped cream, and I also needed to keep it visually appealing of course. 

I wanted to eat it so bad at this point. It was like tie dye. Letting it cool was the worst part of this process. It looks so ready for me to eat! Fortunately I resisted, because after it cooled it tasted so much better than what I had tried off the spoon prior. So, since I made a pound cake last week and wasn't in the mood for that process again, I picked up an angel food cake block from giant, and six little sponge cake cups also from giant. I cut out the center of the block and plopped the mix into it.

Along with flopping some of it into the mini cups.

And here's my super artsy collage:

The blueberry fool was seriously so good I've been having it for dessert every day since I've made it, and i'm pretty sure my Grandma has been having it for breakfast! :)

Pounding that Pound Cake (Title provided by Brooke Rhea)

Pound Cake is extremely heavy and dense. When a recipe calls for five eggs, I guess that should be expected. I made a pound cake this week! So I kind of cheated with this week to be honest, I used a recipe titled "No Fail Pound Cake." It was one of those things where I had all the ingredients already in my kitchen, I hadn't started any other homework, and I was exhausted from the previous two weeks of musical madness. Although the cake really turned out delicious. 

I used a recipe from foodnetwork.com this week, which you can find here! 

Ingredients
1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, softened
3 cups sugar
5 eggs
3 cups cake flour
1 cup milk
2 teaspoons lemon extract
Berries, for garnish
Special equipment: a 10-inch bundt pan, greased and floured

Directions
In a large bowl, using a mixer, combine the butter and sugar until creamy. Add the eggs, 1 at a time, beating well after each addition. Add the flour and milk alternately, beginning and ending with the flour. Stir in the lemon extract. Spoon the batter into the prepared pan.
Place the pan in a cold oven and set the oven temperature to 325 degrees F. Bake cake for 1 hour. Increase the temperature to 350 degrees F and bake for 30 minutes more.
*Cook's Note: Do not open the oven door while baking.
Cool the cake in the pan for 10 minutes, and then turn out onto a wire rack to cool.

The result was definitely a step up from last week. I was really surprised by the amount alone of each ingredient, seriously five eggs is a lot, plus three cups of sugar and flour all in one bowl, I was having trouble with the amount of splatter form the electric mixer. 

There isn't much to say really about the process of mixing the ingredients and such, because all I did was pour everything in the mixer:

Baking took 90 minutes, which is the longest thing I've ever had to bake. I was holding back the urge to open the oven and take a peak like every 20 minutes. 

When it came out of the oven my entire house literally smelled like heaven. The top of the cake was almost crispy because of how dense the cake turned out. After ten or fifteen minutes I decided to try and pop the cake out of the pan, but it was seriously stuck in there. I figured I should give it another ten. Finally almost thirty minutes after the cake was out of the oven I tried to take it out again and it was still stuck. 

I ended up getting it out by taking a plastic knife and sliding it into every little crack where the cake touched the pan. A tedious task, but it worked!

I really think it turned out great, it was really soft but dense at the same time. I think my favorite part is that you can taste the tiny bit of lemon extract in it, it's like a little something extra. Julia Klugherz's birthday is actually Wednesday of this week (HAPPY BIRTHDAY JULIA), so I brought some of the finished product in for her (except she wasn't in school so...), and I dressed it up a little with some berries. 

Yay! Success! 

Crepe Nation

Famous last words: "I've decided to start simple... I'm making crepes!" French crepes are truly the opposite of simple and I have no idea where I got the idea that they were. My friend Priya was with me to help document the process (and taste test!) So all the photo credit goes to her. Here goes...

I laid out all the ingredients and equipment, (1 cup flour, 1 tsp sugar, 1/4 tsp salt, 3 eggs, 2 cups milk, 2 tbsps melted butter, 1 griddle) and prepared myself to start crepe making! Once everything was properly mixed together and I had (what I thought would be) a good consistency of batter, I poured my first one on the griddle...  

And then that happened. So, it wasn't the prettiest of crepes, but I figured it had to be impossible to make the perfect crepe on the first try. Then came time to flip it. Which did not go as well as planned. "It takes practice," I had to keep telling myself. So I ended up switching spatulas because the other one was just not working. After another folded over mess I needed a new game plan. The website where I found the recipe had said to use either a griddle or a frying pan over the stove. I figured I would give the frying pan a shot. 

The pan I had was a great size, my new spatula fit perfectly, and I could tilt the batter in the pan and make a perfect circle. Everything was going great! Until it wouldn't come off. I had sprayed it, and used butter, there was absolutely no reason it should be sticking! Time for plan C. I grabbed a fat slice of butter an spread it in a circle back on the griddle, and poured the batter in the middle, and it was actually working. I made a bunch that were (almost) circular, a little bit browned, and looked (kind of) yummy (also a bit like potato latkes?). I pretty much figured they weren't going to get any better than this. 

When I had just enough batter left for about three or four more, I decided to try it without any butter on the griddle. I felt like the butter was making it shinny and really bubbly on the outside (which was freaking me out). Literally was the best decision of my life. They were suddenly thicker and prettier and did not look like potato pancakes anymore. I seriously wished I would have made them like that way before. 

I had finally finished off all the batter and I was ready to make them beautiful and delicious with strawberries, bananas, cool whip, and Nutella. Finally I had a finished product!

I decorated this thin one, and inside were only a few strawberries and bananas, This one was purely, for show, when the ones that tasted the best were stuffed and ate like tacos!

So I made crepes, the majority were pretty ugly, it took way longer than I expected, cleaning up almost took longer than actually making them, and I ate them totally wrong. But they tasted so good and I had a lot of fun! I had them for breakfast the next morning too. I would definitely do it again and I plan to. French Crepes were a great way to start my genius project!

Jenna fait la nourriture!

This week I traveled to France! (Well technically not yet because it's hell week so I haven't gotten home any earlier than 9pm every night, but by Saturday the 2nd I will have travelled to France!) Since my project is entirely desserts now I've decided to start simple, but in bulk. I've been doing a lot of research from big sites like foodnetwork.com to the tiny and hidden food blogs of the internet. A couple issues I've run into have been finding authentic recipes from parts of the world. Depending on the recipe that I'm looking for, it's either really difficult to find a recipe that isn't edited with someone else's 'secret ingredient,' or I run into 17 billion of the same exact recipe and that's pretty much all I'm going to get.

So, for my first dessert, I'm going to start with making crepes! The first time I had crepes was when my parents came back from france almost five years ago. They had had them at a restaurant there and wanted me to try them (since I was ten and still hadn't something as super simple as crepes). We made them with rasberries and blueberries and I loved them! So I asked my parents for some help remembering that recipe, and when I make these, I'll be basing the recipe off of this one:

Ingredients

• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 tsp white sugar
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 3 eggs
• 2 cups milk
• 2 tbsps melted butter

Directions

1. Sift together flour, sugar and salt; set aside. In a large bowl, beat eggs and milk together with an electric mixer. Beat in flour mixture until smooth; stir in melted butter.
2. Heat a lightly oiled griddle or frying pan over medium high heat. Pour or scoop the batter onto the griddle, using approximately 2 tablespoons for each crepe. Tip and rotate pan to spread batter as thinly as possible. Brown on both sides and serve hot.

Of course this is going to be really simple, but I wouldn't want to have a horror story on my first dessert. I have a griddle that we always make pancakes on that I'm excited to use. For the inside and the toppings, my favorite fruits are definitely strawberries and bananas, I was hoping to have some fresh slices of those, some whipped cream, and for sure some Nutella! My family has loads of fruit so when i make these tomorrow we'll be experimenting. I'm going to make another blog post after I make them tomorrow night with pictures and how they went! I'm really excited!

Week One

I've grown up in an environment centered around the kitchen. My family bonded and grew closer by sharing and making meals together. My Dad has always loved cooking and baking, he's always loved to host dinner on the holidays, and he volunteers to make and decorate cakes for family birthdays. As soon as I was old enough to get into the kitchen and work with him, I did. When I was ten, and the movie Ratatouille came out, I was in love with it. I wanted to be a chef for the longest time after that. In middle school, I really enjoyed family and consumer science, cooking came easy to me. I started asking my Grandmother a lot about her favorite foods to make and to this day I make a lot with her.

Starting with the week of February 25th, and ending with the week of March 25th I plan on assigning each week with a different region of the world. From that region, I will choose one or two dessert dishes to make (the amount will depend on the complexity and length of time the dish will take) and cook or bake them that week. All of the food I make will be of the dessert category because I really enjoy making dessert more than cooking actual meals. At the end of each week, my blog post is going to include the recipe(s) of what I made that week, and I'll explain a little bit about how it went. Also I am looking forward to posting pictures of all my creations with the recipes and final products.

Baking cakes, cupcakes, cookies, etc. has always been one of my favorite things to do. From trying recipes that include Sprite, to experimenting with food coloring, I always want to make something new. I figured the next step would be try something completely different, make things with new ingredients, make things I've never even heard of, and hopefully a lot of fruit! I'm really excited to make some desserts that maybe have some ingredients that you wouldn't normally expect to be in desserts. Once I have my whole timeline of all the weeks planned out, I'm going to work on getting the recipes from different sources.

My family's collection of cookbooks is going to be my primary resource, as well as recipes that have been passed down in my family. I hope to come out of these next 5 weeks with a better understanding of international cuisine, I want to experience flavors and tastes from countries that I've never tried before. Cooking and baking have always been a passion for me, and I can't wait to broaden my horizons (hopefully sweetly!)