Cheese and Cake, but not Cheesecake

This week Adrianne and I have been working on our skills.  Adrianne made a cake for a friend's daughter.  It looked fantastic, and we have heard reports that it tasted great, too.

Mike made Camembert for the first time.  Camembert is the same as Bri, except it's smaller.  Bri is a cheese that snobs eat just so they can sound like they are cultured--at least that's what Mike thought until he had a good Bri.  Prior to that, he was sure that Bri wasn't very good.  Now he's excited to be making his own and hopes that it will turn out well.

Making a B/C (Bri or Camembert) is different from making other cheeses in a number of ways.  The first is that in B/C you add mold to the milk (you can also spray mold on after you've made it).  Another is that in other cheeses, you take the curds and press them together to get a solid cheese.  In B/C you use a ladle and scoop the curds and whey into the molds.

You let the whey drain out, while flipped the molds every few hours until the cheese is a "solid" mass.

You age the cheeses in a high humidity environment (which I am hoping to accomplish by keeping them in this storage box, at about 54 degrees.

  Here the box is in the cheese cave--I put the lid on it after this picture.  I've got a little meter in there to measure the temperature and the humidity for me.  They'll stay in here for about a week until it is covered in a white, velvety bloom of mold.

I'll report on how they turned out in about 3-4 weeks.