This is not so much an Xmess photo, but I’m posting it anyway so that you may know the heights (depths?) of my baking disorder.
I spent the last week of October and first week of November 2002 at a pair of professional breadbaking classes at the Baking Education Center at King Arthur Flour in Vermont. On the weekend between classes, Ciril Hitz visited the school and taught a decorative bread sculpture class. Chef Hitz teaches at Johnson & Wales, and was on the U.S. team at the last Coupe de Monde de la Boulangerie in Paris. Studying deco bread with him is like studying figure sculpture with Rodin. He is that good, and he is one of only a dozen people in the U.S. who specializes in this technique.
Under his tutelage we completed two projects: a hanging platter made from a yeasted rye dough ("live dough") and a sculpture made from unyeasted rye dough ("dead dough"). The dead dough was lots of fun. We dyed it different colors with coffee and chili powder and turmeric. We ran it through the dough sheeter and made marbleized sheets. We made braids and baskets and cornucopias. For our sculpture, Chef Hitz passed out stencils of a rooster. We were told that our sculpture had to include the rooster, but the rest of the sculpture was up to us. I decided to mount the rooster onto a sunflower platform, glue the platform onto a tube made out of dough, then glue the tube to another platform. For the platforms I made miniature representations of various breads: pain au levain, pumpernickel loaves, baguettes, rye rolls, brioches, marble ryes. I glued them to the platforms, then used coffee syrup to paint a cheesy ad slogan for my dream bakery, which has/had a working name of Baked Goods: “Baked Goods. They’re baked. They’re good.” (My dad said, “ah, a bakery that the President can understand.” I said, “Dad, if the President understands this bakery, then I’ve done my job.") The finished sculpture was 20 inches high and a thing of beauty.
Miraculously, the sculpture survived the vagaries of FedEx—I’ve never used so much bubble wrap in my life—and arrived at my office intact, where it sat proudly on my desk for two months. Then one day I decided to move it so that I could dust, and I discovered the effect of bone-dry office air on a bread sculpture. Rooster broke in three places, and I could not glue it back together. The tube split down the middle. I bit my lip and threw the pieces in the trash. But I could not bear to throw away the bread miniatures, so here they still sit, cheering me up as I toil for LuthorCorp.