A Baker in Brooklyn

FAIL.

2010-07-08T12:31:00.000-04:00

This is what being stuck on the L train under the East River for 40 minutes with no AC and no lights in the middle of summer will do to a red velvet cake.

Thanks, MTA, for this megafail.

Sorry, Jeff!

2010-07-07T19:09:00.000-04:00

Busy busy up here in Greenpoint these days. I've had an average of about two cakes per week for about 4 weeks straight now, and this week is no exception. Why is it that everyone wants cake when it's (literally) 100 degrees outside? I mean, I'm not complaining or anything, but Loretta is spending her days as far from my kitchen as possible lately.

I was recently given total creative freedom to invent a cake. Given the hot summer weather (which I love), I was inspired by the abundance of blueberries and peaches in the markets. Martha Stewart has a pretty decent peach cake recipe on her site, but it sounded a little boring. I decided to roast the peaches and make a mash to put in the batter. Dense, yes, but also hopefully delicious.

I would also like to point out that, as a Southerner who grew up eating Georgia peaches, these New Jersey peaches from the farmer's market were admittedly some of the best I've had since moving up here - sweet and juicy but not overly ripe. They lacked that extra megapunch of flavor that Georgia peaches have, but they were truly delicious, and they smelled amazing as they roasted.

I folded in a pint of blueberries and baked as usual.

The cake was, as I expected, dense and moist. But the peach flavor was not as pronounced as I wanted it to be. I wanted this cake to lay the peach smack down on your taste buds. I had some of the roasted peach mash left, so I pureed it with a bit of sugar and a pinch of salt and spread it over each layer of the cake. After cutting and tasting it, the peach syrup really helped out substantially. It still tasted a little flour-y, but the berries were sweet and tart and went well with the sweet peach. The frosting was a simple cream cheese.

I'd make this one again (while these fruits are in season), but I'd definitely rev up the peachiness, and I'd maybe dust the top with powdered sugar instead of glazing the berries with pectin.

Up later this week is a banana cake of some sort. Trying to think of something different to do with this one. Maybe a Bananas Foster cake? With a flaming shot of Bacardi 151 on top? We'll see.

2010-06-24T18:05:00.000-04:00

Here's a cake I invented recently. It's got Key Lime curd in between the layers as a filling. The frosting is white chocolate. It's a pretty delicious cake - tart inside and sweet and creamy outside. Very delicious. I'm proud of this one!

2010-06-03T10:20:00.002-04:00

The Times has a great article today about local food producers in Greenpoint. I read the entire thing from start to finish three times.

Check it out!

2010-05-21T15:12:00.000-04:00

To do (on a frustratingly beautiful, sunny, warm afternoon):

Dip mallomars in chocolate
Make chocolate bacon lollipops
Bake cookies
Cut marshmallows
Package, package, package

My superhot friend Ryan will be manning my flea market table at the
Metropolitan Bar in Brooklyn tomorrow. Swing by and say hello! And buy
my stuff. And have a beer.

Whee!

2010-05-19T20:38:00.000-04:00

Hey, if you're around Brooklyn this Saturday, stop by the Metropolitan's first ever flea market! I won't be there (gotta work), but my sweets will. There will be lots of cool stuff for sale and drinks will be cheap. I'm definitely making salted caramels, and I'm also thinking chocolate cheesecake lollipops, maybe some dark chocolate lollipop, chocolate chip cookies, moon pies, maybe mallowmars? I don't know yet. I have a lot of stuff in my kitchen, so I need to take stock and work it out. But trust - there will definitely be A Baker in Brooklyn presence!

Fun!

2010-05-05T10:56:00.000-04:00

I don't know if I'm allowed to say exactly what's it's for yet, but today I'm doing some writing for a very popular line of books with a friend of mine.

That's called a "teaser," folks.

2010-04-18T11:20:00.000-04:00

Here's a little cake I whipped up last week for my pal Nate (at the request of Mr. Matt Garretson). I thought the cake looked pretty good, considering my lack of experience with these kinds of decorations. So I used what I knew - stencils. Except I made my own. Check it:

Once the sprinkles were on, it was just a matter of placing the silver dragees on one-by-one with my increasingly-useful kitchen tweezers.

Done. The flavor was salted caramel and chocolate, like the one they have at Baked. I was told it was fully devoured by the end of the party, which no small feat (think 6 sticks of butter in one cake).

I've got more to do this week, so keep checking back!

2010-04-10T13:53:00.000-04:00

A busy Friday night/Saturday morning resulted in:

1. Pickled garlic

Ready in two weeks!

2. A Key Lime pie

3. A Red Velvet cake for a friend's birthday (this cake looks "topless" to me in this picture).

I'm looking forward to doing a lot more pickling and preserving this year. My friend Ashton and I joined a community supported agriculture (CSA) share that starts in June. We'll (hopefully) be getting an abundance of fruits, vegetables, eggs, and flowers. Looking forward to seeing what I can do with all the stuff we get, not to mention how quickly I can do it all, given the organic, preservative-free nature of the food. Should be interesting..

More to come!

2010-03-26T12:30:00.000-04:00

Salted caramels this coming Saturday afternoon (March 27) at Nowhere Bar!
322 E 14th St. NYC

$6 for a bag of 13 caramels

See you then!

2010-03-13T11:58:00.000-05:00

Well, here it is. My first (and hopefully last) attempt at a "Cake Wreck-style" cake. It was harder to let loose that I thought it would be. I know I could have gotten a lot sloppier than this, but, well, I just didn't want to.

In the end, it was fun to make and, not suprisingly, didn't take too much time to decorate. I enjoyed the process, but I don't want to do this again.

I heard the cake was well-received by the birthday boy, so that's really the most important thing.

Happy Birthday Dustin w/ sprinkles!

2010-03-10T11:22:00.000-05:00

It was bound to happen. I've been asked to make a "Cake Wreck-style" cake. It'll be done by tomorrow evening. I'll have photos to post of this one, for sure.

2010-03-08T19:06:00.001-05:00

For the better part of February, I was busy working out logistics for
another wedding cake to make in Provincetown. This time, the grooms
were the charming and handsome Chris Miller and Rocky Casale. They
requested something chocolate, salty, gooey, and mustachioed. Nothing
fancy looking, but something nice.

After much prep work in NYC (and a LOT of extra weight in my luggage -
see the numbers below), I worked out the makings for a two-tier
chocolate cake, salted caramel filling, and salted caramel buttercream.
The cake was a huge success and I got rave reviews. People were coming
back for thirds. Thirds! I was thrilled. I also think I have a fairly
solid fan base in Provincetown now, which is very exciting to me. I
even got offers to come back and bake more stuff I'm exchange for a
place to stay. THAT'S an offer I can appreciate! So give me a call,
Provincetown folks. I'm ready to travel!

This cake was also immensely easier to make than the first one. I made
a list last time of all the equipment I needed to take with me. The
list was considerably shorter this time because the lady that owned
the condo I stayed in brought me a KitchenAid stand mixer, which as
you know, if you own one, is like an extra set of hands in the kitchen.
In the end, the cake was definitely something to be proud of, the
wedding was beautiful, the company was better than ever, and the trip
to PTown was just amazing. And we rescued a squirrel from a fireplace.

Here are some fun numbers:
5 pounds of butter
1 pound of bittersweet chocolate
6 cups of unsweetened cocoa powder
12 pounds of sugar (TWELVE!)
36 eggs
9 cups of salted caramel
110 salted caramel candies
2 caramel mustaches
1 epic hangover
Add two wonderful guys, a wedding, and here's what you get:

sigh

2010-02-11T15:17:00.001-05:00

Thanks (I guess) to Josh over at Twerking for this little gem.

Actually pretty darn amazing.

2010-02-10T21:50:00.000-05:00

Here's another project I did a few weeks ago with my pal Brian over at Camp Blood.

Yeah, this is what I do when I'm not blogging.

Happy VD, friends!

2010-02-07T12:46:00.000-05:00

Ok, so the results of the flavored caramel experiment were interesting and not entirely unsurprising.

The caramels I made with only smoked sea salt came out tasting, of all things, a bit fishy. They didn't taste like fish, but there was something vaguely reminiscent of smoked salmon. It wasn't strong, but it was definitely distracting in a bad way. If I was eating them and didn't know what it was, I probably wouldn't be able to figure it out, but I would be annoyed by the flavor.

Fail.

The chocolate caramels were a total failure based entirely on the fact that I thought I knew enough about the properties hot sugar and chocolate to successfully merge them, and I was wrong. The taste was actually ok - rich, sweet, buttery - but the chocolate broke and never incorporated into the cream correctly. When I poured the messed up chocolate/cream mixture into the sugar, it... I don't know.. fried the chocolate or something. As it cooked, it didn't boil and bubble and steam up like regular caramel. More like, it sizzled in the pot. And it smelled awful, like burned sugar and burned chocolate (which is basically what it was). I poured it out and in a few hours it had set into a greasy block of smelly chocolate cement. Totally inedible, but I'll try them again at some point.

Fail.

Of course, the regular caramels came out wonderfully well.

I took all these to the Ace Hotel for Ashton to pass out. Hopefully I'll get a chance to redeem myself with those fine folks who bought them last time and couldn't eat them.

I think I'm also going to make some marshmallows this week, too. Maybe I'll really do the Valentine's gift boxes again. People seemed to like those.

I've got another batch of caramel I'm going to have at Nowhere Bar this Monday (and Tuesday, if I have any left). Swing by and say hi and try some!

Thanks!

2010-02-03T18:05:00.000-05:00

As an experiment, I've just made salted caramel, smoked-salted caramels, and salted chocolate caramels. I think the salted ones will be delicious. The chocolate version was my own recipe and, frankly, it smells like caca. Maybe it'll taste ok, though...

2010-02-01T16:35:00.001-05:00

I made a new batch of salted caramels and wrapped them with these perfect little wax paper wrappers. Genius! They were great. I'm going to try using the smoked sea salt I found for the next batch. Or maybe I can smoke my own salt. Has anyone tried that?

Salty caramels

2010-01-19T12:36:00.000-05:00

Hi there.

So right before Christmas, I was walking around New York City, just shopping and eating and drinking way too much coffee. I came across a little outpost of the Brooklyn Flea in the old Tower Records on Lafayette and Bond (or Great Jones or something). Walking in, I was delighted to find about 40 vendors packed into the space selling a great variety of wares, from clothing to beer brewing kits to jewelry to Pee Wee's Playhouse temporary tattoos (I bought 5). I also found a great little lady selling flavored caramels, like salted, chocolate, and probably some other ones that I forget. On a whim (and with a great deal of Christmas joy in my little black heart), I decided to try the salted caramels. At $5 per bag (with each bag containing only 6 little caramels), I was set to be blown away by the taste. And frankly, I was.

These were simply AMAZING. Sweet and buttery and creamy with a salty finish. I savored each one over the course of the day, partially due to the cost of $1.20 per piece, but also because they were seriously delicious.

I've been making cakes with a salted caramel layer for years, so why hadn't I thought to just eat it straight? Duh. So I got to work at home making my own. Making caramel is pretty straightforward and easy (and so cheap, Miss Five Dollars A Bag) - water, sugar, corn syrup, butter, cream, and salt. The only part that's remotely challenging is getting the sugar to stop cooking at exactly the right temperature. It just takes a bit of attention.

After a few experiments - one resulting in caramels that were a little too hard for my taste, and one that was a little too soft and mushy - I discovered the perfect cooking temperature of 248. They were firm when they went in your mouth, but they softened up quickly when you bit down. I also experimented with the amount of salt that went in, and found that I could put in quite a bit of salt. I also topped them with even more salt which added a savory punch of crunchiness. I only used Maldon Salt because it actually tastes good, unlike regular table salt.

Here's my third attempt:

I hand-wrapped each and every caramel in these really colorful candy wrappers that were lined with wax paper. At least I thought it was wax paper...

Turns out, the "wax paper" was more like regular paper, and was not suited to candy at all. After receiving, filling, and delivering 20 orders for these things from my friends at the Ace Hotel, I discovered, to my extreme horror and embarrassment, that every single caramel was stuck to the paper inside. So unless you wanted to eat paper with your caramel, they were totally inedible.

They looked cute, though.

This was a major fuck-up on my part. At first, I asked my friend Ashton at the hotel to remove my name from the bags and not take anyone's money, then a few hours later I asked him to just thrown everything away. I was pretty upset about this one. Total fail. I spent hours and hours making and wrapping and packaging these things, only to be ruined in the end by a stupid piece of paper. Well, that and my lack of experience making candy.

But trust - now I know. I found more suitable candy wrappers and I'm ready to go. I usually like doing some stuff for Valentine's Day, so that might be where these surface next. I've also purchased Maldon's smoked sea salt, so maybe I'll give that a shot, too. It's delicious.

This Friday, I'm making two birthday cakes - red velvet and chocolate bacon - for a couple of friends who are having a joint 30th birthday party. Then at the end of the month is one my best friend's 40th birthday, so of course I'll be busy for that one, too.

If you were to receive a Valentine's Day box of goodies, what homemade goodies would you want in it? Caramels? Cookies? Marshmallows? Chocolate? Let me know!

Thanks for reading. More coming soon...

Christian

Stencil success!

2009-12-14T12:28:00.000-05:00

Last week was a busy one. The stencil project for Ed came out pretty well, if I do say so myself (which I just did. So... yes. Ok). The learning curve was very steep, but once I figured out the best way to get the sharpest pattern onto those cookies, I started turning those mothers out. Check it out below.

I started with my dough. The recipes for the butter cookies and the gingerbread I used were both from Martha Stewart's Baking Handbook. They were simple and elegant, and the recipes worked well. I made the butter cookie dough earlier in the week and chilled it for a few days. Here's some dough I made with chocolate pieces.

I wrapped the dough in parchment and, using a technique I also learned from Martha, I formed these prefectly round logs of dough by pressing a straight-edge (the ruler) into the crease of the parchment.

The result was three batches of ready-to-slice-and-bake cookie dough.

After chilling out in the fridge for a few days, I took these guys out, sliced em up, and turned em into 24 perfect little butter cookies each.

The gingerbread cookies were exceedingly simple. I doubled the amount of freshly grated ginger called for in the recipe, because, well - dang. They're supposed to be spicy and taste like ginger (which I love). I made three batches of this dough, chilled them all for about an hour, the rolled them out one of a time in preparation to be cut up.

I planned to use several different cookie cutters, so I wanted to make sure I had enough dough. It made a LOT of cookies.

So here's what I had to work with:

It felt good knowing I had plenty of cookies to mess up by experimenting more freely. This was a lesson I learned in the process. Having plenty of back-up really cut down on the stress of potentially screwing up.

By the way, I learned the best way for a cookie to hold it's shape in the oven after being cut is to freeze it. I froze these gingerbread cookies for about half an hour each, and they held their curves and angles really well.

What didn't help, though, was that I basically had two days to figure out a way to do this whole thing. How do I get icing through a stencil onto a cookie and make it look perfect? As I mentioned in my last post, I was determined to use fondant on top of each cookie, and the plan was to stencil onto the fondant. Once the stencil was dry, I told myself, I could then use the cookie cutters to cut the same cookie shape from the fondant and adhere it to the cookie. Time consuming, yes. But it should work, right? I really wanted these to look sharp and very modern and clean.

Well thankfully, the answer was a huge YES! Everything worked exactly as I had hoped. Essentially, I "screen-printed" the frosting onto the fondant using an offset spatula. It worked, and I was thrilled with the outcome.

Here's basically what I used for the decor. Food coloring (I use a lot of that red for all the red velvet cakes people order). There are also silver dragees (those little silver sugar balls), colored jimmies (which I did not end up using), disco dust (a superfine edible glitter that I also did not use), and sanding sugar (which I used a ton of). The Wilton Colormist food spray was totally useless - it didn't work and tasted like butane. I can't fathom any semi-professional baker using this crap. It's $5 a can, too! Don't wasted your money - it's stupid.

I sifted out two pounds of confectioners sugar to make the royal icing and got some mixing bowls ready for different colors.

Loretta was totally uninterested in this project.

I kneaded the fondant I made a few days earlier. It needed to be warm so it wouldn't crack when it went through my pasta roller. After a few attempts, I got the first piece rolled out nicely and started stenciling. The stencils I was using from Ed were small - only about 2 1/2" by 4". That was a great size for one cookie, but I had about a hundred to make! At first I attempted to use one stencil to try and create a solid pattern. In the case below, I tried using the bricks.

It didn't really work. Matching the pattern was far too difficult and time consuming on such a small scale. I also had to wait for the first pass to dry before laying the stencil down to print the next part of the pattern. And the stencil had to be thoroughly washed and dried after each pass so the icing color wouldn't bleed out onto the fondant. This idea was not working (but at least the icing was taking well to the fondant).

After a few more attempts, I decided to just go one pattern at a time. It was much cleaner and, while more time consuming, it at least gave me the result I was after. I sprinkled sanding sugar over each stencil after I printed it, and I think that also really helped the icing stay in place when I removed the stencil.

The sanding sugar looked particularly sexy on the bricks!

Here are some blue ones:

After going at this for several hours, I kind of got into a good rhythm. I started caring less about the patterns being too close to each other or about how the pattern was oriented on the fondant. My goal was to get as much pattern onto as much fondant as possible in a short amount of time. Cutting the fondant out with the cookie cutters was IMMENSELY satisfying. It was the stage of the process that I got to see and enjoy basically what the finished product was going to look like. Everything looked very sharp and very clean and very modern. I was really into it.

I knew at this point that everything was going to look really fucking amazing and I got really excited. I made up more royal icing and used it to adhere the fondant onto the cookies. The way the cookies puffed up a little as they baked made them a little bit bigger than their original size, so it provided a handsome outline around the white fondant. I didn't want to waste any of the printed fondant, so I used smaller cutters to cut the scraps into leaves and snowflakes, which you can see in this photo.

Here they are boxed up and ready to go.

I was very very very very very proud of these!

I also made three 10" square spice cakes to use the actual stencils included in Ed's new book, Stencil 101 Decor. I marked off the center of the cake with my kitchen tweezers (don't fret - I use different tweezers for my eyebrows).

I used the Ranchero stencil in the center of two of them and Ed's name and face in the other. Powdered sugar is the medium here.

Here was the final result.

They looked really great all out on display.

A few things I learned from this project:

1. Freeze your cookies before you bake them. It really makes all the difference in holding their shape.
2. Give yourself as much backup as possible to prevent stress.
3. Larger stencils. I would have loved a 12"x12" pattern stencil to print one big piece of fondant at a time. Maybe that's something I can work on the future.

Well, thanks for reading. Back to the kitchen!

Christian

Stenciling again

2009-11-30T13:37:00.000-05:00

My pal Ed over at Stencil1 has a supercool new book out. The stencils included in the pack are larger-scale than his last round, making them ideal for larger surfaces like walls or floors. The official release party for press and media is this Thursday at a real klassy chocolate shop in Manhattan. Then the BIG party that's open to the public is this Saturday, December 5 from 4 - 6 at powerHouse Arena in Brooklyn (37 Main St., in DUMBO) - stop by, meet Ed, eat some of my baked stuff, and enjoy a little DIY crafternoon! If you've never been to powerHouse, you should go check it out. It's pretty cool and offers a great view of the Manhattan skyline.

So I've once again been brainstorming for some ideas of how to get these patterns and images onto to edible items. I've been racking my brain to come up with something - anything - easier and more professional looking than last year's event. Those were nice, but I really love these new patterns in Ed's book and wanted to do something less organic-looking and more structured and tight.

So I was watching Ace of Cakes last night while recovering from a seriously bad stomach problem (sorry, Eric!), and it hit me. Use fondant. While I've never I've never used fondant, never made fondant , and never even liked fondant, I was sure that this was the best way to go.

Fondant is basically a thick sugar paste that you roll out and drape over a cake for a smooth, satin-y finish. Wedding cakes are usually covered in fondant because it's so smooth and pretty. The problem is that it usually tastes like ca-ca-doo-doo. People hate it so much that they even sometimes peel it off the cake and leave it on the plate! What a waste.

I'm not one to waste anything in kitchen (and I certainly don't want to see anyone peeling my cookies apart and throwing the pretty part away - how awful!), so I decided to flavor the fondant with vanilla and almond for one batch, and chocolate for the other. Duh - so easy!

I used this recipe, primarily because I had these ingredients in my cabinet. Well, I didn't have the glucose, but since I didn't know what that did anyway, I just omitted it (maybe it's a flexibility ingredient or something). The recipe worked well and I turned out a batch of vanilla/almond and a batch of chocolate fondant within an hour. I probably kneaded it longer than necessary, but I like kneading, so whatever.

My ingredients:

I forgot to photograph the kneading process, probably because I LOVE kneading things!

Anyway, I rolled out a bit of the chocolate fondant and tried the stenciling process using powdered sugar on one and red royal icing on the other.

While I like both effects and will likely use both techniques, I was really excited by the red icing. It looks great, retained the sharp lines of the stencil, and has already hardened to a durable finish.

So that's the end of experiment day 1. Tomorrow is dough day, when I'll be making the cookie doughs for these patterns to go on. I hope this all works out, because I have no time for a do-over by Thursday.

Yeesh.

Off to work now.

2009-11-22T18:34:00.001-05:00

Shutout.

2009-11-22T14:36:00.001-05:00

Hey! I'm on my phone. I've just entered a pie competition at a really cute store in Williamsburg called Spacecraft. I was going to make a blackberry apple pie, but since no one had any blackberries, I created an apple/blueberry hybrid. I'm sure it will taste great, and it looks pretty good (despite my extremely poor time mgmt this morning). But there are like 75 pies here! Fucking Williamsburg kids and their free time!

Judging is coming soon. Fingers crossed!

BAKE OFF!

2009-11-14T11:05:00.000-05:00

If you're in New York City today and need something to do, come by Nowhere's first ever Bake Off!

If you want to enter your favorite recipe, have it to the bar by 7:30 for judging. Otherwise, just come and enjoy the cheap drinks and sweet treats!

I'll be slinging drinks behind the bar, but I may be sneaking in an entry or two...

We're at 322 East 14th St., NYC 10003. Hope to see some friendly faces!

Christian

Granny Fingers

2009-10-27T11:26:00.000-04:00

Wanna see something scary? My pal Brian over at Camp Blood approached me a few weeks ago about a project he was working on for Halloween. He wanted to do a gay-horror-Halloween-themed DIY home project segment. After a few hours of shooting at my new place (and a few shots of tequila), here's the result. I think it's fucking hilarious and awesome!

The dude making that cool mummy bag is Aaron from Brooklyn Bags, and also from my last blog post. He's a happy newlywed!

As promised in the clip, here's the recipe for the ladies' fingers. It's adapted from Martha Stewart's recipe for the same idea. I added a few new elements and I've tried to include a few different ideas/twists. The ingredients are easy to find, and with the exception of the yeast, you might already have everything in your kitchen. Don't be afraid to experiment with the decoration part to make them as ugly or pretty as you like. Now you can really give your boss the finger!

Ingredients

Makes about 4 dozen

Red or green food coloring (optional, but encouraged, for nail polish)
24 blanched almonds, halved lengthwise (or cashews or walnuts)
2 cups warm water (110 degrees), plus 3 quarts, plus 1 tablespoon
1 tablespoon sugar
1 package active dry yeast (1/4 ounce)
Vegetable oil
5 to 6 cups all-purpose flour, plus more for work surface
1 tablespoon coarse salt
2 tablespoons baking soda
1 large egg
Sea salt
Fried rosemary (optional, for toes)

Directions

Place a small amount of food coloring, if using, in a shallow bowl, and, using a paintbrush, color the rounded side of each split almond or cashew; set aside to dry. If using walnuts, they look grossest if left unpainted and broken up.
Pour 2 cups water into the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the dough-hook attachment. Add sugar; stir to dissolve. Sprinkle with yeast, and let stand until yeast begins to bubble (bubble, toil and trouble), about 5 minutes. Beat in 1 cup flour into yeast on low speed until combined. Beat in coarse salt; add 3 1/2 cups flour, and beat until combined. Continue beating until dough pulls away from bowl, 1 to 2 minutes. Add 1/2 cup flour. Beat 1 minute more. If dough is sticky, add up to 1 cup more flour. At this point you could halve or quarter the dough and add some spooky color to part of the dough, like green or purple. Transfer to a lightly floured surface; knead until smooth, 1 minute.
Coat a large bowl with cooking spray. Transfer dough to bowl, turning dough to coat with oil. Cover with plastic wrap; let rest in a warm spot to rise until doubled in size, about 1 hour.
Preheat oven to 450 degrees. Bring 3 quarts water to a boil in a 6-quart straight-sided saucepan over high heat; reduce to a simmer. Add baking soda. Lightly coat two baking sheets with cooking spray. Divide dough into quarters. Work with one quarter at a time, and cover remaining dough with plastic wrap. Divide first quarter into 12 pieces. On a lightly floured work surface, roll each piece back and forth with your palm forming a long finger shape, about 3 to 4 inches. Pinch dough in two places to form knuckles. Or, to make toes, roll each piece so that it is slightly shorter and fatter, about 2 inches. Pinch in 1 place to form the knuckle. Cut a bit of dough off the back half of the finger or toe (so it looks like it was chopped off). When 12 fingers or toes are formed, transfer to simmering water. Poach for 1 minute. Using a slotted spoon, transfer fingers to the prepared baking sheets. Repeat with remaining dough, blanching each set of 12 fingers or toes before making more.
Beat egg with 1 tablespoon water. Brush pretzel fingers and toes with the egg wash. Using a sharp knife, lightly score each knuckle about three times. Sprinkle liberally with sea salt and rosemary (for hair), if using. Position almond nails, pushing them into dough to attach. Push one almond or cashew into the back side of each finger and paint around it with red food color. Bake until golden brown, 12 to 15 minutes. Let cool on wire rack. Fingers and toes are best eaten the same day; or store, covered, up to 2 days at room temperature.