Jess meets Rose

So one of my favorite movies is Julie and Julia. Partially because I just love food, and baking, but partially because I love how it depicts how fun and exciting, how creative and entertaining, how draining and stressful making good food can be. Food is an art, if you do it well it is a gift you can give to lots of people that they carry with them long after the food is gone.

People give me cook books all the time...however, I'm not really a cookbook kind of girl. In this day of the Internet I like to look at many recipes of the same type. Then do a sort of compiling to make and adapt my own recipes from those that received the best ratings and reviews by brave souls that tried the recipe before me. I like to learn from others mistakes and hopefully make fewer of my own.

However, a couple of years ago I was making a birthday cake for my lovely friend Kait and I used a recipe out of a cookbook called Rose's Heavenly Cakes, by Rose Levy Beranbaum. It was amazing! Then recently I pulled the cookbook out again trying to find a cake I could adapt into cupcakes to make with my little friend Cass. I started realizing that all the cakes seemed exquisite, and although I didn't want to try to make any of the cakes in the book with a 4 year old, I decided I did want to make ALL the cakes in this book.

Here is where my project begins. I'm pulling a Julie Powell...I'm going to cook all the recipes in Rose's Heavenly Cakes. I'm not giving myself a deadline, and I'm making these cakes for the fun of it. I'm doing this project for me. I love to bake, especially fancy pastries. Somehow though, that joy sometimes gets stolen when I'm rushing to make something for a birthday or an event and probably spending too much money in the process. So this time I'm doing this on my own time, when I have time and when I have the money. I'm investing the money for the right ingredients and materials.

So we'll see how it goes. I think this is going to be the start of something good. I'll start out by showing you cakes I've made before and I may interupt with other fun baking projects that find their way in the middle of this one. All in all my goal is to make some taste buds happy.

Thanks for coming along for the ride. I hope you have fun, learn a few things on the way and I hope to learn some things from you too. Please give me feedback whenever you have it and let's make some cake!