"Cake Boss" to "Kitchen Boss" TLC

On the season finale of chef Buddy Valastro's competition show, "Cake Boss: Next Great Baker" (TLC at 9), contestants compete for the $50,000 prize, and perhaps even more valuable, a job at Carlo's bakery.

Directly after "Cake Boss," the new show "Kitchen Boss" (at 10) airs a prime-time sneak peek. The cooking show - which will air at 5:30 p.m. starting Tuesday - features Buddy as he steps out of the bakery and shows off his other cooking skills, namely his family's secret recipes for Italian food.

In a new TLC cooking show, Buddy Valastro brings viewers into the kitchen, where he shares his family favorite Italian dishes. From his grandmother's secret recipes to simple tips to make a more delicious meal, Buddy cooks everything from pastas and proteins to sides and everyday desserts that make dinner a family event. To help spice it up during the series, various guests, including members of the Valastro family, join Buddy in the kitchen.

Buddy Valastro KITCHEN BOSS

CAKE BOSS has taken viewers behind the scenes of Buddy Valastro’s busy, family-run bakery, sharing the sweeter side of life. Now, TLC is heating things up with KITCHEN BOSS, a brand-new daytime cooking series that will showcase Buddy’s traditional Italian recipes. Both series are ready to be served up this month – KITCHEN BOSS premieres on Monday January 24 and season four of CAKE BOSS premieres Monday January 31.

In KITCHEN BOSS, Buddy brings viewers into the kitchen, where he shares his family favorite Italian dishes. From his grandmother’s secret recipes to simple tips to make a more delicious meal, Buddy cooks everything from pastas and proteins to sides and everyday desserts that make dinner a family event. To help spice it up during the series, various guests, including members of the Valastro family, join Buddy in the kitchen. As an added treat, TLC.com will feature recipes, tips, and behind-the-scene footage.

“Food is love, and my favorite family moments involve meals just like the ones I’m preparing on KITCHEN BOSS, and it’s great to be able to share these recipes with viewers” says Buddy Valastro.

A sneak peek of KITCHEN BOSS airs out of the finale of Buddy’s competition show NEXT GREAT BAKER on Monday, January 24 at 10:30pm. The series moves to its weekday home, 5:30pm, starting Tuesday, January 25. TLC has ordered 40 half-hour episodes of KITCHEN BOSS.

Buy Cupcake Online

If you are fond of eating, then there are many good dishes you can try. Looking around you will easily an end number of recipes that are enough to bring water in your mouth. Not just that if you are fond of desserts then there is a huge variety of websites available for you helping you to prepare or even buy the dish of your choice.

Gone are the days when it was really very difficult to find the products or services of your choice. Today with the help of technological invention called internet it is possible to get almost any product or service in no time. Not just that, today the services are so improved that if you want to order cupcakes online then even that option is possible.

There are thousands of online cupcake stores available over the internet. This is indeed a good indication but with good indications there are some bad ones as well! As there are so many online stores available offering cupcakes now the question arises which one is the best one and from which store the person should keep a safe distance?

The answer to above question is also available over the internet. An online cupcake store that has good recipes, good varieties and that is on the top position in various search options is indeed a good option to buy cupcakes. The reason behind this is that generally a website or an online store is on good ranking if it has a good number of visitors or hits. In addition to that you can also have an idea by going through the content that is available over the website.

Last but not the least; you can also go through the reviews or feedbacks of customers to know the quality of products or services being offered by the online store.

By keeping these points in mind it is sure to find a good online cupcake store that can help you enjoy the dish of your taste!

How to Make Fudge from Scratch

Are you tired of making burnt or tasteless fudge? Or are you tired of the same old fudge recipe?

I have been there and I totally understand your frustration!

No matter how hard I tried to make great fudge I always ended up with the same results.

I would try to whisk the chocolate fast then I would try to whisk it slow.

I would change the order in which I added the ingredients. I would even try to take out some ingredients that I thought was giving me unsatisfactory results.

I got to the point where I was beyond frustration.

But, I have to let YOU in on something. I OVERCAME this little bump in my candy making road and so can you!

I have learned a few secrets that made my ordinary candy into extraordinary delicacies.

Often times many candy makers encounter many challenges in their candy making endeavors. Especially when it comes to making fudge!

Here is the secret. I now use very strict temperature control when using any fudge recipe.

Mainly with chocolate because it can scold and burn REALLY easy. This can make a gross burnt overall taste and after taste.

No matter if you are cooking with white chocolate, milk chocolate, or dark chocolate you need to keep your stoves temperature range at a low to medium setting.

Otherwise you will be wasting time and money because you will be left with a batch of candy that no one will eat!!!

Uneaten food will hurt any cook's feelings! LOL!

I control the temperature by using a candy thermometer. Most people believe they can make candy without it.

I am here to tell you that this little gadget WILL make the difference in the taste and texture of your homemade candy creations!

'Cake Boss' looks for recipe for good TV

  'Cake Boss' Buddy Valastro shows a slice of his art.

CAKE BOSS. Monday at 9 p.m., TLC

If you think President Obama's got a lot on his plate, you gotta see the opening night of "Cake Boss."

It's exhausting just to watch.

It's also probably fattening just to watch, given that everything revolves around flour, sugar, eggs and icing.

Not that anyone at Carlo's Bakery has time to eat. Things are moving that fast for Buddy Valastro and the Valastro family, which, in just an hour tonight, has to handle two huge parties for the family and one for New Jersey's incoming governor, Chris Christie.

The Valastros are baking a cake that has to serve 2,000 people.

Buddy decides the cake will also be a celebration of New Jersey, which means the top will be decorated with sculptures of produce (the Garden State), lighthouses, New Jersey Turnpike signs and everything he or anyone else can think of.

Skip the toxic waste dump jokes, please. But there is a small sculpture of the governor, arm raised in "a little Jersey fist pump."

It takes about eight Carlo's employees to carry the cake into the Prudential Center, and when they get there, the gov loves it.

This is great promotion for the bakery, though it could have troubling implications for the show.

"Cake Boss" works because it's an engaging story about a family business and the family that runs it.

True, Carlo's provides specialty baking for unusual occasions, and that's part of the drama. But if the show becomes exclusively about catering to the stars, or politicians, it becomes a very different show than if it's about a place where ordinary people walk in wanting an extraordinary cake.

Tonight, Buddy is also working on a 30th-birthday surprise for his wife, Lisa: a life-size cake sculpted to look like her, in her precise dimensions.

One of the minidramas in this process is the all-important facial sculpture, which Buddy entrusts to a new hire, Ralph, who looks like he walked in from the set of "Guys and Dolls."

So it's fun to watch Lisa's cake double come together, though one suspects Buddy doesn't really want dozens of people to come through the door asking for similar sculptures of their own spouses.

Weird cakes are definitely part of the fun. If they become the whole show, though, that's like too much icing. It could overpower a good thing.

Bravo aims to take the cake with new 'Top Chef: Just Desserts'

If it's anything like the original, Bravo's new 'Top Chef: Just Desserts' will be more tart than sweet - and that's a good thing.

Life is about to get sweeter for "Top Chef" fans.

Bravo announced a new series Monday that will take the "Top Chef" formula and turn it into a competition for the spun-sugar and pastry flour set.

The spin-off, "Top Chef: Just Desserts," will premiere in 2010 with the same basic structure of the hit on which it's based. An undisclosed number of contestants will live together and compete in various challenges under the supervision of judges and a host, complete with quickfire challenges and eliminations.

The sweet tooths who will fill the host and judge roles have yet to be announced.

Casting calls for the dessert themed show get underway Monday October 26 in Chicago, Bravo announced, in most of the same locations where "Top Chef" season 7 hopefuls can attempt to impress with their culinary resumes and best TV personalities, since they don't actually cook at the tryouts.

New Yorkers who harbor dreams of sauteing, basting or baking their way to reality TV fame, on either the dessert-themed spin-off or the original, will have their chance at Craftsteak on Sunday November 8.

"Just Desserts" arrives amidst plenty of competition, including TLC's "Cake Boss," which has its season premiere Monday night at 10 p.m., and the Food Network's "Ace of Cakes."

The Bravo show was inspired in part by the difficulty that desserts have posed for "Top Chef" cooks, Frances Berwick, Bravo's vice president and general manager told Variety.

"Their Achilles heel is usually the desserts," Berwick said of the "Top Chef" contestants. "As this has gone on, we've been thinking that it would be fun to do a 'Top Chef' with experienced pastry chefs. We've had a few pastry chefs on 'Top Chef,' but they haven't gone too far. It's just a different skill."

With "Top Chef: Just Desserts" and the recently renewed "Top Chef Masters," which puts established chefs head-to-head in cook-off competitions for charity, the network hopes "Top Chef" will become a year-round presence.

"There is a phenomenon going on right now, where people are very interested in the cooking space," Berwick told Variety. "I have to believe this is recession-related. People are enjoying the experience of cooking at home, because it's cheaper than going out. We're building off that phenomenon."

'Cake' is tasty, but not filling

  TLC series 'Cake Boss' returns Monday night for its second season.

CAKE BOSS
Monday night at 10, TLC

"Cake Boss" makes you hungry for something sweet, which is good.

It also can make you hungry for something with a little more TV substance.

Buddy Valastro and his posse are all back Monday night to launch season two of "Cake Boss," a reality show centered on the fun that apparently never stops at Carlo's Bakery in Hoboken.

Valastro and his extended, often quirky Italian family rarely allow a dull moment. They're an animated bunch, not reluctant to speak up. They also work overtime to convince us Carlo's is not one of those bakeries whose daily production is rolls, bread, pastries and a couple of personalized birthday cakes.

Valastro has a client who wants to propose to his girlfriend in Carlo's. This client also wants Valastro to bake him a cake that replicates an engagement ring box, and put the actual ring inside. So he does, and it looks great. Problem is, this isn't like when your mom made a cake and you felt involved because you could lick the bowl. This is more abstract, like watching the construction of a house.

At another point, Valastro and his team assemble a cake for a Brooklyn botanical event whose theme is "Wicked Plants." Valastro's cake replicates a Venus flytrap, with a long winding stem that resembles an uncoiling cobra. The combination of flour, sugar and eggs doesn't bind strongly enough to support that kind of stem, so he makes it from PVC pipe.

The end result is impressive.

But again, here, the creation process feels more like an engineering lesson than Willie Wonka.

Since TV interactivity has not reached the point where we can actually taste the cake, the livelier part of "Cake Boss" is the interaction of the family - and, tellingly, the highlight of Monday night's episode is a moment that feels wholly staged for the camera.

We won't spoil it here, but it goes back to last season's infamous "Cake Drop" episode. Anthony and Danny were carrying a tall Sweet 16 cake down a flight of stairs when they lost their grip and the cake went down the stairs without them.

Fans have argued whether it was more Anthony's or Danny's fault. Monday night, we find out where Valastro comes down on that one. It's an amusing enough scene. It just feels like it was dreamed up for the TV camera.

"Cake Boss" has engaging passages. Too often it feels like cotton candy.