If you give a kid dry ice...

Happy New Year!  It's exciting to be saying that for the third year as a business owner.  At this time last year we were still imagining how Après would look, and now we're planning a celebration of the Dessert Bar's first birthday (a fun dessert wine tasting on February 13)!  I'm looking forward to 2011 as the year we don't add any more extensions to our business.

We had a nice holiday season around Generous Servings, including a couple of days off (we were closed on Christmas and New Year's Day), which feels weird when you work seven days a week almost every week.  Last week I taught only two cooking classes, both for teens.  The first was a bread baking class, during which we made several great bread recipes, the runaway favorite being monkey bread (which is mostly sugar with some bread dough inside it).  The second class was a food science class, which was a lot of fun.  It was not the neatest class: here's a picture of the remnants of one "experiment" (playing with cornstarch and water):

We also cooked with some cornstarch, made a gelatin dessert, and did some spherification (a classic molecular gastronomy trick):

And of course, we used some dry ice to make ice cream:

The kids came up with all kinds of other things they wanted to test with dry ice (they tried freezing the spheres we made in the other experiment, making carbon dioxide-filled soap bubbles, etc.).  They were excited to learn that you can buy dry ice at the grocery store, and disappointed that you have to be 18 (they were all under 15).  Several of them assured me that they could easily pass for 17 at the movies, and personally, I think using a fake ID to buy dry ice is probably better than using it for cigarettes, so I wished them luck.

I'm not sure anyone really learned any science in the class, but the more important point is to be excited by something you don't really understand, and I think we accomplished that.  That seems like a good way to start a new year.