Ratatouille Themed Cake

Tonight was my cousin's son's 4th birthday. Every year my dad and I bake him a cake in the theme of his choosing. Two years ago we made a Thomas The Tank Engine cake, last year we made a Mickey Mouse cake and this year his request was a Ratatouille cake.

This was a golden cake done in a bundt pan, to get the domed shape. A bit of cake was shaved off the top and used to fill the hole in the centre. It then got an orange buttercream crumb coat. The pasta was made out of yellow fondant being run through a pasta maker with a linguini attachment. The rat figure was also fondant, as was the wooden looking spoon sticking out of the left. To make that, I took a long metal skewer and formed the shaft of the spoon around the end. I only made half of the actual spoon part, so that once the rest of the skewer was stuck in the cake it looked like the rest of the spoon was in the pasta.

The pasta sauce is a plain buttercream mixed with strawberry jam. We put a mixture of red brown and orange food colouring in the sauce to give it the right colour. The meatballs were made out of chocolate ganache. We rolled it into truffles and crushed chocolate cheerios to coat them in for texture. To top everything off we grated green fondant and shaved white chocolate all over the top to look like parsley flakes and parmesan.

That was it! This was a lot easier than it looked. I hope you like it!

Fomes Fomentarius???

About a block from my apartment a neighbour has a big birch tree and all over it are these hoof shaped polypores. I had been eyeing them for months thinking they were a birch polypore, and finally the other day on my way home I asked if I could take one. They were growing on the central branches of the tree all over the place, so I picked one low enough to reach and just sort of pushed up on it until it came off. When I got it down it didn't look much like a birch polypore anymore, so I brought it home to inspect.

This is what it looked like:

It has a very hard top surface and the underside has very tiny light grey pores that bruise a darker grey/brown immediately when touched. The pore surface is so fine that the underside is velvety smooth. The pore surfaces bruises so fast that you can take the edge of something sharp and use it to write things on it! I had a lot of fun with that, by the end the underside of the mushroom looked like a page out of an old highschool notebook.

I tried to take a spore print of this mushroom, but it didn't seem to work. When I checked back the next day there was just a bunch of what looked like condensation in the glass, but not much else. I am a fairly inexperienced mushroom nerd, so I'm not entirely sure what that means.

Without a spore print or more experience I can't tell for certain what species this is but I am almost 100% sure it is in the Fomes species and if I had to make a guess I would say it is a Fomes Fomentarius.

If anyone has any questions, or has even come across this type of mushroom before, let me know!

Today's Mushroom Finds Plus Dinner!

Today I went for a little stroll where I had found the agaricus campestrises yesterday, just to see if I could find any more. I ended up having a very lucky mushroom hunt! Here is everything I came home with:

The two mushrooms on the top left are more agaricus bisporus, the one on the top right is a puffball mushroom. I wasn't sure exactly what the bottom one was at first, but now I think it is a shaggy mane mushroom, or coprinus comatus.

Here is a picture of the bottom one cut open:

As you can see, the mushroom is pure white. It didn't seem to bruise any particular colour when I cut it either. It has very dense soft almost squishy gills that are free from the stem. The centre of the stem is also hollow. My research so far indicates that this must be coprinus comatus, but I am currently taking a spore print just to be sure. If it is, the spore print will be black. I'm hoping it is because this is apparently a delicious edible mushroom!

After todays adventure plus the two giant shrooms from yesterday, I had a ton of mushrooms. I didn't really want to do much to them because mushrooms are my favourite food and I just want to taste that, nothing else. Look at my beautiful bowl of mushrooms!

I just took all these and sliced them up into fairly fat slices. My sliced puffball and agaricus pile:

All I did after this was throw them all into a pot with a very generous amount of butter, 1 large clove of garlic finely diced and some salt and pepper. The mushrooms cooked down and left a delicious sauce in the bottom of the pan. I ate this plain with a crusty white bun to dip in the sauce. I almost forgot to take a picture I scarfed it down so fast!

I know it sounds a bit boring, but I was feeling pretty lazy today. So lazy, in fact, that I ate this straight out of the pot, as you can see. It was delicious nonetheless.

That's all I have to say for today. I hope I made your mouth water!

Agaricus Campestris II

The Agaricus have returned!!!! I have waited and waited, patiently checking the hill that I found the first one on every few days and today there were finally more. It was quite dark out when I found them so I can't say how many there were, but I grabbed two big huge ones to take home with me and there was at least one more little button poking through the grass that will be big and delicious soon!

Without further ado, here are my beautiful funghi:

Aren't they beautiful???

The larger one has a cap that measures 5 inches across! I am still deciding how I want to cook these guys. They taste almost exactly like grocery store bought button mushrooms apparently and the big one looks big enough for a mushroom burger perhaps! I will try to remember to photograph them when they are all cooked up. Hope you enjoyed this post! I have found a few great mushrooms in the past few days, so more posts will follow!

Agaricus Campestris

Welcome to my new blog, where I will be posting about food, baking (which I suppose is really still food), mycology (which can also sometimes cross over into the food category....) and whatever else I feel like really. My name is Kat, I am 23 and I live in Ontario, Canada and if you can't already tell I really love food. I also really love mushrooms and foraging for wild edibles. Recently my foraging interest has branched out into the study of mushrooms and fungi. I love collecting mushrooms and attempting to identify what species they are later, though I am not great at this yet. But enough rambling about me, on to my first post!

I would like to kick off this blog with a post about a mushroom I found just the other day. On my way home a few days ago I saw a white ball poking out of the grass on a small hill. I immediately assumed it was a puffball mushroom, since I have seen those growing there often before and I couldn't see the stem at all. when I picked it up though a stem was poking out of the bottom, which initially made me kind of sad, since I had been hoping for a side of puffball with my dinner that night and instead I got a strange blob I had never seen before.
Here is a photo of the mushroom after I took it inside:

The mushroom smelled basically like a button mushroom from the store and was smooth and white all over. The cap was about 2-3 inches across. The cap had a veil and was young so I could not see if there were gills or what they looked like.
Here is a photo that shows the stem a bit better:

I then sliced the mushroom in half to find pretty, pink gills that were completely free from the stem. The mushroom only stained a slight brown colour after being cut.
Here is a picture of the mushroom after I cut it open:

I had narrowed it down to a type of agaricus mushroom now, but I didn't really know what I was looking at still, so I decided to do a spore print. I left a piece of the cap in a glass cup with plastic wrap over the top overnight and when I removed it the next day it had left a dark brown spore print. With all that information I think I can say with almost complete certainty that this mushroom was an Agaricus Campestris!

Agaricus Campestris is also know as a meadow mushroom. It is edible and a very close relative to Agaricus Bisporus, which are the white button mushrooms you get at the grocery store. They have pink gills and smell delicious and muhroomy. If you have found a mushroom that you think might be Agaricus Campestris make sure you do a lot of research before eating it, there are many other mushrooms that look extremely similar! A few indications it is poisonous are a bad odour, yellow staining or if the gills lean more to an orange or purple hue.

I hope you enjoyed my first post! Look forward to many more!