Ice Festival Downtown DG 2021 with Nadeau's Ice Sculptures

What an experience. Truly. I feel nothing but gratitude for every single sore muscle, wet sock, cracked block, load of mildew scented laundry and ice-cubed glove that was part of the journey of prepping for this ice festival over the last few weeks. I know I've said this before, and I'll say it many more times, but I never thought I would be an ice carver, or have the chance to work with an absolutely amazing company like Nadeau's Ice Sculptures to create art for festivals like these. But, I suppose if the glittered rubber boot with steel toe cap fits, Elsa the ice carver I shall be!

After making over fifteen thousand pounds of ice, scraping and shoveling floors and snow piles, and moving and organizing all of the ice in the freezer, it was time to get to work. Nothing is more exciting than receiving a list of carvings that we need and a deadline that we need them by, if you ask me. Some more challenging than others, but the real challenge comes towards the end of the process when the freezer becomes a literal china shop with finished carvings lined up everywhere and carvings that still need to be finished!

The more carvings that are created, the more likely it is for a mishap like this one. R.I.P. snowboarder number one with a broken arm! The best thing about breaking a carving that's complete is carving it in half the time and getting a better result creating it the second time around. Honestly, I'm surprised there weren't more issues like this along the way!

I have to say, prepping for this ice festival flew by. I thoroughly enjoyed creating every piece that I got to put my hands on, from the hand carvings to the colored CNC pieces. The more carvings were completed, I almost started to feel sad that we were almost done. It's a bittersweet ending when it's time to take all of these little nuggets of your soul and disperse them into the world.

And now, for those of you that weren't able to use the ice carving map of Downtown Downers Grove and locate all 41 carvings in the cold this weekend, I did it for you! And yes, I may have cried some happy tears over the almost hour and a half that it took me to do so as I admired all of our hard work. What a seriously fulfilling experience!

With 41 carving pictures here, I felt I just had to give some "awards" to a few of them!

This unicorn carving I awarded the most difficult carving I made for this festival. Lots of features, proportions, and details. I enjoy whimsical and geometrical carvings, but when it comes to animals, its a challenge.

This kissing booth carving I am awarding the lightbulb moment carving, where I feel I truly made a breakthrough learning about fusing pieces together. Of course, that usually happens when you completely fail the first time around... ;)

This snowboarder carving, as mentioned earlier, most resilient award! It was carved, broken, recreated, and turned out dang beautiful.

This eagle carving, I'm definitely awarding best texture. The finishing details is what made this piece something special, for sure.

This carving, elephant on a ball, was one of my favorite carvings of the day. Nice one, Max!

This popcorn machine carving, definitely winning the most interesting colored CNC piece to learn how to make! Green glitter, popcorn kernels, popped popcorn, and snow!

And these minions, although not perfect, is one of my favorite carvings that I have gotten to design and make. Not bad for a first time carving it!

Humpty Dumpty, I couldn't forget about you! Most detailed piece award, for sure. Check out that face! Great job, Max.

What a whirlwind of ice. On top of 41 carvings for the sponsors in Downers, they also had live carving at the train station of 8 full blocks of ice over the weekend. Tony, Patrick, and I braved the arctic weather, revved our chainsaws, and got to work! I carved an owl and a Valentine's bear. Click here to watch a video of the live carving of the owl that my loving husband stood out in the freezing cold to film, thank you, thank you, thank you!!

I was actually lucky enough to get to carve at this same event last year, where I also carved a Valentine's bear. Just for fun, I thought it would be cool to carve one again and see how much I've learned.

Obviously, just learning a thing or two about photography, angles of photos, and importance of close-up finished shots of carvings to learn from can make a world of difference. When looking with a closer eye, the progress I've made in design and utilization of block, tool usage, cleanliness of the piece as a whole, and adding in smaller details to drive home the point of the carving is more apparent. I also only carved one piece last year, so there's without a doubt some improvement in endurance and strength. It's definitely exciting to see progress, and motivating to continue the journey to progress even further!

It's super important to mention the hard working team that made this project flow seamlessly (well, almost ;) ). Max, you carved some amazing pieces for this festival and did some excellent teaching, planning, multitasking and organizing along the way. Brenda, you are awesome at what you do and we are so grateful! And to the group of delivery and setup guys from Nadeau's, moving that much ice in the middle of the night sounds like a cake walk, so work a little harder next time, will you?! :) And of course, a big THANK YOU to Downtown Downers Grove for continuing this tradition with Nadeau's, even through these unique times. The entire event was managed wonderfully.

After all of the snow dust has settled, and I look back on all of the work for this festival, I feel proud. I'm a woman, a petite person, a perfectionist, in a male-dominated field, taking on projects that literally outweigh me by more than double on the daily. What it has taught me is that at the end of the day, with the right mindset, tools, and team, I can always summon my inner ice queen!

The Making Of: Ice Throne & Bench with Nadeau's Ice

I have always been fascinated with those TV Shows like Unwrapped, How Its Made, and then of course once I got more into food Good Eats, DDD, and so many others. What these things all have in common is that you get to see how they do it! So, how do you make an ice throne and an ice bench that weighs roughly a ton and has beautiful glittery embellishments? Well, with an ice block of course. Not just one ice block, but about a dozen ice blocks. And a lathe, a CNC, a Clinebell, a chainsaw, a bandsaw, a huge blowtorch, a bunch of red glitter, even more perfectly sifted snow... so maybe this isn't one of those things you can go try at home afterwards. But, still absolutely mesmerizing to see. And, I must say, makes you feel like arctic royalty when you sit on it!

Below, you can see how the ice blocks are made. It's not a glamorous setup, but the outcome is absolutely amazing. It starts by filling these Clinebell machines with ultra filtered water, then freezing them slowly over the course of a couple days, depending on a few temperature variables. As it freezes, we remove impurities as much as possible and add more water gradually to freeze slowly. All of the air bubbles are removed through the gradual freezing process in these machines that leads to a beautifully clear ice block, weighing in at about 400 pounds and measuring roughly 40" x 20" x 12".

This block is tempered and ready to be removed from the Clinebell, and we do that using a system of pulleys and motors that mechanically lift it out with chains and a metal bar and onto a dolly. Or, if it's more exciting for you to imagine, we can pretend that I lift them out with my mind. ;)

Then, we cut them with a bandsaw so that they're perfectly flat on the top (when they freeze, the have a "belly" on them, just like ice that you freeze at home). At that point, they're completely usable ice blocks for anything from a hand carving to a CNC piece. For the throne and bench, we actually used the bandsaw to take those blocks and cut them in half lengthwise to create the piece that fits on the lathe below and to construct the legs of the bench. Using the lathe to create a finished product of a column with four rounded sections will make it easier for us to slice apart, sand with a cone sander, smooth with a bag of hot water, and turn into the sphere embellishments on the arms of the throne. Pretty innovative thinking to get four large matching spheres of ice, which is no easy challenge whatsoever.

After we're finished with the lathe, it's time to take all of the slices of ice (funny that we call them slices, I think more about a slice of cake... :) ), but we slice these off of the full blocks of ice to put on the CNC. Above, you can see the large drill bit going through what looks like just a bunch of snow. Below that is a block of ice being cut into a specific design programmed and run by the CNC. That is how we can make perfect logos and carvings that can be easily replicated for matching carvings. For a little context of how large of scale things are, the photo of the freezer above is of the lathe and three CNCs that go all the way back to the far end of the freezer.

After the CNC is complete, it's time to clean all of the snow off of the etched pieces. We do that by meticulously tracing the inscription in the ice with a dull ice pick (so that we don't crack the smaller parts) to loosen the snow, then following up with a gentle blast from the air compressor to fully remove all of the snow from the ice carving. At that point, we clean it of remaining snow with hot water (but not too much or the details of the design will melt away), lay the glitter in the pockets of the engraving, pack it in with snow so it stays in place, fuse the back plates of the throne on, and finish up with more snow to seal the seams.

After packing, boxing, wheeling, strapping, loading, and unloading all of the pieces, it's time to start assembling! The base of the throne is pretty simple, just making sure the solid blocks are even and level on the ground, then scratching and snowing them into place on each other. After that, we start lifting the decorative pieces onto the back of the throne. To make sure each block solidly fuses to the block below, we use a scratchboard (pictured below) to scratch up the surface of the sides that will be fused, then follow up with snow in the seams.

The final step that clears up all of the carvings and makes the whole structure a solid piece is using a huge blowtorch to melt off any excess snow or frost from the outside of the carving. It also seals all of the fuses and seams with warm water, which will make all of it structurally sound. Think of it like ice cubes in your glass at home, once you pour water on them, they all stick together.

I have to say, the finished result of this ice carving had me completely in awe. Working on this project piece by piece and then getting to build it and actually sit on it like Elsa herself was amazing.

I never would have thought that I would be an ice carver, let alone be building ice thrones. The gratitude that I feel towards the people in my life that helped facilitate this is beyond words. JJC, Nadeau's Ice Sculptures, all of my friends and family that support me daily... I couldn't do it without you.

Below is a preview of the entire video of the assembly of the throne. If you head on over to the video tab at the top of this page or click here, you can enjoy the full time-lapsed video.

At the end of the day, they say you'll never work a day in your life if you love what you do. Lucky for me, I have loved what I've been doing in cakes, culinary, and certainly in ice, for the entirety of my culinary career thus far. Now, is it work to slowly freeze, harvest, slice, carve, embellish, load, unload and assemble an ice throne and bench? Um, yes. :) But, it's all worth it when you get to kick back and relax on the ice throne you built!

Honey, It's The Holidays!

The holidays are certainly a legendary time for Chefs. For many reasons, from the thrill we get from cooking massive amounts of food in a short amount of time and serving it to make people happy to the food we cook at home to share with those closest to us in our own kitchen. This year, although it looked a lot different for most of us, there's always a few things that makes this Chef feel like it's the holidays: a good meal, the secret-family-recipe-takes-all-day-to-prepare-and-burn-yourself-while-making-the-honey-sauce-but-totally-worth-it-honey-rolls, and a full belly with my family in our home that smells delicious for hours after.

Of course, given my background in pastry, I decided on a mashup dessert for the holidays this year. This little beauty is a mashup of a pumpkin pie, a cobbler, and an ice cream sundae. With the holidays being smaller this year, I just used a 4" springform pan to make the pumpkin pie. For the cobbler component, I used a traditional streusel topping recipe and baked it off on a sheet pan, then crunched it up into large chunks for some texture. A little chocolate chunk ice cream to seal the deal, and the perfect hybrid fall dessert for two was born!

Limiting the menu with less people this year has been a little bit of a struggle for me. I think most of you are feeling the same way, it is definitely a struggle to make everything you enjoy without having a ton of leftovers! I try to land somewhere in the middle, making small portions, prioritizing my favorites, and of course, giving those leftovers all the love they deserve afterwards.

When we're talking about vegetables, there's a must-have as far as I'm concerned: fried Brussel's sprouts. They're simple, delicious, quick, and versatile when it comes to the finishing flavors. It's so simple and easy, I'm going to give the recipe right here!

3- Step Fried Brussel's Sprouts:

Step 1: Trim up the sprouts (no set amount, whatever you have will do). Cut off the bottom woody stem, cut them in half or quarters depending on size keeping them all about the same size, and peel off any excess outer leaves that fall off while doing this. If you want to get fancy, you can blanch those leaves and top the dish with a brighter green pop of color.

Step 2: Fry them (vegetable or canola oil works well here) at 350 degrees until golden brown and delicious, (if you're frying in a smaller vessel, let the oil get up to 400, it will cool off a decent amount as soon as the sprouts are added).

Step 3: Finish them off with the flavors you love. Starting with salt while they're still wet with oil.

In culinary school from Chef Thompson I learned to top them with sweet chili sauce (there's a couple good brands out there, sweet/spicy/vinegary flavor is what you're looking for) and parmesan cheese. They're also great with other spices and toppings, literally no wrong answers here.

With a recipe that is actually as easy as 1-2-3 (and who doesn't love to eat fried things...?), there's plenty of room on the holiday dinner table this year for these yummy green veggies!

Every great holiday meal needs a unique mashup dessert and a tasty green vegetable, no doubt. But, dare I say the most important thing on the dinner plate is the gravy.

I've talked about making stocks before (also very similar to the methods in the Steps to a Braise post from a few weeks ago), you can even fortify a store bought stock with roasted bones and mire poix to make it a little simpler. For this, I used the turkey bones I had leftover, mire poix and aromatics to make a sauce. Since this year is already untraditional, I decided to go untraditional with the gravy and make a rustic, veggie-heavy French based sauce instead. No roux this year, that's right, I said it! Strictly reducing, straining, reducing, mounting in butter, and finishing with lemon. It turned out pretty and shiny, just look at it!

Then, of course, it was time to address that turkey. With hot oil already on the stove, it just made sense to fry the turkey this year. In the photo just above, you can see the ideal layout for a proper three stage breading station. The key is a wire rack to let the chicken drip onto in between each breading stage. Removing excess flour and egg will help the final layer of breading adhere to the turkey properly. Thank you Chef Bucci for teaching me this, such a simple but extremely important lesson!

Once they're beautifully breaded, into the hot oil they go! Then onto a sheet tray with a rack to get a generous amount of salt and finish cooking in the oven.

Last component of dinner had to be stuffing, or dressing, or whatever your family likes to call it! I defy the rules and call mine stuffing, even though I don't stuff it anywhere. Just my personal preference. :)

And behold, everything comes together on one plate for the most majestic holiday meal you can imagine. At least to us. What's great about the holidays is that everyone has certain things they love from their family traditions that they want to share. A plate of food says a lot about the person that put their heart into it.

But, a holiday wouldn't be a holiday without these honey rolls. It's an absolute secret family recipe, and I cherish it because it's the only one I have. I've been making them since I was a little girl, and the process has refined over the years of adapting and learning.

Although I can't share the recipe, I can share the beautiful process. Making the sweet dough, shaping it into a ball, letting it rise, and smelling the yeast is an amazing experience. Then cooking the honey sauce, although a long, tedious, labor-intensive, and semi-dangerous process, is one of my favorite things to do in the world.

Flopping the beautiful dough out onto a floured surface to roll it super thin...

Adding the honey sauce and rolling it into a massively-delicious log of dough...

and slicing them into portions to create this sticky, sweet, deliciously-southern, light and fluffy, slightly salted, honey rolls.

As far as this Chef is concerned, honey rolls are the holidays. The bulk buying of flour, honey, yeast, and foil cupcake pans, the yeasty smell that fills the kitchen as the dough is rising, the bubbling of the honey sauce in the largest pot that I own, and the joy on all the faces of every person that gets to enjoy the secret family recipe once a year.

Honey, it's the Holidays.