Pretty bundt cake

I made this pretty moist and delicious bundt cake this afternoon. It came out of the oven around 4.30 pm, then had to cool and by the time I wanted to take a photo there was no light left whatsoever. That meant having to wait either until the next day or find an alternative solution. I still had this one daylight lamp that I took out of the studio at some point, used once, didn’t like it and tossed it in a corner to get dusty. Enough with the lazy and comfortable daylight! Time to get cracking on some serious stuff..

I’ve received many a question from people desperate to find out how to work with lighting in the night or for those of us living in the Northern Hemisphere, in the wintertime when light fades after 3 pm. I’ve written something about it before which you find here but thought I could do a little more research myself so why not share? As I said; I never use this lamp as it’s just not the same but in case of emergency, you would have to do with what you got right? So for today I dusted of my daylight lamp, took it into our kitchen and started moving it around.

Position of the lamp

As you can see I positioned the light to come from the right and back and from above a little bit. The lamp has 5 separate bulbs I can turn off individually, so I turned three of and left two burning as it was far too bright, causing burnout and heavy shadows. With a little less light it started to look a little better. I had only one light, so you can see that there is quite a bit of shadow in front of the cake. In order to fill that up a bit I used a silver reflector (you can also use foamboard, aluminiumfoil or something similar) to bounce a bit of light back to the front of the cake. In the two photos below you can see the difference with or without the reflector.

With or without reflector

You can tell that there is a big difference here. You can still tell that these are shot with artificial light but the result is acceptable and you can actually use this. Now what is most important I find when working with lights is the direction of the light. That is also true for daylight but that can be a bit more forgiving. I’ve taken two shots where I changed the position of the lamp and see what happens.

Ok first of all; what I like, might be something else from what you like, so it’s in the end all personal preference but to me the photo on the right is boring and lacks something. I turned the light more towards the table coming more from straight above almost (not quite) which made the light a bit flatter and shadows less pronounced.

I will be doing more tests with other lights that anyone would have in their home. Just to see what the issues are and how to possible solve those (or not). These lights are the easy ones since they are daylight balanced and need limited tweaking when it comes to color. In general for shooting at night, it is extremely helpful to use raw instead of jpeg. It gives you more control over the white balance so you can correct it later where needed. For now I will leave you with this delicious bundt cake!

Apple pear and nut bundt cake

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Serves:	8-12
Prep time:	15 minutes
Cook time:	1 hour
Total time:	1 hour, 15 minutes
Allergy:	Egg, Peanuts, Tree Nuts
Meal type:	Dessert
Misc:	Pre-preparable
Region:	Worldwide
Website:	Epicurious

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup dried cranberries
• 2 cups all purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon nutmeg (freshly grated)
• 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
• 1 cup light brown sugar (packed)
• 1 cup granulated sugar
• 1 cup unsalted butter (2 sticks, softened)
• 3 eggs (large ones)
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 pears (peeled, cored and cut into small pieces)
• 2 apple, Golden Delicious (peeled, cored and cut into small pieces)
• 1 cup Mixed nuts (coarsely chopped)
• 1/2 teaspoon salt

Directions

In a small bowl put the cranberries with a bit of warm water and let them soak for at least an hour. Drain, discarding the water and set aside. Position rack in the middle of an oven and preheat the oven to 180 C. Lightly butter the bundt tin, then dust with flour, knocking out the excess.

In a large mixing bow or bowl of electric mixer, sift together flour, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves and salt. Add brown and granulated sugars, butter, eggs and vanilla. Using electric mixer, beat on high speed, scraping down sides of bowl with rubber spatula as needed, until batter is pale and smooth, about 3 minutes for handheld mixer and 2 minutes for standmixer. Stir in apples, pears, nuts and cranberries. Spoon into prepared pan and smooth the top.

Bake until a wooden pick or skewer comes out clean when inserted into the center of the cake. About 1 hour. Cool cake in pan on a rack for 10 minutes, then invert and unmold onto rack and cool completely. Cake can be made up to three days in advance and stored at room temperature wrapped tightly in plastic wrapp

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You didn’t think I had vanished from the face of the earth now did you? I’ve just been incredibly swamped with work ever since the new Year started. It’s weird, wonderful and a little troubling too. (knock on wood) It could be over next month, so I am taking everything I can to make up for possibly leaner times coming soon. The funny thing is too that I spend more time working in the studio then ever before… It must be a sign of some sort.

Cress

I thought I entertain you with a couple of shots from recent shoots I did. I’m getting more and more food assignments which is good news as that – ultimately – is what I want to do. Next week is again going to be really busy with on monday a shoot with a man who tries to get schoolkids to eat healthier by educating them about growing their own in small city garden, on Tuesday I am in the studio together with a food stylist shooting for a producer of a sustainable substitute for tuna, on Wednesday product shots, on Thursday I have the second day of shoots for a restaurant in Arnhem where we will do the desserts and a la carte menu and on Friday I am giving a workshop.. And that’s the week over again. Well except for the portrait shoots on Saturday..

Small cherry pie

And because Tom is still unemployed he has been doing most of the cooking so not a lot of recipes to share. I miss actually coming up with new recipes and even though we have eaten really well and delicious, because of the terrible light at night I haven’t shot any of them. But there will be recipes soon again!

In the meantime we’re also shopping around for a new kitchen, which is fun and frustrating at the same time. We are going to make the kitchen a bit bigger and according to all the sales guys we have a really big kitchen. We don’t think so, as a kitchen can never be too big right?

Possible colorsetting of new kitchen

I can’t give you the exact details of the kitchen but the color setting will be fairly similar to the one above. The wall will be light and the flour will be wooden but the cupboards will be fairly similar and the counter will be slightly less dark (but still stone). It’s a lot of work figuring out all the details while still trying to stay within budget and convincing the salesguys that we do NOT want to spend any more… O well, within the next two weeks, we will probably make the final decision so I’ll let you know once I have the details! And then you think you’re done you still have to figure out what to put on the wall and the floors… *sigh* But it’s all for the greater good!

So no recipe from me this time but there will be one next time!

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• Foodphotography;shooting at night or in low light
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• Foodstyling attempt no. 1

Lemon sour bundt cake

There are those things that you can almost predict will go wrong. As I had told you when announcing the Donna Hay Challenge nr. 2, I didn’t have time to make the challenge recipe prior to the actual challenge so I had to do it still, just like the rest of you and then shoot it.

Making the batter was a breeze, but I tried out a new anti-stick stuff that I had used before successfully on other cake tins. I normally grease a bundt cake with butter and then carefully make sure all hooks are filled. I then dust the inside with icing sugar and it works every time. This time I decided to try my anti stick bottle and well… it didn’t work so well as my own method!

First of all I made a big mistake by taking the cake out of the tin just 2 minutes after coming out of the oven. I should have waited longer but I didn’t think, plopped a cakerack on top, turned it over and voila, cake in two! Damn… Not a good thing if you have to smoothly cover the thing in icing and shoot it. So what to do? I carefully took out the part of the cake that was still in the tin and then matched it to the other part already on the cooling rack. Needless to say, that was not perfect but it looked more or less like an entire bundt cake. Then I figured; if I cover it with icing you won’t see it so much now would you?

Ofcourse in order to be able to cover cracks the size of ravines you would need to sort of put a lot of icing on top!

Little more light from the left too

And putting a lot of icing on the cake made it look a little bit dodgy too as you can see in the background. O well, I’m sure it will taste delicious! So now on to the photo part. I normally shoot in my kitchen but since the photo needed to be fairly dark and the sun had all of a sudden decided to come out, I moved everything to the other part of the living room and used a wooden board as my background (LOVE that board which is 200 years old and comes from Weimar!). I placed another dark wooden board behind it on a chair to act as my background. I took a photo with my Iphone to show you the setup.

Setup for the shot

I took two shots; one without the foamboard on the left as you see it above and one with the board. Both photos are shown above. Now in my memory the background of the original photo was quite dark, but when I put the photos on my computer it wasn’t as dark as I had thought it would be. So my photo is darker! If you need areas of a picture to be really dark with heavy shadows, the easiest way to do that is to use something called a ‘flag’. I use white board a lot to reflect the light back onto the photos, with black you basically do the same but in reverse. So where ever you have too much light and you need more shadows, see what happens when you hold a black flag to that area. I took another Iphone photo showing

See what that reflector does from the right?

you how I position the flag, but it was a little hard to hold it at the right angle and hold the black flag at the same time, so it’s not exactly how it should be but you get the picture I think.

See how much shadow it casts? The photos where shot with my Canon eos 5d mark II on manual. The lens was the 100mm macro and the setting were iso 160 at F4.5 for 1/5 s. It was dark and overcast at the time I took the photo which worked fine here as too much light would have made it too bright.

In the photo below you can see how damaged the cake was… All the brown bits are sort of missing plus I think I should have left it maybe a few minutes more. O well, better next time I would say! Also visible here is how the shot looks without using any flag or reflection. The only big difference is that the sun was still out so it looks a little brighter in general plus the curtain on the other end of the room (the kitchen) was open too getting in some stray light from the left.

Before icing!

Side by side for easy comparison

What is also pretty obvious if you compare the two photos side by side is that the bundt pan makes some different to the amount of shadows cast as well. The ridges in the cake by Con Poulos are much more pronounced meaning they cast more shadow then my pale shallow one.. Plus my drips are not so pretty! I should have made my icing a little thinner too. But overall… I’m fairly happy with the results. Good exercise for sure! (both in terms of baking and in terms of taking the shot.. ) Can I hire a cakebaker for next time? Lol.. O wait, next time is not a cake! Hope you enjoy it as much as I did! O and can I just say that this cake is absolutely and totally delicious? The addition of sour cream in the batter made it more moist and the overall presence of the lemon is just delicious. It did not last long!

I might actually try and redo this cake if I have enough time left… See if I can make one that is a little bit better looking!

Sour lemon cake

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Serves:	8-10
Prep time:	15 minutes
Cook time:	45 minutes
Total time:	1 hour
Meal type:	Dessert
Region:	Worldwide
By author:	Donna Hay

Ingredients

• 220g butter (melted)
• 2 eggs
• 330g caster sugar (superfine)
• 120g sour cream
• 60ml lemon juice
• 2 tablespoons lemon rind (finely grated)
• 300g all purpose flour (sifted)
• 2 teaspoons baking powder (sifted)

Lemon icing

• 320g icing sugar (sifted)
• 1 tablespoon lemon juice
• 2 tablespoons water (boiling)

Directions

Preheat oven to 160 C (320F). Place the butter, sugar, eggs, sour cream, lemon juice and rind in a bowl and whisk to combine. Add the flour and baking powder and whisk until smooth. Spoon into 2 x well greased 4 cup capacity (1 liter) Bundt tins and bake for 40-45 minutes or until cooked when tested with a skewer. Cool in tins for 10 minutes. Turn out onto a wire rack to cool completely.

To make the lemon icing, place icing sugar, juice and water in a bowl and mix to combine. Spoon over cakes to serve. Serves 8-10

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The other day I was tweeting along happily and mentioned that I was going to be doing a babyshoot later that day. Mona, from the fabulous WiseWords, reacted if I could maybe write something about shooting a baby on my blog… I asked the parents for permission to use some of the photos and they obviously said yes, so here we are! It’s not exactly food, but then this blog IS after all about food, photography and travel, so I figured babies would fall under the right category..

I should have probably called this post ‘how to photograph a baby’ but hey, you know what I mean when I say shoot, right?

Ok, basics first; a baby needs a couple of things in life and they are simple but essential. Take any of those away and you’re likely to get horrible results. The basics are:

• Mom and/or dad
• Something soft and cuddly to lie on
• Food when hungry
• Warmth to feel comfy
• Preferably not too much distraction, other then mom or dad
• Toys and squeeky things

If you have all of the above then you’re good to go. In general – as I am sure I do not need to tell you if you’re a mother or father – every kid is different and that is true just as much for babies as it is for bigger children. So your first job is to make sure you have an idea of your options. Some babies are very hard to work with and will cry as soon as they are left alone. Other babies, as the one pictured here, are just all happy and smiles and really easy to work with. Now I usually work in the studio with babies which is a plus in terms of light but it can also be a minus in terms of setting and comfort for the baby. So if you can shoot at someones home, it will be a little easier for the baby to relax.

Regardless of where you shoot, you need to first know how old the baby is. Can they sit on their own (usually when they are older then 7 months), can they hold up their heads or are they still too tiny. The smallest baby I ever photographed was just barely two weeks old.

Barely two weeks old

Your options are a bit limited when they are this small. I love closeup shots of wrinkly hands and feet or intimate shots with the mom and dad holding the little one close. It’s perfectly fine if they are sleeping as that just ads to the soft feel. If you want to go in close, make sure you use a macro lens preferably as that will blur out any little details in the room you do not want to see and will allow you to go in close to zoom in on tiny fingernails or little wrinkly feet.

Don’t feel the need to show everything of the baby or even everything of the face. I love closeups of those tiny faces where the only thing you see is an eye or half a face. In terms of light; daylight is perfect as that has a soft quality to it, but will also mean that you have to keep control over your shutterspeed to prevent camera shake. You can use a tripod but that is not always very handy when working with little kids. If the baby is sleeping then a tripod is fine, but if they’re awake; you’re not going to be able to keep up with the movements.

That is another thing with little babies; if they are old enough to hold their head up by themselves it is still going to be wobbly. And really hard to get a good focus. You know those really cute shots where the baby is lying on something (soft and cuddly remember?) and they look up with their shaky little heads? Cute it is, but also hard to take a good photo. Patience is the key here and don’t get discouraged when you have 10 images that are blurry. In the end you need only one good shot and also worth to remember is that the parents won’t mind a little blurriness if the picture is really cute. I have this habit of checking every single photo at a 100% but with a 21 Mb camera it is unlikely to be ever used at that size, so no one will probably even notice a little blurriness. I’m not talking completely unsharp and unfocused here but just a little bit off because the baby moved it’s head. In fact the first photo here is not entirely sharp but I loved the happy face so kept it in.

You don't always need a smily face!

If you do use daylight then a reflector can come in handy too. Don’t use an in camera flash and I would be careful with using a regular flash if it cannot be used off camera (via cord or wireless). If you do have a separate flash with a swivelhead but no option to us it of the camera you can also bounce the flash via a reflector. Just position the swivelhead to point to a reflector and have the reflector point at the baby. You might get a better result that way. Be careful though that you do not scare the baby as bright light can be a problem.

Happy Mila

Once you sorted out your lighting situation it is time to entertain the baby. I usually have either mom or dad stand behind me and do funny things. Pull faces, make noises, whatever makes the child happy. I play peekaboo from behind my camera when necessary (focus, hold it, move your face away from the camera, shout peekabook and press the button) although that is double tricky with babies but whatever needs to be done!

Make sure that you are on eyelevel with the baby as that usually gives the nicest results. You can shoot from above or below for variation but in general eye-level works best with kids and animals.

When it comes to babies that can sit but not on their own; I usually ask the parents to sit on either site of the child and hold it around it’s waist to support it. That way I can shoot portraits closeup of the little one (such as the first picture) as if they are sitting. And when need be you can remove an arm later in photoshop. The photo above with the little bathcape was cute but mom was holding the baby so she was half in the frame, as you see the original below.

And then ultimately it all comes down to a lot of patience… Good luck! And if you have any other great tips you want to share, feel free to leave a comment!

Unedited photo

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This is a school example of how you should not be styling your pannacotta!

Once upon a time there was this girl that had all these pretty pictures in her head. Beautiful images of wonderfully styled desserts, simple yet effective and made with just the flick of a spoon or in the blink of an eye. But sometimes, every so often, the evil witch came by and made sure that all her desserts looked absolutely horrible. No amount of begging or pleading would make the witches curse over the desserts go away. No matter what the girl would do; all her desserts came out completely wrong, putting her in a miserable state of mind.

Maybe that is a slight exaggeration… There is nothing wrong with my state of mind, other then the fact that I had to laugh pretty hard at myself when I tried to plate up these pannacotta’s so I could make a ‘pretty’ picture. Needless to say that that didn’t exactly work as I had envisioned it before!

I’ve made many pannacotta’s before.. Like this apple cinnamon one, this wonderful pannacotta with lemon-buttermilk and now… this disaster of a pannacotta.. I was wondering if I should be sharing something that, obviously, is not the best looking example when it comes to styling, but then I figured; lots of people struggle with styling a dish (including myself) so why not share the ones that went wrong? On the bright side; the colors look pretty enough.

I made this plum pannacotta when my father in law was coming over for dinner the other night and because I was a little late in making my pannacotta I put the ones we had for dinner in glasses, so that looked pretty enough and no harm was done for our dinner. But because I always end up making a bit too much of the pannacotta I also filled a couple of the molds I normally use for this dessert. I have the ones you see here: on the left. They work fine most of the time but what I should have realized is that pouring the cream mixture in after putting the plum mixture in, was bound to go pear shaped.

And while that was not a big issue when I served it in a glass, it looks slightly messy when you do that and then turn the pannacotta out as I did in the first picture… I tried to save the day by adding a few things on top of the pannacotta. That’s the nutty crumbles you see and the small pieces of plum. But that didn’t help matters either!

And no putting it in a glass didn't work either

I guess that just proofed that if it is wrong, it is wrong and no amount of fiddling around will make it any better. With everything I added to the poor pannacotta it sort of started to collaps upon itself even more, leaving just a flat bit of cream with a blob of plumcoulis on top. It tasted good though, even though the plums had their best time and I will definitely not be making this pannacotta again. I’ve had better!

Plum pannacotta

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Serves:	6
Prep time:	10 minutes
Cook time:	4 hours
Total time:	4 hours, 10 minutes
Allergy:	Milk
Meal type:	Dessert
Misc:	Serve Cold
Region:	Italian
Website:	Tartelette

Ingredients

• 2 cups Plums (Cleaned and deseeded)
• 1/4 cup water
• 2 cups Heavy cream
• 3 sheets Gelatin
• 1/4 cup Honey
• 1 cup buttermilk (full fat)
• 1 piece vanilla bean

Directions

Clean the plums, remove the stone and put them in a blender. Once they're all cleaned make a puree of the fruit.

Place the water in small bowl and put the gelatin sheets in it. Reserve.

In a large heavy bottomed saucepan placed over medium heat, bring the heavy cream and honey to a simmer. When the cream is hot, remove from the heat and whisk in the reserved gelatin until it is completely dissolved. Add the buttermilk and whisk until well blended. Remove the seeds from the vanilla bean and add to the mix. Whisk to combine.

Put the plum mixture in the bottom of a glass and carefully pour the cream mixture on top. Let stand at room temperature for 20 minutes and then refrigerate for at least 4 hours before serving to let the cream set properly.

Note

The pannacotta itself is great but if you use plums, make sure that they are sweet and have a nice texture as that will heavily influence how your end result will be. I didn't pay enough attention to that with the result being that this was just a mediocre pannacotta for me.

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