So many families were crushed when they heard about the 5-alarm fire that burned a few buildings at our local Merritt Trace Elementary School during the summer. With just a few clicks on Facebook and a mere minute of your time, you can vote to have Kohl’s give $500,000 to the school. You even get 5 votes that you can give this one school. What a powerful way to start your morning, right? I sincerely appreciate your efforts to help our school.
We interrupt your regularly scheduled sugar and fondant work with… a pie! I know, we tell everyone that we only make custom cakes. Well, TLC asked us to shoot our favorite summer dessert.
Shoot? Break out the gun!
Haha… Well, we took the cool TLC Flip video camera (thanks TLC, you rock!) and shot this video for the first TLC Cake Crew challenge. They wanted creative and summery, so we chose Amy’s family’s black raspberry pie that I tried many summers ago when I first met her grandparents. And for Amy it was a welcome home in pie form. It’s soooo good.
Everyone thinks we must always have a sugar high since we’re usually always surrounded by cake, and this video will surely not change that idea. I couldn’t help laughing all thru it with our little marzipan gecko and turtle telling the story. And when it was over, I found a few spots that needed some explanation. Oh, well, it’s our first video. We’ll figure out later how to actually get into the camera shot. The real recipe is below. So take a look and enjoy. It’s OK to laugh!
American Pie Dough (from The America’s Test Kitchen Cookbook)
Dry Ingredients:
2 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons sugar
8 tablespoons shortening, chilled
12 tablespoons butter, chilled, cut into 1/4 inch pieces
6-8 tablespoons water
Mix dry ingredients in food processor. Add shortening and process until it’s the texture of coarse sand, about 10 seconds. Add butter and pulse about ten 1-second pulses until the butter is in bits about the size of a pea. Pour out to a medium bowl and add 6 tablespoons of water. Fold to mix until the dough comes together. If it will not come together, add another tablespoon of water or two of water. Separate the dough into two balls, flatten the balls into discs, cover in plastic wrap, and chill for at least an hour or up to 2 days.
While the dough is chilling, mix the filling ingredients in a medium bowl.
Black Raspberry Filling
4 cups black raspberries
1 1/4 cups sugar
1/4 cup corn starch
2 tablespoons melted butter
1 teaspoon lemon zest
1 tablespoon lemon juice
After the dough has chilled, dust your work surface with a little flour. Roll it out to fit your standard pie dish and transfer to the pie dish. Add your filling to the unbaked crust. Roll out the second piece of dough, cover the pie and crimp the edges to seal the pie. Using a knife (large or small, haha), cut the top crust to allow steam to vent from the pie during baking.
Additional ingredients:
Milk
Sanding sugar
Using a pastry brush, brush milk on the top of the pie. Sprinkle with sanding sugar. Bake for about one hour in a preheated 350 degree oven or until golden brown and delicious. Allow to completely chill. This is the hardest part, but it’s better when it’s cooled and set (not runny).
If you’ve never tried black raspberries, this is a great way to try them. They grow wild in Indiana, but we’ve seen them in some specialty stores here in California. I’m hoping they’ll become the next hot food because they’re just the best raspberry out there, and we adore the standard red.
Please let us know what you think of the video and the pie. TLC is looking for comments and we want to know if this made you laugh as much as we did!
We’ve been nominated for the Best Desserts on the Bay List’s Best of the Bay! Woo-hoo! We’d love your support to win in the category for Specialty Food – Best Desserts. Vote for AJ’s Moonlight Bakery!
There’s a cool new show premiering on TLC tonight called “Chocolate Wars”. As one of the perks of being part of TLC’s Cake Crew, I’m catching a sneak preview of the show just after a little chocolate adventure.
Strike a pose.
Amy and I had an unexpected day with nothing to do yesterday when my mom was too sick to spend time with the family on Mother’s Day. We decided to visit Coyote Point Museum in San Mateo to see my favorite bird, the Great Blue Heron, up close. Then since we were so close to where Amy took a private tour of the Guittard factory across the street from the See’s factory, we had to drive by there. You know you’re in the right place when all you can smell in the air around you is chocolate.
When you're at the corner of Rollins and Guittard, stop and smell the chocolate.
Chocolate!!!
Of course, smelling that we had to go up to the Ghirardelli Factory for a chocolate fix. We tried a new sundae called the Espresso Escape with espresso chip ice cream, dark chocolate hot fudge sauce, and fresh whipped cream. With a view of flowing chocolate and a delicious sundae, the sweet smell of chocolate in the air, we were getting a serious chocolate fix.
It looks like one is dark and one is milk chocolate, but that's all from the same batch.
Rich, luscious chocolate
Now watching Chocolate Wars, I can imagine just how good that room smells with the large chocolate showpieces going up. I love watching all of the sweet competitions with pastry chefs making giant cakes, sugar sculptures, and chocolate showpieces. It’s just amazing to see this competition where chocolate is molded into realistic animals and delicate flowers in beautiful colors. And there’s a waterfall in one of the showpieces? You’ve gotta check it out tonight on TLC after another cool show, Best Food Ever – Most Bodacious Bakeries episode. Grab your chocolate pastries for both shows since they’re on at dessert time.
Hello again! After a hiatus of many months, the blog is finally back! Yahoo! announced that WordPress would force an update on all of the blogs running on very old versions of the software (like this one). This cake lady knows how to do many things on a computer, but maintaining the blog software is not my expertise. I was relieved that I didn’t need to figure out how to install the update. Whew!
So now that our technical difficulties are behind us, let’s get back to the cakes. Yeah!
We’ve had some technical difficulties with the blog lately. We love to do the cakes and our skill level has shown great improvements since we made our first cake two and a half years ago. But the blog? Well, maybe some of our computer skills are lacking. We can make a cake that looks like a computer with this blog on the screen, but getting past this blog issue has been difficult. Surprise, surprise, right?
I am happy to announce that we started a fan site on Facebook, and that’s been an easy format for sharing what we’re doing with the cakes. Please check it out at www.Facebook.com/AJsMB. Become and fan and you’ll get our updates again. Hopefully we’ll get this blog back up and running again, but until then, see you on Facebook!
I’ve just recently discovered blogging communities and blogs on blogs when I found this! Brittney Gilbert from Eye on Blogs on cbs5.com writes about local blogs and posted a review of the AJ’s Moonlight Bakery blog. We’ve been excited about the reviews we’ve received from our clients, and now this is great to get a local plug for the blog on cbs5.com.
Cute!: Charming San Jose Cake Blog
Posted by brittneygilbert
Reader Mary Pascual alerted me to an incredibly delightful blog out of the Bay Area’s largest city, San Jose. Y’all, it’s a cake blog. Instantly enamored, aren’t you? It was set up by a bakery called AJ’s Moonlight Bakery, and they do incredible work. They document their delectable, edible projects on the blog, and give a little backstory about each.
The Weirdgirl added an AJ’s Moonlight Bakery button to the few shops she supports on her blog.
As a growing small business, we greatly appreciate the support and promotion we receive from our clients and friends. The Weirdgirl actually ordered our first cake, so her repeat orders, feedback, and plugs help us know that we’re on the right track with our cakes.
Her son has received Disney’s Little Einstein’s Rocket Cake and the Pump It Up Cake for his special birthdays, and her good friend received the Baby Blocks with Lamb Cake.
Disney’s Little Einstein’s Rocket Cake
Pump It Up Cake
Baby Blocks with Lamb Cake
Little Lamb
Check out the Weirdgirl for stories from a hilarious momma.
We were just contacted by KRON 4, a local TV station, to hear that AJ’s Moonlight Bakery has been nominated as one of the Best Wedding Cake Bakeries in the Bay Area. This is an extreme honor to be recognized for our work and to be nominated.
While most of the cakes we make are sculpted decorated cakes, we have only made a few tiered cakes. Our clients have requested styles that show off their personality, not the traditional classic style. We look forward to the opportunity to decorate classic tiered cakes and all types of unique designs to earn this honor.
Cakes are a lot of fun to decorate. Then we deliver them and many times hear people tell us that they don’t want to cut into the sculpture, the character, or the scene that was created for them. Luckily there are pictures of the details that make their cake unique. That’s the reason for this blog.
The cakes are delicious, so dive right in. Then come here to remember what was your special cake.
We also want to send a special note to all of our family and friends who have been incredibly supportive. Your enthusiasm for the finished decorated cakes and tastings have been wonderful.
