Sweet River Studios

The last 5 or 6 weeks of my cooking class focused on desserts. From classic french pastries such as eclairs and profiteroles to homemade ice cream, cakes, crepes, mousses and souffles. Unfortunately, we didn't get to make macaroons since our instructor is allergic to nuts and therefore almond flour was out but that's okay. We learned to make pate a choux dough, which is used to make eclairs and profiteroles and of course you can make them savory instead of sweet, which we did by adding cheese. We then used the dough to make a little sandwich with bacon, onion and arugula. We also made swans out of the choux dough and filled them with pastry cream and dusted them with powdered sugar.    And finally, we made churros from the choux dough as well. We fried them and then tossed them with sugar and cinnamon. We also made lunch on dessert day since it's hard to eat 8 different kinds of dessert for lunch without throwing up so we made a paella with sausages, ch...

One of the young women in my cooking class is pregnant with her first child and I decided to make a cute baby quilt for her. I also decided to make something a bit more complicated than sewing 2 pieces of fabric together and putting on a binding. I must like punishment. Anyway, I found this pattern called, Good Morning Sunshine , which is made up of grandmother's fan blocks. I thought it was very pretty and now I have an excuse to do it and since she's having a girl, I settled on creams, browns and various pink/mauve colors. Warning: This pattern is considered advanced since sewing curved pieces together is really quite a challenge so if you're new to sewing or your skills are rusty, take my advice and run. Just run away from this pattern unless you really want to challenge not only your sewing skills but your patience and your temper. If your okay with that then read on. The reason why this quilt is so hard to do is because of the two pieces that you need to sew togeth...