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!

Airbrushing and Sugar...Slightly Boring

Okay so I’m really really behind in my blogging.  Basically that’s because for the last three months we have been stealing internet from our neighbors.  They just moved making it very difficult for me to do anything on the computer since we no longer had internet.  I’m proud to say though that we just got it so now I’m officially back online.  So what I shall do so that you can read in spurts and I don’t post a nine inch long post (in HP assignment terms) is post a few blogs for the weeks that I have missed.  Hopefully I haven’t lost you all by being gone so long. 

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.  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 spraying dots.  Very boring and nothing you want to hear about.  Since this was so short, keep reading the more recent posts!

Sugar Showpieces

Last week was back to class with Chef Scott, one of my favs.  His absolute specialty is sugar work and he is really good at it obviously.  We worked with sugar in many forms: pastillage (like gumpaste), pressed sugar, cast sugar, pulled sugar, and blown.  Sugar is pretty hard to work with for many reasons.  Number 1: The recipe for sugar although basic in ingredients is very precise in how it is worked out.  You can only stir until a certain temperature or else the sugar will crystallize too much, you are supposed to add food coloring during a 5 degree temperature range, the sugar needs to be skimmed twice at specific times to remove any impurities that will cause the sugar to crystallize, and then glucose and acid must be added at the right time and then the sugar must be pulled off at the right temperature, then dunked in a cold water bath for just a second so that it stops the sugar from cooking much more but not from cooling too much, and finally, at least for cast sugar, the sugar has to sit for about a minute before being poured.  Number 2: Pulled sugar has to be poured and then let it sit just long enough that it won't stick to your fingers but not cold enough that it begins to harden and then you have to keep all parts of the sugar at relatively the same temperature and then you have to kneed and pull the sugar just enough to get it the right shine and consistency.  I rarely ever got this pulling part right because all he could say was that "you'll know when it is ready by how it looks" but it all looked the same to me and to everyone else but its just one of those things that you have to do over and over so that you begin to notice the slight differences.  Number 3:  The sugar is cooked to 165 degrees Celsius which is 329 degrees Fahrenheit.  

So then you cool it with the water bath for one second and then it sits for two more minutes before you begin to touch it.  Now I can't way exactly what temperature that would be but you start pulling at 140 C (284 F) which is way way way down the road which means you are touch your hands to sugar at around 155 C (311 F).  These are small touches but nonetheless, very hot.  Then you hold the sugar in your hands for about 15 seconds at a time.  You may ask how does this not burn your hand?  And you made the wrong assumption because it does indeed burn your hands.  One of the guys in my class had a blister hanging off his thumb with another blister already formed underneath it.  Sound like fun?  Well it kind of is.  Although it is very hot and you want to pull away, you have to suck it up because you'll never get anything without burning yourself.  So for instance, when you pull a rose petal, you pull with your thumb (takes about 5 seconds), then you must pinch with your other hand on the end so that the cool of your hand shocks the heat of the sugar and causes it to break off leaving you with a small petal (so other hand now has 5 seconds of heat), but then your thumb must remain on the rose petal as you push it into the palm of your hand to shape it (5 seconds) and then while you shape the edges of the leaves (5 seconds)  all of this with sugar around 260 Fahrenheit.  My Chef has become completely numb to heat.  He took a knife and kept turning it in his thumb print and he said he couldn't feel a thing.  He also grabs pans right out of the oven.  Crazy I tell you!  And the last reason, Number 4:  I am terrible with heat.  As most of you know, I can't even sit under island lights or have fabric touch my ears or have any heat really without my ears becoming as red as a Chicago Bulls jersey (more applicable reference in my life than a tomato).  I hate heat.  So not only are you handling burning sugar but you also have to stand with your face about a half foot away from two 250 watt light bulbs while also holding your hands underneath them to mold the sugar.  Fun huh?  You can imagine my struggles if you have ever been with me for five minutes I'm sure.

So the cake that we worked on is by far my favorite decorated cake we have made so far.  We used cast sugar, pulled sugar, blown sugar, and bubble sugar on this cake.  Cast sugar is basically where you make a pot of sugar and pour it into a mold without doing anything else and therefore, it is cast into a certain shape.  Pulled sugar is pulled over and over creating a very shiny and opaque sugar.  Blown sugar is done by taking pulled sugar and wrapping it over a blood pressure pump (literally), and then blowing air into it.  Bubble sugar is just done by putting a form of sugar on a pan and into the oven, sort of, and then it forms bubbles in the sugar which all melts together.  Then you take it out and it hardens and you crack it into pieces, heat slightly under a lamp and bend it to be a cool shape you want.  The bubble sugar and cast sugar are really easy but pulled and blown sugar are very skilled tasks that are also not often seen in a normal cake shop, even one that specializes in wedding cakes and such.  However, sugar was what always amazed me the most before coming to school so I was soooo excited to start and "burn my delicate little fingers" as the chef said.  

If you look at the pictures, you'll see the cast sugar is the black that is covering the top of the top tier.  The bubble sugar is what is surrounding the rose in the picture above.  The roses are pulled sugar and the swans (or thunder hawks as my chef likes to call them) are blown sugar.  Now for the bows, which is another method of pulled sugar, the chef gave us the option of doing.  He did a demonstration of how to do them for the whole class and said if we had time we could work on them.  He says this is the hardest thing to do pretty much and he said if he doesn't do it consistently, he has a hard time getting back to having great looking bows (although lets be real, they look freaking awesome still).  Only two of us ended up with bows on our cake.  I was so glad I was able to get it although it did take a lot of help from my chef and a few tries.  If only I could show you a video of how this is done; however, we are not allowed to take videos in class.  It's crazy though and there are so many things you can do to make the bow look so sick.  It's a pretty sweet cake and it was cool because this weekend my dad and Helene came to visit Chicago and were able to stop by the school and see the place.  It was nice to have them see where I spend 6 hours every day and be able to meet some of the people who work there or are my chefs.  So they picked me up from class before getting dinner and we took a few pictures in the parking lot before it had a chance to break on the drive home.  However, I dropped it off at home and spent the next few days in Wheaton where  my dad and Helene were staying and where Jared lives.  It was a very relaxed weekend and just what I needed: close family and friends and just time to hang out and be with people who know everything about you.  It makes living easy and effortless because explanations are never needed.  That is one of the things I miss most about living in Virginia.  But while they were here, we ate deep dish pizza, saw the city, saw Wheaton, saw a movie, and enjoyed other fabulous meals and time together.  However, when I returned to my apartment, I found my cake had been destroyed my roommate's nephew so I have very very very few and not so good pictures.  Here is what my cake looks likes now...I don't think I can hide the "blemishes" very well.  Awkward.

Quilling, Brush Embroidery, and Purse Box Cakes

Again this week was with Chef Mark and was focused on decorating.  The first few days we made this purse box thing.  I honestly don't really know what to call it.  As you can see it has a lot of accessories and although everything looks pretty easy (minus the flower), it was very time consuming.  Apparently we are the slowest class the chefs have ever seen in our program (it is in its third semester so there have been 6 sections of people). We were barely finishing any of our things and so chefs were threatening to cut some stuff out of the program since we were running out of time.  For this reason, over half of the class's flowers broke.  One girl even had four flowers break.  It was a tragic story and although my first flower broke, my second one made it, that is until the train ride home and so this picture is of a broken flower.  Sad times.  But the bright side is that we are spectacular cleaners, some of the fastest they have ever seen.  So why the difference in speed?  Well what we have come to see is that our class is the biggest group of perfectionists they have ever had.  To jump ahead on my blog for next week, today we cooked sugar and made roses with it.  Our chef said that we had some of the best batches of sugar made and the best roses on the first try out of any class he's taught (which is probably around 10 classes) yet were the most concerned and asked more questions worried about having done it wrong.  We all want everything to be so perfect so we stress over our work and ask a billion questions that we run out of time.  Very unfortunate in this business as everything is so fast paced and as our chef said today, "you will lose your business if you are this meticulous about everything" because you'd spend so much time on the little stuff that you never actually get much done.

     But back to decorations.   The next project we did was called brush embroidery.  Basically we were given a drawing of a rose that had each petal outlined.  We copied this pattern onto our fondant by putting the pattern on top of the fondant and using a needle to prick continuously along the lines to make a dotted marking onto the fondant of the rose.  I keep noticing how cake people seem to make everything so incredibly tedious and time consuming.  But after you do this, you pipe a small line of icing along the line of each petal.  Then you take a brush and carefully drag the line of icing in towards the center of the petal and continue doing this for each petal.  The picture will hopefully make it easier to understand; I made it big so it's easier to see the details.

So as you can see, there is a thick line around the edge but then it is brushed in toward the center and this is done for each petal.  Each week we have a "proficiency" which basically is a practical exam.  This was what I turned in for a grade and although it looks pretty cool, I can tell you that this is not something I excelled in at all.  It is definitely not something that I'm even wanting to prefect as it is pretty boring with little wow factor in my view because you can't really see how cool it is and how each petal of the rose is individually done.  Nothing about my personality is really subtle and so I want my decorations to match that so if I'm going to put work into something, it better show.

     The last skill we learned was quilling.  I really enjoyed this skill as it required little skill for what we were doing and looks pretty awesome too.  However, it gets more complicated as the designs get more intricate.  First we worked on the basic shapes that pretty much are used to make almost any design (all in pink on the left of the picture).  Then we used these shapes to make a flower with stems and leaves and then to make a snowflake.  It ends up looking really awesome but all you do is take gum paste, put it through a linguine pasta cutter and then roll up each piece to make a scroll.  Pretty cool effect though, right?  And it's 3D so it would really add dimension to a cake.

    

 I again did another stage this week on both Tuesday and Friday as these are the only two days during the week that I don't work at Protein Bar, my real (paid) job.  So I staged at a place called Element Bars, www.elementbars.com (right now there is a 20% discount on orders; if you want to buy any, let me know and I can give you the info).  Basically it is a place where you can make custom protein bars without the nasty protein taste.  You get a choice of base (date paste, oats, rise crispy things, etc), a choice of fruit, seeds, nuts, sweetener, boosts (immunity, fiber, omega-3, etc.).  You can also choose from premade ones that are $1 cheaper per bar.  It is in a factory not a bakery.  So they hand mix every single batch that is ordered and any order that is under 72 bars is weighed by hand, hand pressed into individual molds, and then baked.  I did it this way on Friday; however, on Tuesday they were working on an order for 30,000 bars for one man.  I'm pretty sure he is selling them in a store or something although I honestly don't know.  What do you do with 30,000 bars in one order?  They complete this order by putting the hand mixed ingredients onto a conveyorYummm.

     My last thing to tell you about is my time this weekend that brought me back to UVa days.  Wheaton College had homecoming this weekend and so Jared decided to throw a tailgating party before the game.  It's cool because his friend has an apartment that basically looks over the football field from about 20 feet away from the actually field lines and so from the parking lot we watched the game and feasted on food grilled right there.  Jared finally learned why UVa made football about more than just football by following the rule "guys in ties, girls in pearls." What he discovered is that if your school's football team sucks to watch, why not look good while watching it.  At least you can look better in the stands than the football players look on the field (how they look playing at least).  So he made the theme of the tailgate "Guys in ties, girls in pearls."  Soooo great.  And boy did everyone look spectacular.  Jared wore a bow tie, some guys even had jackets on (although with the heat they were quickly removed), and the girls all had their pearls and dresses on.  It was just like good ol' UVa days and it was a splendid, beautiful (day and people), sunny day.

Decorating Delights

     We have switched chefs to a very well renowned Chef Mark Seaman.  As you can tell, all our chefs are world renowned hence the reason I am attending the best school in the nation.  He is teaching us cake decorating and although most of this stuff I have done before, it was still great practice and I learned new methods of doing things and the reason behind a lot of it.  We made two cakes specifically: a man's birthday cake and a baby shower cake.  As you can see from the picture, we made a cake that looks like a wrapped present.  If any of you have seen my work from A.J.C.akes, you have seen me do this twice (once as my very first order and it definitely shows, but one that I am very proud of that I did for Marguerite's birthday).  I was very pleased with my finished product.  At the end of class, Chef Mark gathered the class together and had us stand by our cake and tell the class what were the flaws of the cake or areas that we struggled.  Very humbling and exciting at the same time because you can learn so much and it really is good to be able to recognize areas that I still need to work on.  However, I was very ecstatic when 4 people came up to me after class and said mine was in the top two of their favorite cakes in the class.  It's great because although we are all going to be competing in the industry in the long run, everyone is pretty amicable so far.  It is a good environment because what I've come to learn is that a lot of us are very similar personalities.  Many of us are high energy/high volume (very very loud people), all have a very similar sense of humor, many of us are very open (blunt) people, and all of us are slightly anal about certain things or always hope for perfection.  As our chefs always say, "Perfection isnt' a reality," and we hear this almost daily when we start to complain about where we messed up.  Right now my partner is very helpful because we both are pretty blunt people but because of that we are both pretty tough skinned.  We both can be honest about what looks good on the cake or what should be changed and I'm excited to continue to work with her because it will be beneficial to get better and learn from my mistakes.
     The other cake we made was a baby shower cake that worked on a few different skills: covering in fondant, royal icing piping, gum paste flowers, and on the side, string work.  I have done the fondant and royal icing piping before but I hadn't even heard of string work before.  Let me tell you why: very few people sell it anymore because it is such a time consuming task that requires a lot of practice and perfection. However, because of this, one can charge quite a bit since it is a rare skill to be great at.  Chef Mark owned his own shop for 10 years and charged $20 per inch he piped.  That seems insane to me but like I said, he is great at it and has won awards for it. See the pictures at the bottom and you will see a few of the things we tried with explanations in the caption.  There is bridged and bridgeless.  Bridged means you pipe a thick bridge by taking the smallest tip you can buy (a 00) and piping 14 lines on top of each other.  Royal icing hardens completely and so basically you pipe one line, wait a few minutes, pipe another, wait, pipe another, and so forth.  Then you pipe strings from the top to the new bridge you've created.  Bridgeless, though, requires you to put pins in the cake and pipe a hanging string from one pin to the other and then let that harden and pipe strings from the top to this hanging line.  Once it is all supported with strings, you can take the pins out and it looks, well actually is, hanging off the cake.  It is a very dramatic but classy effect.  However it took me about an hour to pipe one bridge and two inches of string work.

Bridged string work with piped lace
that is attached after completely drying

The piping is so close together on the blue bridged one.
The white right next to it with the dots around it is the
piping where you pipe lines on top of each other creating
a bridge.  Each bridge made like this is supposed to have 14
lines piped on top of each other extending it further and
further away from the cake.  And each line needs at least
five minutes to dry.  Can you believe how long this takes.
Imagine having to do this around a whole cake.  Goodness.

The cool effect of bridgeless hanging an inch off the edge.

Bridgeless.  The piping is supposed to be closer
than that but they were all breaking on me so I made
them just a bit further away to  make it easier.

     Also this week I did two different stages.  I staged on Tuesday and Friday for a French Pastry School graduate.  He doesn't have a shop but makes in a kitchen and sells in stores and at farmer's markets.  He is his only worker and although he doesn't do cakes really, I thought it would be a good experience.  And boy was I right.  I asked to stage and he required a three day commitment.  I did a bunch of different stuff and really was able to see a variety of things.  He also uses very natural ingredients so I was exposed to new sugars and flours than I had ever seen and used.  After three days I received an email asking if I wanted to come in for a fourth day because he was making a wedding cake for his brother's wedding.  I assummed I would be making all the daily production goods while he worked on the cake but he said since cakes were my thing and what I was going to school for, I should be able to do it so he so graciously let me bake some of the cakes, stack and ice all the cakes, and even make some of the fondant decorations for the cake.  It was an experience I will treasure as it was my first official wedding cake I have worked on.  It was an invalueable experience and the fact that he trusted me to work on it was so encouraging.  The next day I also did another stage at a restaurant.  Everyone there was soooo unbelievable willing to help.  If I was confused about anything, they really made sure to help me out and show me where to put stuff or how to do something.  I was told I would be there from 9-2 or 4 but I was there from 9-6 and didn't even leave the kitchen once for food or bathroom break.  However, I'm very glad I did the stage and I seriously learn so many new things each time I do one.  I'm surprised at how many people in my class haven't staged or even looked at the staging list.  They very clearly told us that it is unbelievable the correlation between number of stages and number of job offers at the end of the semester.  I have done a total of 7 days worth of stages over 43 hours with 3 companies.  I have two more stages set up already for next week and more in the weeks to come.  I'm really trying to do as much as I can.  The program is only four months long but if I have to work my but off in the next four months then I will.  And I am. 

A Thousand Pounds of Cake

This week I literally, well maybe not literally (HIMYM fans, I am Robin with this statement), made a 1000 pounds of cake.  This week is still cake building and tasting and we still have the awesome chef that I had last week.  He seriously is so great.  He's only 35 and after he graduated from high school he worked in his uncle's pastry shop until he got a job at the Ritz.  Then he opened up his own shop so he has so much knowledge about how to save money when trying to do this and what to do for this and that.  It's an unbelievable resource for all of us and he has been so helpful.  With all this talk about starting your own business, I began thinking about what I wanted to do at the end of this program.  The thing is I have nothing holding me to any location.  I've loved moving my entire life and I want to move again and again.  Owning my own shop does not allow me to do this since not only will I be tied to that location, but I also will be very short on money since it costs so much to start up a business.  I've decided that I wanna be on the move and see as much of the world as possible.  This basically means that I want to work in a hotel of sorts such as the Four Seasons or the Ritz so that I can find a job in so many different cities.  I'm already starting to talk to people to see how I can make this happen so keep me in your prayers for finding a job and making my dream come true.

     As far as baking goes though, this week we made some pretty baller cakes.  We made a chocolate biscuit (again not a biscuit but a cake) with a chocolate mouse and caramelized pistachios with pistachio nougat.  It is pretty darn delicious even though it so much chocolate.  Another cake we made was a really dry chocolate biscuit and then you soak it in a orange caramel soaking syrup and it becomes really spongy.  It is a very European kind of dessert and very few of us liked it because its just kinda soggy.  It also had a layer of orange marmalade in it and chocolate ganache.  Again, way too chocolaty for me.  We also made a strawberry cake that has a layer of almond genoise (just another term for cake basically), really rich buttercream, strawberries, caramelized almonds, and then another layer of almond genoise.  It was also covered in marzipan which is almond paste and sugar but basically has a similar texture to fondant.  The English use it because they think fondant is stupid since it only adds a negative or neutral flavor and has no function as most people end up peeling it off.  Marzipan though has a very nice almond flavor only adding to the cake rather than taking away from it.  As you can see, we made some delicious cakes.  Basically I should have gained a 1000 pounds but fortunately I don't have a scale here so we shall never know.

     Again it has been another busy week with stages and I've been getting sick so that made it even worse.  As you can imagine, my stomach is not really thanking me for eating all this gluten but how tortuous is it to have a gluten allergy in a pastry program.  My stomach will just have to endure for another week of cake baking and tasting and then I guess a whole lifetime of more baked goods.  However, I do try to eat as much gluten free stuff as I can outside of class.  I have been really trying some new baked goods.  I've made gluten-free doughnuts, snickerdoodle cookies, and bagels.  All absolutely delicious.
     As you can see this post is a week old so continue reading about the last week as it has been quite awesome and full of pictures.  Then again, what week hasn't been awesome?

Millions of Tasty Treats and Experiences

     So our first and second week in the kitchen have just ended and it was great to get to learning the real stuff.  This program is going to go by so quickly considering we are already 18.75% of the way done.  We did some modeling with modeling chocolate, fondant, and marzipan (almond paste and sugar).  We made little monkeys, polar bears, dogs, roses, etc.  It was really awesome.  We got started on a few basic recipes making an English fruitcake to start.  As I told you last post, the program is highly personal and this fruitcake recipe actually is one of our English chef's family's recipe that has been around for ages.  I must say, I am not particularly excited about this fruit cake as it is super dense, almost all fruit, and must be aged for around 3-4 months.  A fruit cake should age no less than 2 months and often no more than 2 years.  It is saturated in brandy and sugar which preserves the cake for practically forever.  We also made a sweet dough that I brought home and made into a kiwi and raspberry tart.

     The second week was all about tasting and building a cake based on flavor and texture.  We made tons of cake that we ended up building into a cake that had these layers (picture directly to the left).  The bottom layer was a hazelnut biscuit (biscuit is not a biscuit as we think of and actually is not even pronounced like that but like the french way) but is basically a pretty dense but moist cake, then a layer of from-scratch orange marmalade, and then another layer of the hazelnut biscuit, then a layer of coffee pastry cream with streusel chunks in it and then a layer of an orange hazelnut japonais which is almost like a macaroon but way more cake like.  Basically they teach us that a cake is not just two textures and two flavors but should be a cornucopia of flavors and textures leaving a unique cake that cannot be replicated easily.  We had so much extra cake so I took a bunch of it home and made a vanilla genoise (a denser vanilla cake) with homemade whipped cream and strawberries and a chocolate genoise with a peanut butter mousse.  I took all these baked goods and about 6 small loaves of bread to Jared's and I think they are starting to warm to the idea that I'll be at their apartment every weekend. 

     Again I am highly impressed by my chefs.  The first and second week we had an awesome chef who is freaking hilarious and ridiculous but soooo knowledgeable.  We will have him again for sugar work which is what I am most excited about because I have been dreaming of making sugar work and blown sugar for quite some time now.  This past week and next week we have another chef who is also pretty funny and again so helpful.  I wanted a peanut butter mousse for the chocolate genoise and he gave me his own recipe and stayed after class to tell me what to do.  The chefs are all about sharing their recipes and such and even say a recipe itself really isn't all that helpful unless you know how to do it.  After making the mousse, I learned how true it was.  During class the chefs do a demonstration of all the recipes we will be making which takes about half of the class time and then we go and make the same recipes.  Even then I have a million questions.  For the peanut butter mousse, I just had to guess on what to do and I know I messed up quite a bit but it still tasted like peanut butter mousse so I was okay with it.  It's just so wonderful that they care about their students and care not only about what they are baking in class but also helping them out elsewhere.
     Also something that the French Pastry School really encourages the students to do is stage (not pronounced like stage but like stasjh- terrible attempt at spelling by sound but basically the french way again).  They say that this is one of the easiest ways to figure out what kind of work we want to do afterwords whether it be in a bakery, a restaurant, a hotel, etc.  It is also a way to get letters of recommendation and stuff on the resume.  The French Pastry School says that there is a huge correlation between number of stages done during the year and number of job offers at the end of the year.  I'm going to make these I priority and try to do as many as I can.   I have gone to the same one twice now and it was actually paid.  Normally it isn't paid but this one was because they are a huge, rich club that can afford it and had so many events that they really needed help.  It is really cool because you get to do a bunch of random tasks.  Last Saturday I made 300 apple turnovers, and yesterday I got to plate a wedding cake, try about a 1000 tasty treats and learned really creative new ideas for how to present cakes, and made bread pudding.  I've never done any of those things AND you get to work around great pastry chefs.  Yesterday the pastry chef decorated a four tiered wedding cake in less than 30 minutes.  How is that possible?  Goodness.   I've got a few more stages lined up which means I'll literally be working from 6-12:30 everyday during the week and then going to school everyday from 1-7:15.  And I will most likely be working on Saturdays too like I did the last two weeks (from 10-5).  I always said I wanted to live in the city and have a faced paced life and so I guess I got my dream.  And the cool thing is that I really do love it.  I love my work and I loooovvveeee my school.  What more could I ask for?

My Arrival in Chicago and School Beginnings

     At last, the summer has ended and my time in Chicago has begun.  I arrived in Chicago on the 22^nd with Jared and Mercedes after a 15 hour car ride.  Since I have not lived in Chicago since the 5^th grade, there was so much that I wanted to see and do again or for the first time.  It was great having Mercedes here to be able to go out and see the city and do things.  While trying to figure out our plans for the day, I found some really amazing, free activities and events that happen in Chicago all the time.  There really is so much character to the city of Chicago.  Mercedes and I headed to downtown Chicago to roam the city streets.  We went to Millennium Park to see the Bean  which is really so spectacular.  Basically it is just a giant mirror in the shape of a bean.  The great thing is that the city is right behind it so it reflects all the buildings.  One day we went to the "beach" which is basically the lake with the city behind it.  It was absolutely beautiful because the water was really teal and the city was its backdrop.  It was really nice because both Mercedes and I have DSLR cameras and so we just kept taking photo after photo.  In one day alone, Mercedes took over 700 pictures.  But see the city, we did and boy was it spectacular.

    Like I mentioned, the city is constantly putting on free events especially during the summer months.  Every single night in the summer the city puts on “Movies in the Park”  in which three parks are chosen across the city and suburbs of Chicago playing a wide spectrum of movies.  A park about two minutes from my apartment was playing “How to Train Your Dragon” and although it was pretty cold, we endured because the movie was so good.  Another night we went downtown and stumbled upon this music and dance event that happens every night featuring new dance styles and new DJs.  The night we were there it happened to be DJ Casper who is the DJ that did the Cha-Cha Slide.  We didn’t really fit into the crowd that was there but it was fun to see him and listen to music that is older than I am right in the heart of downtown.  How could anyone get bored in such a city?  I really hope I don’t get lazy and stop finding things to do and places to visit.  I could be here only till December depending on where I get a job and I want to really enjoy and learn the city. 

     Then Monday came and classes at the French Pastry School started.  I am in the Cake Baking and Decorating program which is the only program in the nation that specializes in just cakes.  I can’t begin to explain to you how much I love this school.  First of all, it is one of the best schools in the nation.  The founder Chef Jacquy Pfeiffer was labeled as one of the top 100 pastry chefs in the world and top ten in America.  He has been inducted into quite a few hall of fames for both sugar and chocolate.  The highest accomplishment in the pastry world is becoming an M.O.F. or rather a Meilleur Ouvrier de France which basically means the best craftsman in pastry.  A competition takes place every four years and in 2008, Chef Jacquy competed in the final round against 15 other competitor s.  And although he did not win, a documentary about the competition, The Kings of Pastry, focused on his a career and time in the competition.  Another one of the chefs at the French Pastry School and winner of the 2004 Meileur Ouvrier de France is Chef Sébastien Canonne, M.O.F.  The letters M.O.F. are always included at the end of his name almost like a PhD or and MD.  There are only 114 winners in the world and the competition has been around since 1924.  I haven’t had much interaction with him but just knowing he is that good is astounding.  Also, I cannot forget my other chefs who are also just as wonderful and who won the National Pastry Competition and are now competing the World Pastry Competition representing the US.   Basically I have some of the best pastry chefs and teachers in the world.  I am so blessed to be able to attend the French Pastry School. 

     The first week was all in the classroom and this is the only time throughout the entire program where we will be in a classroom and not in a kitchen.  We took an 18 hour sanitation course to get nationally certified in sanitation which spanned over two days and then the rest was orientation and my personal favorite, the science of baking.  Since I took so many chemistry courses in college, I absolutely love it and combining that with baking only makes it double my passion.  We learned the basic chemical processes that go on with baking powder and soda, wheat, butter, etc.  It was fascinating and the teacher is one of my favorite chefs at the school so far.  Next week we enter the kitchen and begin learning.  I honestly can’t even begin to describe how excited I am to learn everything and gain a bit of these experts’ knowledge.  It is truly incredible.