For Natural Chef certification, in addition to classes each of us has to "extern." My official externship is in the works (more on that once I have details...). But the excitement of this weekend was that my friend Brooks Nguyen, owner of Dragonfly Cakes, invited me to help at her bakery for my first official extern hours.
Brooks attended the baking program up at the Greystone (Napa) location of the Culinary Institute of America. Her bakery opened five years ago and is clearly a labor of love. They specialize in gorgeous hand decorated petit fours. Brooks created the seven flavors (my favorite was lemon), and has built the business to the point where she was featured on the cover of Harry & David's Mother's Day catalog! If you taste these things, you'll understand why they were featured.
I got to decorate about a thousand of the lemon petit fours with their little pink flowers using white chocolate as my "glue." Baking is a whole different realm for me, so it was quite the experience. Dragonfly's petit fours are carried by Mollie Stones, Whole Foods and Costco I believe, in addition to Harry & David. Highly recommend them, just please for the sake of their sanity wait to order until after the Mother's Day rush ;-)
I've added photos from my Dragonfly adventure under the class photos archive, along with the new sea vegetables, breakfast and alternative ingredients class pictures. Enjoy!
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