Monthly Archives: July 2014

Blackberry Smash

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Recipe by Patricia Richards
Photography by Sarah Jane Sanders
Mixologist – Jeff Worden

4 Blackberries (medium in size)
1.5 ounces Fresh Sweet & Sour (**recipe below)
0.25 ounces Flavorganics Organic French Vanilla Syrup (Whole Foods Market)
0.25 ounces (heavy pour) Mathilde Blackcurrant Liqueur
1.5 ounces Gentleman Jack Tennessee Whiskey
Method: In a clean bar mixing glass, thoroughly muddle blackberries to pulverize. Add
remaining ingredients to mixing glass. Fill bar mixing tin two-thirds full with ice and
shake cocktail well. Double-strain the cocktail using a strainer to cover the bar mixing
tin, push through a fine mesh strainer in your opposite hand. Double-strain the cocktail
over fresh, cracked ice and garnish with a mint top. Serve.
*Note: Double-straining removes blackberry pulp, so don’t double-strain if you prefer
this pulp in your cocktail.

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Four Berry Champagne Summer Cake

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Recipe by Candice Hinsinger
Photography by Melissa Becker 

After a long Chicago winter and chilly northern spring, I couldn’t wait to start introducing more citrus and fruit flavors into my sweets here at the bakery. This cake is perfection at the height of berry season. When you can have four berries rather than one, why not? The addition of
champagne in both the cake and buttercream gives this beauty a lovely effervescence and lightness that you wouldn’t normally expect from cake.

As delicious as it is gorgeous, this cake will certainly impress, but it is also easy to assemble! As always when baking, make sure to bring your ingredients to room temperature (ideally, overnight) before baking. This step helps every element blend together beautifully.

Champagne Cake

1 cup (2 sticks) butter, room temperature
3 cups granulated sugar
6 eggs, room temperature
4 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup whole milk, room temperature
1 1/2 cups champagne (don’t use the good stuff, whatever is reasonably priced and on hand is just
fine)
2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Champagne Buttercream Frosting

1 cup (2 sticks) of butter, room temperature
6 cups powdered sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/3 – 1/2 cup champagne

Berry Garnish

1 1/2 pints (3 cups) each of blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, and strawberries (some sliced)

Recipe

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease 3-8″x3″-round cake pans with a flavorless oil such as canola or vegetable oil. If on hand, line with parchment paper.
In the bowl of a stand mixer (or in a large bowl with a hand mixer) on medium speed, cream together butter and sugar for at least 2-3 minutes, until mixture is light and fluffy.
Add eggs—one at a time—making sure to fully incorporate each egg before adding the next.
With a fork, fluff the flour, baking powder, and salt together in a bowl. Separately combine milk, champagne, and vanilla into a measuring cup and give a light whisk.
On low speed, add half of the flour mixture until almost incorporated. Add the liquid mixture and blend until smooth. Add the remaining flour mixture and blend on medium speed until fully and smooth.
Pour the batter into the prepared pans as evenly as possible.
Stagger the pans in your oven so that each pan has air flow around it. Bake for 25 minutes, rotate,and bake for an additional 10-15 minutes or until the cakes are fully set and a small knife inserted comes out clean. emove the cakes and let cool in the pans on a rack until absolutely cool to the touch.
Meanwhile, make the buttercream frosting. Combine all ingredients in the stand mixer bowl, starting with 1/3 cup of the champagne. Start the mixer on the lowest setting and gradually increase as the ingredients start to combine. Add more champagne if needed. Mix until combined and light in texture.

Assemble the cake

Remove the cakes from the pans.
Using a large serrated knife, trim your cakes so that they are as flat as possible.
Set one of the cakes on your tray or platter of choice.
Fill a piping bag, if handy, with the buttercream. If not using a piping bag, use a clean spatula.
Pipe or spread a 1/2″-layer of buttercream on the first cake layer. Smooth.
Top with an assortment of berries to create a flat layer.
Repeat with the second and third cakes, frosting, and berries.
Create a beautifully tall pile of berries on the top of the cake.
Using a sifter, sprinkle powdered sugar over the top.
Let chill in the refrigerator for 1 hour before serving.

 

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Island Love

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Words by Lanie Anderson
Photography by Jessica Hill

Imagine a wedding with a center aisle carpeted in leaves and colorful rose petals, gift bags woven by local indigenous women and stuffed with organic body products, ocean waves that welcome the processional, and an outdoor patio made ready for dancing with Chinese parasols hanging just overhead. More like a fairy tale than a reality, this is Larissa Banting’s standard for weddings in Costa Rica and those standards have made her wedding planning business an international success.

Launching a wedding planning company for the first time would have made most sense in her own backyard of Toronto, Canada. Unless you know Larissa. During the summer of 2001, she trekked with an Alberta-based film production company to Costa Rica and fell in love with Roberto Leiva, a Costa Rican actor. A year later she moved to be with him and in 2003 they married.

What her friends and family in Canada deemed crazy—Larissa didn’t know anyone in Costa Rica besides Roberto, had no job, and couldn’t speak the language—she considered adventurous. “I loved the weather, the people, and the country,” Larissa explained. “I wasn’t flighty. Something resonated with me that this was the right place to be.”

To read the rest of the article, subscribe to CAKE&WHISKEY magazine or purchase the single issue here.

Soccket To Me

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Words by Robbie Clark
Photography by Jacklyn Greenberg

Kicking an Idea Around

As a very recent graduate from Harvard Business School, where she had the daunting challenge of running an innovative socio-tech company she founded while also keeping up with her obviously challenging course work, one would assume Jessica Matthews didn’t know squat about (let alone have time for) play.

But “play”–we’ll call it the pursuit of doing an activity just for the sake of having fun–was the crux of Matthews’ studies while in school (no, we’re not talking about Beer Pong or sorority formals) and it is the core concept behind her business.

On the surface, Uncharted Play, which now has its office in the Tribeca neighborhood of Manhattan, makes play things that in turn generate energy after they’ve been played with, such as the Soccket, a soccer ball that can power an accompanying LED lamp, and Pulse, a jump rope with an accompanying adaptor that can charge small appliances like cellphones. But the philosophy and mission behind Uncharted Play has more gravitas than producing a few volts from a lithion-ion battery: Matthews wants her company to inspire children to be the next generation of social inventors to challenge the status quo.

To read more about Uncharted Play and Soccket, subscribe to CAKE&WHISKEY magazine or purchase the single issue here.

Ada: Enchantress of Numbers

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Words by Dayna Brownfield
Artwork by Ann Shen

Walking down the rows of laptops, tablets and iPods at my local big-box electronics store, I am amazed at the tiny devices’ power and ingenuity. I grew up with computer-integrated classrooms and heard stories from my grandfather who, in the 60s and 70s, held meetings with his boss about “these new computer contraptions that can calculate large equations for the company.”

What you may not realize is that the creation of the computer began long before the twentieth century. In 1834, Ada Lovelace, a 19-year-old Englishwoman, took some of the first steps towards developing the fundamentals of modern computer programming.

To read more about Ada Lovelace, subscribe to CAKE&WHISKEY magazine or purchase the single issue here.

La Cuisine Paris

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Words by Linnea Zielinski
Photography by Rebecca Plotnick

“We need to be sitting together over a bottle of wine,” Jane Bertch says as she launches into what can only be described as a dizzying leap from a 10-year banking career to owning and running her own cooking school. Her friendly jocularity is a serendipitous illustration of the driving ethos of her school―for all the glitz a French cooking school implies, classes at La Cuisine Paris are less like a meal at a Michelin-starred restaurant and more like a split bottle of wine at a corner café. You can be sure that’s intentional.

Tasting the Difference

French cuisine has the reputation of being elegant, refined, intimidating, and, if honest, probably a little elitist―something best left to graduates of culinary school and celebrated domestic mavens. For the gutsy home chef with enough gall to tackle classic French dishes, the food industry can seem rife with untouchable professionals feeding them wisdom from on high (or from the pages of embossed cookbooks that are doomed to gather dust).

To Jane, culture―even beyond food―is a composition of community members sharing how their families did things. French cuisine, like any other, is something composed in family kitchens, making it an art without pretense. Upon this belief, La Cuisine Paris has flourished. Where other chefs would lecture, Jane has hired teachers who engage their students, imparting accounts of their childhood kitchens, spoons licked from family recipes.

It is on this level playing field (why, yes! Food should be fun!) that classes are conducted. Chef-instructors at La Cuisine Paris engage students in two, three, even five hours of cultural exchange from which everyone emerges with a sense of camaraderie, and smelling strongly of butter. It’s this sense of the food being their food, not the instructors’ food, that Jane believes makes all the difference in students’ experience and taste.

If you doubt whether the taste of a buttery croissant can change just because of environment, think about eating it at your cubicle before starting work in comparison to the company it might keep beside a cappuccino at a café on the Champs-Élysées.

To read the rest of the article, subscribe to CAKE&WHISKEY magazine or purchase the single issue here.

Flying Solar

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Interview by Robbie Clark

In early June, Solar Impulse 2 made its inaugural flight, which lasted two hours. The vehicle’s intended mission, scheduled to begin next year, will take a little more time, since the charted course is to circumnavigate the globe.

Since the Golden Age of Aviation, a number of pilots or teams of pilots have cruised around the world to their own distinction, from the first round-the-world flight in 1924 by a team of four Douglas Cruiser biplanes (a 175-day voyage) to Wiley Post’s first round-the-world solo flight in 1933 to Capt. James Gallagher’s first round-the-world nonstop flight. If successful, Solar Impulse 2 and its pilots, Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg, will add a new title to the venerated list: first solar-powered round-the-world flight.

Subscribe to CAKE&WHISKEY magazine or purchase the single issue here for the full interview with Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg.

She’s A Mizzfit

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Interview by Lina Fletcher
Photography by Caitlin Mitchell

Ever wished you could wear your favorite pair of yoga pants to work? Bianca Jade did…and now does. Once managing a successful career in advertising, Bianca turned her favorite hour of the day, her workout, into a full-time job. Now the go-to expert on fitness and fashion, Bianca, a.k.a Mizzfit, stylizes sportswear brands, tests new fitness trends, speaks on national TV shows, and motivates women everywhere to “break a sweat and look good doing it!”

Many of us juggling home and career consider gym time a luxury. What would you say to the woman who feels too busy to work out? 

The key is to schedule your  week in advance. That’s what I do. I sit down every Sunday night and look at my calendar for the week ahead and find 1 hour in every day from Monday to the following Sunday where I can fit in a workout. Whether it’s a studio fitness class, meeting up with a friend for a jog, or something more restorative and relaxing like yoga, I find the time. It’s really the only way to do it because if you leave fitness as your last priority, it always gets pushed to the end of your to-do list that day. I use the iCal calendar on my computer and once it’s logged and scheduled, there’s no turning back. It’s happening.

To read the rest of the interview with Bianca, subscribe to CAKE&WHISKEY magazine or purchase the single issue here.

Difference

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Words and Photography by Pamela Sutton

Difference: The One-Page Method for Reimagining Your Business and Reinventing Your Marketing
by Bernatte Jiwa

What if your business turned into wild success overnight all because of a story—your story?

Bernadette Jiwa is a freelance brand story strategist and author of best-selling marketing book Difference: The One-Page Method for Reimagining Your Business and Reinventing Your Marketing. The Difference Model is a new way of marketing: brand storytelling. No longer is marketing about tactics or labels; it’s about creating meaning in the lives of our customers through the art of storytelling. An engaging, true story that moves people to act, and fall in love with your idea. Jiwa sums up her short, but powerful book as one that “turns the old Marketing Mix model on its head. The businesses that have wildly succeeded in the past decade have done it by understanding their customers first, which enables them to create products and services for their customers.” By learning to see through the eyes of our another, Difference shows us how to transform our company from something that works from a distance to becoming a part of our customer’s own narrative.

Subscribe to CAKE&WHISKEY magazine or purchase the single issue here to read more from Bernatte.

Dreaming My Dreams With You

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Words and Photography by Morgan Day Cecil

What was I thinking, sharing my heart with the world?

That afternoon in my daughter’s bedroom, I was ready to border up my sensitive soul, punch a motivational speaker in the nose, and forget about ever making a dime from my passion.

But quitting my dream wasn’t an option. Not because I said so (I was ready to fold), but because my husband said so. That day he knew who I was and what I really wanted better than I did. He knew, because two months earlier I had shared the dream with him.

Flashback to before the scene with the tears. The kids had just been tucked into bed and, curled up on the couch, I shared with him my desire to open an online shop featuring quote prints to start creating for the public what I had been creating for our home and for friends for years. Talking to him about my ideas energized me. I was excited. I was totally lit up. He loved seeing me so alive and told me so.

I carried a wishy-washy version of my small business dream for years, but, once I spoke it out loud and shared it with the person I love and respect most in the world, my dream became an online storefront, stocked in less than a month.

When we are dreaming alone, it is only a dream. When we are dreaming with others, it is the beginning of reality.

To read more of this article, subscribe to CAKE&WHISKEY magazine or purchase the single issue here.

Artist Profile: Rebecca Plotnick

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I was bit by the travel bug in 2003 when I studied abroad in college, and I started dreaming of becoming a travel photographer. Being laid off in 2008 was the push I needed to follow my dreams. I used airline miles and some of my savings to spend 10 days in Paris, photographing from morning until night. The best way to discover Paris is to get lost in the city’s streets. I returned from the trip energized and ready to start selling my work.

To read the rest of the article, subscribe to CAKE&WHISKEY magazine or purchase the single issue here.

An Ode to Farm Life: Erin Brennaman

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Words by Kelli Loos & Linnea Zielinski
Photography by Jen Madigan

City girl. Country boy.
The age-old tale of young love between two people from different sides of the fence.
But this version has a twist.

This little girl loved horses. She dreamed of helping them. Vet school and then a practice of her own.

So after high school, Erin the city girl, left her home in the bustling Chicago suburbs for the expansive fields of Iowa to study Animal Science. The semester stretched. Lectures stalled. Erin’s mind wandered.

A mysterious country boy shone through the tedium, disappearing every weekend from campus, gone to his family’s farm 150 miles away.

Love blossomed. Eventually the city girl followed the country boy into his terrain.

The stereotypes were all true. Small town. One stoplight. Rumors swapped between friends. She thought she would hate it. But she was charmed. Washington County, Iowa.

To read the rest of the article, subscribe to CAKE&WHISKEY magazine or purchase the single issue here.

Artist Profile: Clare Elsaesser

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Five years ago I started my Etsy shop with the goal of making a living from my paintings, a barely utilized Bachelor of Fine Arts and a smattering of art-related jobs on my resume. I began supporting myself through sales from my paintings and their print reproductions. Over time, my subjects have evolved from animals to figures to wild abstracts.

With amazement, I watched the work and time I put into my shop grow into a lucrative business. The success of my business has given me happiness and a rise in determination.

To read the rest of the article, subscribe to CAKE&WHISKEY magazine or purchase the single issue here.