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.