Our first employee has been hired and started work this week my assistant pastry chef. I convinced my friend Sal from Baltimore that he was much to Italian to be living in the south. He is now here in Ramsey fitting in just fine.
Things are a little behind schedule and we are not able to get into the space to do production so we are testing the recipes at my house. Not an ideal situation but better than sitting around waiting. We are starting off with cookies.My plan is to stick to mostly traditional Italian bakery cookies but offer them in an upscale way with some unique twists. The cookie menu so far is as follows:
Cookies
(Biscotti)
Pizzelle- waffle
cookie-anise
Biscotti-chocolate
chip, pistachio lemon, orange walnut, cherry white chocolate, anise toast
Pecan snow ball-
pecan cookies, vanilla powder sugar
Cinnamon Pasta Frolla-
cinnamon shortbread
Meringue- cocoa,
pistachio, coconut
Amaretti- almond
macaroons
Checkerboard- scacchiera
pasta frolla -- chocolate and orange shortbread
Butter cookies- chocolate
sprinkles, jam filled, chocolate dipped, plain
Pignoli- almond
macaroons with pinenuts
Regina- sesame
cookie
Rainbow cookie- colorful almond cake, raspberry jam, chocolate
glaze
Lemon cookie- lemon cello glazed cookie
So far testing has been going pretty well considering we have 5 half sheet pans, 2 kitchen aids and a piece of shit fridgidaire oven.
Cookies baked and packaged we head to NYC to do a tasting for the partners.
So here we are on the 28th floor of an office building in times square. I have all of the cookies displayed and labeled on the table and we start tasting. All goes well with almost all of the items. A few constructive critiques and a few suggestions on things to tighten up but all went excellent.
With cookies pretty much nailed down we prepare to tackle on the next section of the menu.
