A Valentine's Treat & Guest Chef visit!

From Guest Blogger Cara Oslager, Brainfood intern....

Hey Brainfood Fans! This is Cara, the intern from Kitchen All Stars on Mondays and Wednesdays.  This past Monday, we were very lucky to have our first guest chef come in!  Her name was Chef Lisa Biedrzycki, a pastry chef living here in DC.  She used to be a lawyer and then decided to follow her passion to become a chef and graduated as valedictorian from the Culinary Institute of America!  As a pastry chef, she has lots of experience making Petit Fours and this is what we were going to learn how to assemble.  We were lucky enough to have Chef Lisa bring in the pre-made layered cake so all we had to do was cut out shapes, put together a thick glaze, and learn how to pipe chocolate for designs!  Each group was given a rectangular cake of either chocolate cake with vanilla buttercream in the middle or a pound cake with blackberry preserve in the middle.  We then cut either the classic square shape or fun Valentine’s Day shapes for our petit fours.  Then, each group made a glaze consisting of powdered sugar and milk without a recipe.  It was a tough process in order to get the glaze to be the right thickness, but Chef Lisa was there to check out all of the groups.  She then let us use highly concentrated food coloring to create fun and bright colors for the icing.  Each group iced their petit fours while some group members focused on learning the design techniques using melted chocolate. 

Everyone had a great time and we all loved being able to learn about everyone’s creative designs.  What a great way to celebrate an early Valentine’s Day!  Thanks Chef Lisa!

- Cara