perks of the job

hello! i won't bother to make excuses for myself - when i started this blog, i was essentially a secretary in an office i loved but didn't find very satisfying, and i've since bounced from job to job, remaining unsatisfied - until now. this blog served as a fantastic means of creative expression, a way to force myself to do what i love even though i wasn't getting paid for it - it's rather bittersweet that i've found a job now that is so fulfilling, where i get to be as creative as i can muster and do what i love all day long. it's a wonderful feeling, but leaves me feeling somewhat drained when i come home in the afternoon, and blogging has lost some of its urgency, for lack of a better term, for me - it's almost as if my job has become my creative outlet, and blogging has become more of a job. a job that i love, but one that i've been pretty awful about keeping up with.

so, anyway, here's an attempt at getting back on the horse. one of the things i was sad to leave at my last job was the freedom to wear whatever i liked. i've worked in bakeries before, and it's more a case of dressing for comfort that style - and i'm okay with that, but i do miss my fancy shoes and vintage dresses. so i've been rather delighted to find that the other girls who i share a kitchen with are unendingly chic while managing to be kitchen-appropriate. i've taken to wearing lipstick, tights and dresses with an apron careful placed over them; or on more low-key days, something like this:



shirt: j crew
pants: cheap monday
shoes: vintage, thrifted
belt: asos

another fantastic perk is that the bakery is the sister-store of a wonderful organic market, which is right across the street; i'm able to get off work, walk across and head straight to the meat counter, to see what's freshest and talk to the butcher about the best way to prepare it. last thursday it was a lamb, and the butcher recommended i bring half the neck home and braise it with a rub and some vegetables. it's not something i would ever make - for whatever reason, my cooking preferences tend towards extremely fussy, involved dinners - but i followed his advice and it turned out absolutely divine.








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braised lamb's neck

1/2 neck of lamb
a rub of spices - i used kosher salt, fresh cracked pepper, ground fennel seed, coriander, paprika, rubbed sage and fresh garlic
your choice of vegetables - i used what i had lying around: a leek, two potatoes, and a handful of cherry tomatoes
red wine and chicken stock, for braising
a pat of butter, for browning the meat

start the butter in a pan - once hot, add the meat, and cook for a couple of minutes on each side - just long enough to brown it. transfer it to a slow cooker with the veggies inside, and add enough chicken stock and wine to come halfway up the top of the meat. braise on high for at least three hours, or up to six. i served mine with a simple greens salad, tossed with some parmesan, breadcrumbs, salt and pepper and topped with a poached egg. (i'm pretty much topping everything with a poached egg these days.)




i have such a backlog of food to post, i'll do my best to stay on top of it this time! much love to all of you for sticking with me, and hoping you've had a great 2012 thus far.

xo audrey

it's beginning to look a lot like. . .

hello hello!

well, believe it or not, i am STILL nursing this cold, and starting to forget what it feels like to have a nose that isn't runny, and a head that isn't almost too heavy for its neck. one of my readers, lauren, pointed out that i shouldn't nap in the afternoon, and i think she's right - unfortunately i've become stuck in this awful cycle of wake up super early & tired, work for 8 or 9 hours, become exhausted, go home, nap, wake up for dinner and find myself unable to fall asleep at a reasonable hour, and repeat. i've also been watching a lot of law and order: special victims unit, which is doing some pretty weird things to my dreams.

regardless of all of this, i've been working like a maniac and honestly loving just about every minute of it. (except the first thirty or so. try as i might, i am just not a morning person.) with the holidays coming i'm trying to get some ideas together for the bakery (which, i should mention, is called the annex, in fort greene. if you are in new york please stop by!! it's a small place, you'll see me.) what holiday cookies and treats do you like? as a pastry chef with an admittedly saltier tooth than sweet, this time of year can be hard for me - so i've been focusing my time on macarons, always my favorite.








from the top: raspberry lemonade, blueberry white chocolate, caramel apple cider, chocolate espresso, pear ginger, and peppermint dark chocolate.

thank you all for the sweet and encouraging comments. it's a job that hardly feels like work, but i have to say i'm anxious to get my energy back and my sleep back on schedule so i can get back to normal again - i feel like i've been on some kind of strange baking vacation where all i do is work, eat and sleep.

if you have any holiday recipe ideas you'd like to share, please let me know! i'll let you know if i'm serving your cookies in the bakery.

xo audrey

just desserts

hey folks, please pardon my absence - i've had a hell of a two weeks. in the last couple weeks i've made emergency trips to connecticut for a funeral and illinois for a family emergency; everyone is fine, and life goes on, but it has been extremely distracting - especially when the stressful icing on all of this is that i'm about to leave my current job. something came up rather suddenly, and now that it's all been finalized, i can finally share - in just a couple of weeks, i'll be the chef/baker behind a new coffee shop and bakery in brooklyn.



so. . . soon, and very soon, i'll have something new to post nearly every day. i'm working on creating a menu and have a list of ideas about 87 items long! if you have any suggestions. . . anything you'd like to see. . . please let me know, i'd love any input.



so, forgive me for two weeks of nothing - and for having nothing but these unbaked cinnamon rolls to post! i made them as part of my "interview" for the new place. interviewing for jobs in a kitchen is so much more fun than any other kind of job interview (not saying much, of course) - it's typically a couple hours of showing what you can do, and seeing if you'll be a good fit with the space. i made a couple kinds of galettes, cinnamon rolls, and some really tasty ham and cheese popovers; all very 'audrey' things to make, i suppose. i'm really chomping at the bit to get going full time.

i'm going to attempt to make dinner for my husband for the first time in weeks, and i'll certainly take photos to prove it. thanks for bearing with me and i promise not to drop off again!

xo audrey

sugar cookies

good morning! i should start off with a warning that i'm on day two of a three-day juice cleanse, and i'm feeling a little loopy. starting every morning with a shot of chlorophyll (easily the most foul thing i have ever tasted) is in no way a stand-in for a nice, hot cup of coffee. i'm not doing this to try to drop weight or anything - just to be clear - but, rather, because i've been drinking beer like a sorority girl on spring break in europe.

all that said, i'm going to torture myself a bit and post some cookies i made over the weekend. a friend just got engaged (congratulations sharon!) and asked me to make cookies for her engagement party. each one got wrapped up with a little note that said, "will you be my bridesmaid?" (or groomsman, depending.) i had a lot of fun decorating them, each a little differently.








i had a moment of panic when i woke up to make them, realizing that i have tons of sugar cookie recipes and wasn't sure which would be best for this kind of decorating; i decided to go with betty crocker, always reliable, and sure enough the dough was perfect. here's the (slightly modified) recipe:

1 stick unsalted butter
1 1/2 cups powdered sugar
1/2 t raspberry flavor
a couple pinches ground vanilla beans
pinch of salt
1 egg
2 1/2 cups AP flour
1 t cream of tartar
1 t baking soda

a friend of sam's owns a company that makes and bottles natural flavorings, and when she heard i was a pastry chef she very generously bestowed me with a basket full of many of her offerings. i've been waiting for a chance to try them out - this summer seemed way too busy (and hot) for baking - so i subbed in raspberry flavor and ground vanilla beans. the flavor was so good that i used them in some macarons later that day, too - subtle, and REALLY raspberry, not some weird fake-tasting concoction. it can be so hard to find good, unusual flavors, and her shop has tons of them, and at super affordable prices. /end shill.

start the butter, sugar and flavor in your mixer; beat them together until nice and fluffy and white. add egg (preferably at room temperature) and mix just until combined, then add the flour, tartar and baking soda all at once until it comes together in a dough (mix as little as possible.) refrigerate for at least an hour, until the dough is nice and firm.

preheat oven to 37roll it out until the dough is about 1/4 inch thick - they'll puff up a little when they bake. i then decorated mine with fondant i dyed and some royal icing i made. voila!

hope everyone had a great weekend!

xo audrey

glowering flower

good morning! how was everyone's weekend? i'd planned on going into the city to see a couple of shows - fashion! - but instead i stayed home and cleaned my room, because THAT'S how cool i am. this is kind of a repeat, i guess, of what happened in september - delighted to be invited to shows, for the first time ever, i rsvp'd to almost all of them and then ended up only going to the one - rachel comey - that i was most excited to see. there are a few reasons for this - i'm incredibly flattered to be invited, to be sure, but i don't really think of myself as a "fashion person." i am really just a girl who likes dressing up. and this weekend, the craziness of lincoln center - the jumble of photographers, the legions of stick-thin models, the waves and waves of beautiful, confident women walking swiftly past me in several-thousand-dollar shoes as i wait in line, staring at my $12-on-ebay-miu miu's - just didn't sound like a good time. i'm definitely not judging - lots of close blogger friends attended many a show over the past week, and have some really gorgeous photos to show for it. but they know what they're talking about; i don't.

all that to say, i am going to a presentation tonight and i am VERY excited about it. my camera is fully charged and i'm dressed in an outfit that is the most show-appropriate i could put together; i'll post photos from both the show and of my outfit tomorrow, so you can (hopefully) see what i mean. in the meantime, here's an outfit from last week that i somehow never got around to posting.





top: quail
skirt: thrifted, vintage
shoes: a few seasons old pour la victoire
brooch: thrifted vintage clip-on earring

this shirt is one of my all-time favorites, but i don't wear it much anymore because i accidentally ran it through the wash about a year and a half ago, and it's shrunk up to be less of a crop top. . . well, yeah, less than a crop top. i saw a girl rocking this color combo on the F train a couple weeks ago and made mental note of it, and this green skirt is just high enough to make this not-totally-unreasonable for work. all together, the colors & shapes felt very floral to me; a nice little last-hurrah for summer.

oh! i've recently gotten a lot of questions about how i learned to cook. i did go to french culinary school, and graduated about 2 years ago; my concentration was pastry, though, so all of my classes focused on pies, tarts, brulees, napoleons, macarons, chocolate, etc. as far as cooking - rather than baking - is concerned, i really got into cooking a few years ago, when i moved to chicago; i love good food but couldn't afford to go out to eat, so i started slowly, cooking recipes from the cookbooks my mom had given me, and just kept on going from there. i was lucky enough to grow up with a mother and two sisters who knew their way around the kitchen, so i learned some simply by observing them. within a few years i'd cooked enough to know how to make the basics, and started experimenting more; in the year before i left chicago, i started an underground restaurant of sorts, selling tickets to a four- or five-course meal to be cooked in my apartment. it was not only a success, but the most fun i'd ever had - that's when i decided to move to new york to attend culinary school. i decided to focus on baking instead of cooking for a couple of reasons - one being that cooking is something much more easily experimented with. once you know the basics, you can pretty much throw whatever you like into a dish and it will work, so long as you've thought the flavors through - baking, though, is an exact science, and i wanted to be able to play with recipes the way i can when i cook.

i hope this answers some questions, and wasn't too long winded! thank you all so much for reading - you make this a lot of fun for me.

i hope you all had a lovely weekend! until tomorrow,

xo audrey

april showers

good morning! well, afternoon. i spent most of my morning adding things to my etsy shop; my closet is packed to the gills and beginning to overflow onto my desk, my chair, my floor, so it's time to dig in deep and get rid of some things, no matter how attached i may feel. i'll post in a bit about the stuff up for sale - if you're interested in anything, leave a comment and i'll hold it for you.

as for today, i'm combatting another rainy, chilly day with one of my favorite outfits of all time. this little red dress has been in my closet, completely untouched and all but forgotten, for probably two years; it was a little big when i bought it, and by the nature of the way i organize my closet - by color, starting with red and ending with black - it's all the way to one side of the closet, and gets kind of hidden by the wall. it fits much better now that i've put on a few pounds, and the strength of the corduroy allows me to cover it with the mess of flower brooches i've amassed, via etsy, bonanza and a few thrift stores. my new favorite collection.






dress: on sale at anthropologie (a long time ago)
belt: thrifted
brooches: thrifted, etsy'd, bonanza'd
tights: man on the street
shoes: urban

someone asked for the cupcake recipe, so here it is! it's adapted from the vanilla cake we made at the bakery where i used to work. without further ado -

2 1/2 cups cake flour (not self-rising)
3/4 cup all-purpose flour
1 Tbsp. baking powder
1 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. baking soda
8 Tbsp. (1 stick) unsalted butter , softened
1/2 cup vegetable shortening
1 3/4 cups sugar
2 Tbsp. vanilla bean paste
2 large eggs , at room temperature
1 1/2 cups ice cold water
3 large egg whites , at room temperature
1/4 tsp. cream of tartar

preheat oven to 325. sift together flours, baking powder, soda, and salt; set aside. cream together the butter and shortening until soft and no chunks remain; add sugar and beat until light and fluffy. add egg and vanilla and mix juuuuust until combined. in three additions, add flour, then water, then flour, then water, then flour and mix until just barely combined. whisk up your egg whites and cream of tartar in a separate bowl until they are white and frothy and no yellow remains - NO peaks, though. fold this in to your cake batter and scoop it into cupcake cups, about 2/3 of the way full. makes about 30 cupcakes. bake for 10-12 minutes, until they just start to turn golden and a toothpick comes out clean. i actually don't know how many minutes this was - i just kept an eye on them.

pastry cream

2 cups milk
1/4 cup white sugar
2 egg yolks
1 egg
1/4 cup cornstarch
1/3 cup white sugar
2 tablespoons butter
1 teaspoon vanilla bean paste
cherry whiskey or brandy (optional)(but highly recommended)

put milk and 1/4 cup of sugar on the stove on medium - high. meanwhile, whisk the remaining ingredients together until they're pale yellow and well combined. once the milk starts to boil, take it off the stove and add it to your egg mixture, bit by bit, whisking furiously all the while, until it's combined; pour the whole thing back into the pot and whisk it on medium heat until it starts to BOIL. once it's boiling, KEEP IT GOING for another 2 minutes at this heat to get rid of the starchy taste from the cornstarch. pour it through a seive into a bowl or tupperware, cover it with plastic, and let it cool.

take about 1 cup of strawberries and cut them into pretty small dice. mix this with about 1/2 of your pastry cream, and set aside.

take a big star pastry tip and insert it into the cupcakes; twist, and pull. you'll pull out a little tube of vanilla cake. you can keep this for munching, or making a trifle with your leftover pastry cream and strawberries! yum. put your pastry cream/strawberry mixture into a piping bag and fill the holes you've made. ta da! i plan on topping these with a lavender buttercream, or maybe even just whipped cream for the sample ones.




all right, that's all from me for today. stay warm, stay dry, and i'll see you tomorrow!

xo audrey

poof!

apres-work last night i rushed home to get back into the kitchen. the event i'm doing all this work for is tomorrow evening, so yesterday and tonight are really crunch time; i spent most of my night baking sheet cakes and painting macarons. so far, so good, but tonight looks like it's setting up to be a late one; i have lots of assembly to do, lots of finishing touches, and of course i have to meet an electrician at work at 7:30 am - it'll be like college! in that i will get no where near enough sleep and yet probably be out until late tomorrow night (hopefully reveling in my success while stuffing my face with my own desserts.)

wedding planning has been stalled in the midst of all the baking madness, and i'm starting to stress about it. heavily. a couple mornings ago i was brushing my bangs and found my first grey hair. i kid you not. here's hoping that the latter part of this week is easy, quiet, and gives me time to do some much-needed wedding planning.



top: thrifted
skirt: thrifted
tights: HUE, gift from my soon to be mother-in-law
shoes: steve madden
shoe poofs: ban.do

just got this package from ban.do in the mail yesterday, and i am in love with everything in it, which i will do my best not to wear all at once but parse out over a few days. even the packaging is adorable.

these shoes are noticeably scuffed on one side - one bright sunny saturday last spring sam and i decided to ride over the brooklyn bridge (he on his skateboard, me on my bike) and i for whatever reason thought that i could ride in kitten heels - i of course took a terrible spill and destroyed my knee, elbows, and one of these shoes. battle scars.

have a lovely tuesday, folks!

xo audrey

food porn

an outfit post will likely come later, but for now, some shots of what i did over the weekend - bake, bake, and bake some more. batches of macarons, a hundred some-odd mini tart shells, lemon curd, bergamot buttercream, jasmine sponge cake. . . and i think i'm finally getting the knack of this fancy camera.

pop cakes

i have a few email subscriptions that i can't quite bring myself to get rid of, but 99% of the time i delete them without reading; i do the grand majority of my email reading on an iphone, so it's gotta be good to get me to squint at that stupid screen. (i really need new glasses.) but this story on flavorpill caught my eye and i thought it was worth a quick link-up.

pop culture cakes! some really awesome, clever (and some pretty sloppy and uninspired) cakes derived from books, movies, music, tv, and art. a few of my favorites:

the hungry caterpillar & where the wild things are (and, if you follow the link, several very cute others):



andy warhol(another great cake goldmine):


damien hirst:


and a beautiful mondrian:

fashion flake

hello hello! yes, it has been awhile. after receiving a bit of good-natured hell from a friend of mine about being such a flake about posting i realized that there is one thing i miss about my old office job: all the time i had in front of my computer every morning. it's also one of the things i'm most relieved to get away from - spending 9 hours a day in front of a computer was, for me at least, a pretty depressing affair and one that i certainly grew weary of, but it did make writing a blog post a highlight and something easily squeezed into my day before my first cup of coffee and microwaveable lunch. (yeah, i guess there really isn't much else i miss about that job. except the people, of course.) so what has been keeping me so damn busy? well, lots of this.







i made smitten kitchen's best birthday cake.


and shrimp tacos,




and green things,



and red things,

and the most delicious shortcake i've ever had. i think.

so, maybe i'll be a girl here for a minute and go a bit further into explaining my blog hibernation; the winter is just ending, and i work in a bakery, and i spend most of my free time cooking, and i just don't feel like taking photos of myself every day. it's a thing i've always had a strange relationship with anyway; i'm not a big fan of having my picture taking, and like anyone, i'm my own worst critic, but i do love clothes and dressing up and i feel it's an artistic expression in a way that i am proud to show to the world. that said, not only does spending 12 hours a day in a kitchen not really lend itself to wearing one's most delicate vintage finery, but the results of all that cooking (and eating) don't really make me feel like getting super dressed up. the summer seems to be just around the corner, though, and i'm determined to "health up," so to speak, and get my style groove back. i hope you'll be satisfied with delicious recipes and food porn filling in the spaces when outfit posts are less frequent. additions to the store are still to come and i'll be doing my best to make my posts more frequent - but, you know. i'm human. obviously. thanks for sticking with me.

much love,

xo audrey