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?