Final and Bittersweet Weeks

Although I have not posted in almost two months, I do want to share my last three weeks with you as they were very fun and different from all the other weeks of the program. Week 14 was spent making Petits Fours which are basically desserts that can be eaten in less than three bites.  We made tons of different kinds including: "Exotic Cake" made from passion fruit puree and lime juice (my favorite!! and unfortunately Jared's because he ate quite a bit of them); hazelnut and sweet cherry bites; macarons (not a macaroon, see picture above); chocolate cakes; almond bread cookies; butter cookies with an almond center; lemon cream tarts (D-licious in an Annie voice and with her inflections); almond apricot tarts; chocolate sugar cookies; chocolate mousse, coffee struesel, caramel whipped ganache inside a dark chocolate cup; strawberry coulis, banana, and green tea mousse in a white chocolate cup.  I had boxes of treats that I brought home and then brought to Jared's apartment as my final goodbye goodies.  This last week was incorporated because a lot of times people will want a small dessert table at their wedding and so now I can provide that.

On Wednesday and Thursday of Week 15 (out of 16), we were given 3 hours a day to work on a team project.  We were assigned a partner in week 7 and from there we had to plan and coordinate our final project cake.  The theme was Sweet 16 and we were given creative liberties on it all.  I was partnered with a guy named Eddie whose family is from Mexico, and as some of you know, the first place I really lived was Mexico.  Random I know, but Chef Nicholas was doing a technique called the "Mexican hat" and then it hit me.....WE SHOULD DO A SOMBRERO CAKE!!  And what a great idea.  I really liked the cake we designed and it turned out spectacular.  Eddie was a fantastic partner and really made the cake look great.  He did the piping sombrero, the small cake, and the 16.  He is extremely talented and so it was good to know that I could delegate certain tasks and know that they would be completed with precision.  I designed the cake and was mainly in charge of making the sombrero, the blanket base, and the blown sugar maracas.  Here is the final product!

After finishing up on Thursday we were given two hours to start on our Final Project Wedding Cake.  We did this cake on our own and I designed the cake.  We had to incorporate certain techniques but other than that, we had creative liberties.  The theme was Winter Wedding and so some students decided to do an extreme Christmas theme while I just kind of left it simple but still slightly wintery since I wanted to focus more on the wedding aspect than the winter.  So on the lacy part on the second tier and on the crosses on the top and bottom tier I used a shimmery dust.  We had to do a monogram and since my mother was the one who introduced me to the idea of baking, I used her initials to dedicate the cake to her.  I love you, Mom!  Friday, Monday, and Tuesday we were given 5.5 hours to work on the cake.  Friday I spent the entire time making the hyacinth flowers.  I made nearly 75 of them and did not have enough of the right size to cover the cake in the end.  Monday and Tuesday I worked really hard on all of it and I finished right at the end of class on Tuesday leaving me done an extra day early.  I had an entire time sheet filled out with everything that I would do, how long it should take me, what day I would do it on, and what was its priority level for that day, and then my favorite part....the checkmark box at the end so that I could feel accomplished after completing a task.  I thought mine was really detailed until I saw another girls and she broke it down into every five minutes,  making sure to include a few minutes for her to wash her hands which I

would not stop making fun of her for. Obviously I was over generous with how long things would take me since I did not use the last 5.5 hours.  Then graduation was on Friday and Jared, Father Carlson, and Helene came and celebrated with me.  To my utter enjoyment, the reception after had about 5000 desserts, breads, chocolates, and cheeses of every kind to satisfy my palate, in fact, oversatisfy my palate.  It was great to have them there to meet some of the people who have been baking and decorating alongside me or teaching me the fabulous skills I have learned.  It was such a bittersweet day as I really wish the program were longer but it meant that I was getting out into the real world of baking and continuing my education.  My New Year's Resolution was to always keep educating myself now that my formal education is done.  I want to challenge myself with new skills, learn new tricks of the trade, and become the best cake artist that I can be.  And for those in my classes, I learned that in life or at the FPS, you may succeed but you will never excel, because learning never ends.  

Le Chocolat

The week before Thanksgiving was tough because we only had three days to do anything.  Since the am class and the pm class have different schedules so that chefs do not have to teach both in the morning and in the night, all the projects are week long schedules.  So we had to fit a week's worth of work into three days.  Fortunately some of the stuff was pretty simple and Chef Scott did some for us "in his spare time" which he has none since he is constantly teaching or practicing for the World Pastry Competition (in July....crazy I know.)  So it was a rushed week but we were able to finish.  I was not very excited about working with chocolate as I am actually not a fan of chocolate, especially dark and white chocolate which is all we worked with.  We learned how to temper chocolate.  Basically if you melt chocolate and then try to pipe or use it, it will never harden.  You have to melt the chocolate to a certain temperature to melt down certain crystals, then you have to cool the chocolate  a little so that different crystals form which harden up at room temperature.  Also interesting fact...when chocolate has a white powder on it, it actually hasn't gone bad.  You can still use it.  All that has happened is that it is out of temper and the cocoa butter or solids have separated from the chocolate.  If it is a candy bar- EAT IT!! If it is chocolate that you want to use for a baking purpose, retemper the chocolate and it is perfectly good.  I can't image how much money I have wasted by throwing away perfectly good chocolate.  It saddens me. 

So we did a few different things this week.  We made a half sphere ball of chocolate to build the chocolate pieces on.  Another cool thing is that a hollow sphere is actually stronger than a full sphere because when the chocolate is moved much, the shock is displaced in the space whereas when it is solid, the force has no where to go so it breaks the chocolate to get out and be released.  Then we made a butterfly by casting (or pouring) chocolate onto plexiglass and then cutting out a butterfly in dark chocolate and then again in white chocolate but this time cutting out the center pieces.  Chocolate is one of the best glues for anything cake related and so you put things together just by adding a bit of chocolate in between.  Then we made the flower which is the most simple thing ever.  Basically you take a half hollow sphere to build on.  Then you take two chocolate
candies and glue them together and them dip it in yellow cocoa butter.  From there, you just take a small pointed knife, dip it in the chocolate, and make the leaves.  There is a special way of using the knife so that there is a vein going down the petal which makes it really realistic.  However, being as it is so simple, if I tell you this technique, I wouldn't be very skilled anymore.  Then you just take the petals, dip them in chocolate, and attach to the half hollow sphere.  Crazy simple but such a cool look.  Then we made the leaves and the stems.  This is all white chocolate and colored cocoa butter which is blended up until it forms a paste which you can them form into whatever you want really and it hardens completely.

     Earlier in the day my friend Alex who is from Chicago but lived with me in Australia came to tour my school.  Chef Scott was teaching both the morning and evening class and doing chocolate in both.  We sat in during his demonstration of other cool chocolate techniques.  I was the first to finish my cake so I was able to work on a few of these and was very excited about them.  It's amazing how simple some of this stuff is but just how cool it looks.  My favorite were the chocolate plaques which look awesome.  What you do is take colored cocoa butter and brush it onto acetate then pour chocolate on top.  The fats in both are attracted to each other and so the cocoa butter sticks to the chocolate.  You are supposed to cut it into shapes while it is waiting to harden but I forgot so I had to crack mine once it hardened all the way.  So cool.  And then the sad tale...since I was leaving for the airport right after class, I couldn't take my whole cake with my so I was going to take apart each chocolate part and put it in my locker.  So I asked Chef Scott how to take it apart my

chocolate piece since its all glued together and so he came over and pulled it off the cake, flipped it upside down, and smashed all of it into pieces.  I literally shrieked while everyone else gasped and I just looked at him like he was crazy.  And all he said was something like this, "Isn't it great destroying these showpieces."  And I responded with, "When you've done 1000 of them, sure its fun.  But when this is the first and only one you've ever made....not so fun."  Very sad, but I do have plenty of pictures.
Then I got to go home and have a wonderful Thanksgiving with the fam.  We skyped with Sally and ate a wonderful meal with some great pies.  It was a perfect holiday and then I went shopping on Black Friday and got about 15 DVDs.  Thanks fam for a great break!

Scultped Cake Splendor

IT'S TIME FOR SCULPTED CAKES!!!  And yes I do mean the whole nine yards.  We used PVC pipes and everything to get the gravity defying boat.  Two weeks ago was one of my favorite weeks as far as what we were making.  This is the first week where we shared making a cake.  We always have partners but basically they are just at the same table and not doing anything for your cake.  But this week since the cake was so big, two people worked on the project.  I fortunately got one of the best students in the class.  He is the one that I said has an A in the class and always has the best results.  So the cake is basically a steam luggage (I think that's what it is called) with a bear on it, a soccer ball, and a boat on top of the soccer ball, and a ball on the cake board.  The luggage part was really easy since the cake was already baked in the shape of the luggage.  Decorating it was also pretty simple and just required some airbrushing.  The bear was made out of rice krispy treats which can be eaten but because they are so stiff, I personally would never eat it like that.  There are few tricks to making the rice krispy treats become so stable and so you can't just use homemade rice krispies.  Then the bear was covered in fondant and put together.  It actually has a pvc pipe going through the body but it isn't really necessary although it can't hurt because it stabilizes the bear.  Then the bear was also airbrushed to give the color more depth.  Chef Scott always says that airbrushing should just be used to highlight and define objects not to be the main focus of the cake.  I didn't completely understand what he meant until this week because each element doesn't really look airbrushed but seeing it
before and after really looked completely different.  Adding airbrushing almost acts like the shadowing of the object and this makes it much more realistic.  The soccer ball was a little tricky to cover since the shape is so awkward but with patience the fondant can be smoothed on.  Then the pattern was drawn onto the ball, then places removed and then filled with black to give the soccer ball look.  Again the airbrushing really added to the ball because it defined each line and also shadowed the bottom as a real soccer ball would be shadowed.  We did learn quite a bit at this point because in order to keep fondant from drying out you add a bit of crisco.  However, it seems that too much was added to the black segments and when the humidity got to the fondant, the black literally started to melt off and dripped all down the back.  Fortunately my partner did the front of the soccer ball first, rerolled and added crisco and then did the back, only the back had too much crisco and so it didn't ruin the important side of the cake.  The boat is the attached to the pvc pipe that runs through the soccer ball.  We had some issues with this as well because the angle of the boat was so dramatic that the soccer ball wanted to pull off of the cake and fall over.  Our chef suggested we turn the boat around so that the boat was facing inward but being that the back was cover in melted black fondant I was extremely opposed.  We had to do many trials of putting dowels into the cake so that it would hold up and not fall.  In the end, it was stabilized and we didn't have to sacrifice looks to make it work.  This cake was really fun to do because it had so many aspects and we got to work on things over and over.  We did a lot of fondanting, airbrushing, gumpaste work, and the basic cutting of cakes.
Then while we were supposed to be cleaning, I decided to waste some time and take some awesome pictures.... (you can see in the left picture where the pvc pipe was)....so worth it.

Buttercream Cake and a Life Challenge

Three weeks ago was buttercream and sponge cakes.  It was a very frustrating week.  Buttercream is super hard to work with because it melts really easily in your hands since its butter and also because it shows every little mistake.  We were only given a little amount of time to practice before putting it on a real cake.  We made three layers: 1) white sponge cake with vanilla buttercream, 2) chocolate sponge cake with chocolate buttercream, and 3) yellow sponge cake with coffee buttercream.  We covered them in buttercream and then were given certain techniques and designs that we had to put on our cake.  It was a very hard because piping is very much a learned skill.  We were only given a certain amount of time to complete the cake and so that only made it that much harder.  I started out piping and scraping it off when I hated the outcome but towards the end, I just basically had to speed through it so I was forced to put up with my piping.  I was really upset with the outcome of each individual piping technique but once it was completed I was actually pretty pleased with how it turned out.  I’m definitely more critical of myself than I should be.  I mean this is the first time I’m doing a bunch of this stuff and so I’m learning to accept that my cake will not look like my chef’s cake.  Chef Scott said he was actually very pleased with my piping and that I should be surer of myself.  Although he did point out that my cake was leaning quite a bit so basically I am not very good at cutting, filling, and/or stacking the cake to make it even. 

Also seeing as the cake was going to serve quite a few people considering it was a three tiered cake, I was able to share the wealth.  On the way home the man manning the train ticket place jokingly asked for a slice so I cut him up a slice.  Then as I was near my home, a homeless man asked if he could help me with the cake (eating I’m sure), so I told him I would go home and bring him back a few slices.  He was so excited when I actually came back with 10 slices and he said I was the “angel of the week” and that I had just provided him his week’s meals.  I kept feeling called to help this man on the street since I pass him every day but money is always sketchy to give since you have no idea where it is being spent but food is always helpful.  I think I’m going to start bring him breakfast on my way out of the house, even if it’s just a bowl of oatmeal.  The sermon that week was absolutely phenomenal, probably the best one I’ve heard from Pastor Moody at College Church.  He spoke on Ecclesiastes 5 and how it says not to tell God you will do something if you aren’t going to follow through.  When I became a Christian, I was committing to live as Christ did.  That seems like me telling God I would do something.  So how can I pass a homeless man on the street and not do anything about it?  Didn’t Jesus say, “Whatever you did for the least of these you have done for me”?  So I must act on my promise to God and I shall start by helping this homeless man.  I hope that is a challenge for all of us.

Boring Butterflies

So four weeks ago, we had Chef Scott and we worked with other sugars and airbrushing.  Airbrushing was sooooo boring.  We literally spent a whole day just making dots and lines of various sizes so we could learn pressure control and such.  I did alright in this section but once it came time to put airbrushing on the sugar pieces, I wasn’t very talented.  We worked with pressed sugar which is just sugar and vinegar pressed into a mold.  It hardens completely and can hold quite a bit of weight.  So if you look right about the cake portion, you will see a half sphere which is the pressed sugar which we then airbrushed. It looks weird because it has the look and feel of Styrofoam so I don’t like how cheap it looks.  The butterfly, stones, flower, leaves, and stems are all made from pastillage which is basically very much like gumpaste but is made with sugar and vinegar as well.  We airbrushed all of these but the stones.   Honestly there isn’t much more to say about that weeks project since we spent quite a few days just praying dots.  Very boring and nothing you want to hear about.  Since this was so short, keep reading the more recent posts!

Winter Wonderland and Wedding Cakes with Chef Nicholas

Week 2 with Chef Nicholas was another great experience as we worked on a wedding cake and a winter wonderland plaque.  The wedding cake is a different style as far as color goes but then to tame that down a bit, the rest of the cake is kept pretty traditional.
We made a plaque which is a really cool idea because basically it can sit on top of the cake and can be on either a cake board made of cardboard or can be made of edible material such as gumpaste or pastillage.  Then when the cake wants to be eaten, the plaque is taken off and can be saved.  He said for baby showers he will make a plaque with the child's name and birth date on it and a half 3D baby under a blanket (like the snowman) and then he will give sell the couple a shadow box that has a nail they can then hang the plaque on and keep for forever.  I don't like the fact that the one we made is on a cake board but I think it is a really neat idea if it is all technically edible but won't go bad with time.  So we made this Winter Wonderland themed plaque.  We used a mixture of fondant and gumpaste for all the things on the board.  The letters and the snowflakes were all cut out with little cookie-like cutters.  The snowman is just built up 50/50 (called 50/50 mix because its half fondant and half gumpaste) that was then covered with little accessories.  The moment when I truly appreciated the genius of Chef Nicholas was when we started to work on the scarf.  Before each day, he would set a few tools on our table that we would be using during the class period.  This day, we got a toothbrush and we were all so confused and he told us just to wait until the demo to see what it was used for.  So when he started making the scarf he told us to use the toothbrush bristles to create a wool like look for the scarf.  Seriously?!?!  Who thinks of that?  I was literally awestruck by the smallest thing because it's obviously incredible all of the things he does but its the little stuff that  just blew me away.
I can't tell you how many times throughout the two weeks that he said, "so when I was creating this technique/tool...".  It is unbelievable to be working with such a person.

     The second week we worked on a wedding cake.  It was a lot of new and traditional techniques but with a cool color.  But the cool part was working on the gumpaste flowers  We made three different types of flowers: calla lilies, a mini orchid, and a gardenia as well as some leaves.  I really enjoy making gumpaste flowers as it is a very meticulous process and requires a lot of detail and attention but the result looks so good that it is worth it.  They can break pretty easily but if they are taken care of then they are fine.  Some people only make gumpaste flowers for a living.  Chef Nicholas told us how one of his students has kids so couldn't have anything but an at home job so she contacted the local Four Seasons and a few other hotels in the area and provides them with all the gumpaste flowers they need for their cakes since they don't have the time to make them.  She makes over $2000 a WEEK!!  Crazy huh?!  All just making gumpaste flower arrangement.  The other decorations are all really simple for the most part.  The draping was probably one of the hardest parts but at the same time not too hard.  The hard part is that they will all look different because draping drapes differently each time you hang it on the cake.  At first I didn't like the look of the cake but it really grew on me as time went on because the color is my favorite color but the look was still traditional which I like.

     So back to Chef Nicholas Lodge, when I was talking to him about how I loved blown sugar and other sugar work because I saw a woman on tv do it and he was like well I can just shoot her a text and see if she has any openings.  Then we got to talking and he said he has plenty of contacts of big named cake artists in Australia, New Zealand, every state in America, and England obviously.  And I'm sure more and more.  He is probably one of the most well connected people I have ever met.  What a great man and a great week.  Also, many of the chefs here are opposed to giving A's because under the A grading it says that the person has perfected the skill and so they say that since we are students, we have not perfected the skill so they won't give us an A.  There are four sections and throughout the entire semester I have only gotten maybe 3 or 4 A's in a section so never as an actual overall grade for the week.  I think only one kid in the class has an A and he's just really really good at everything.  But I got a perfect score with Chef Nicholas in all sections giving me an A+ for two weeks.  Also most of the chefs are all about being honest and straight forward.  I once brought my airbrushing dots up to Chef Scott and without looking at them he jokingly said they were terrible and then said "just kidding" only to take that back seconds later when he actually did look down and said "actually they are kind of terrible."  I mean I definitely want them to be honest but boy are they honest.  Good thing blunt people don't offend me much because I would be a wreck in this industry if I got upset about those kind of comments.  Some people don't take so easily to those statements.  But Chef Nicholas was always saying how for being the first time we are doing something we are doing excellent.  He always says that nervous or unpracticed shaking makes things look more antique and adds extra texture, always turning negative things into positive ones.  I think we all needed those two weeks of uplifting words to get us through the rest of the semester.  It has been absolutely amazing with him and again, I can't wait to work with him in the last two weeks of the program.  I'll try to be better at posting blogs and I'm still a little behind so keep looking for posts soon to come!  Have a great Thanksgiving everyone and maybe I'll see some of you while I am home.

The Dear Nicholas Lodge

Nicholas Lodge...the best chef in the world in my opinion.  I feel like I say this all the time but he truly is the best.   Nicholas Lodge made one of Princess Diana's wedding cakes, made Harry's Christening cake, and makes all of Elton John's cakes.  He is from England and literally has revolutionized this industry.  He made his first gumpaste flower at 10, wrote and later published his first book at 13, and now has plenty of books.  He has created many techniques that are now considered the standard way of doing things.  For instance, gumpaste roses used to be made by making each petal individually at attaching it.  He decided to use a normal flower cutter with 5 petals, cut down the sides of each to make each petal deeper and then attach it to a center bulb.  Very few people use the old method because it is so time consuming and really doesn't change the result much.  He literally has a foolproof method for roses and everyone's looked great. He now has his own school in which he teaches basically every pastry chef out there so he knows everyone (and he's willing to help us make contact with these amazing chefs).  He also realized that the pastry industry didn't have many of the tool that it really needed to get consistent results so he started his own brand and now sells all these tools that basically aren't made anywhere else.  Also he felt that the colors used to dust flowers were not realistic to he had a woman created more accurate colors that only he sells.  He basically is a pastry genius.  And he taught us for two weeks and will be teaching/helping us during our final two weeks in which we do our individual wedding cakes and team sweet 16 cakes.  He will also be grading us on these two final projects.  I can't explain how much of a privilege it was to have him for even two weeks.
    The first week with him we worked on our fruit cake which is his family's recipe.  Like I said in one of my first few blogs, it is supposed to mature for a few months.  When he let us try it, he said it still wouldn't be ready yet even though it's been two months.  He suggested we save it for Thanksgiving at the earliest but being that it was a Valentine's day cake, he said that would be an ideal time to wait to eat it.  So we covered it with marzipan which is used like fondant but is basically just almond paste so it tastes really good.  Then it is covered with four layers of royal icing.  Royal icing is just normal icing that hardens completely.  So basically if you dropped this cake on the ground, nothing would happen because the royal icing is rock hard.  When he cut his open he literally had to saw through these layers of royal icing.  This helps keep the fruitcake protected and sealed so that moisture cannot get out.  We asked him how long this cake could last and he told us about how the newspaper wrote of a family who found a 113 year old fruitcake in the attic and how it was completely unmolded and looked exactly like it had when it was made after removing all the marzipan and royal icing.  Also fruitcake is the only cake used for weddings.  The tradition of saving the top layer of a wedding cake for the anniversary in America started because in England, the top layer is saved for the first child's christening which is normally about 9 months to one year after the wedding.  However, Chef Nicholas once had a couple come in for a wedding cake and 17 years later, they came in with the top tier of their cake to be redecorated for their first child's christening party.  Crazy, I know.

     So we decorated these cakes in an English style as well.  We used a technique from the the Lambeth Method which is a book full of these old methods used which are sooo beautiful and were new to the industry.  The book is no longer printed so to get one of these books costs a fortune.  Right now the cheapest one on ebay is nearly $500, obviously way out of my budget.  If you look at the cake, everything is done with piping.  The lettering is hand-piped, the heart is done by drawing an item, in this case, a heart and then using really watered down royal icing so that it runs fluidly but stays within the confines of the piped heart shape.  Also one of my favorite parts, which is was better at than I thought I would be, was the cherub on top of the heart.  I piped that!  Basically you use different pressures so that it makes a 3D cherub and looks realistic.  The edges of the cake are the most common of the Lambeth methods.  Basically it is just swirling the icing on top and the sides of the cake and then doing a few layers of this so it gives depth to the cake.  This is called scroll work and there are many versions that have a really cool affect (two pictures to the left and below).  For all of you who will be here during the Christmas season, I am bringing it home for everyone to try.  It isn't like traditional, nasty American fruitcake.  And I have just learned that my dear sister will also be joining us for Christmas.  I can't explain how excited I am to have her back in the same country let alone the same house.  Can't wait to see you, Sal Pal!