i could melt all this stuff, oh, and yay! for strawberries.

okay...so i've been REALLY busy. not just with school, but with all sorts of "life" related things of course, it's taken me what feels like YEARS to post and catch up with all my blog entries. sorry about that... if you've been waiting!

so i think i left off with angel food cake (vs. devil's food cake...more on that later)

we first cut our cake up into 7" squares. the plan was to stack/fill and practice piping techniques and top it all off with some delicious fresh berries for our Memorial Day weekend!

before anything else, we made some strawberry butter cream to use as a filling in our cakes.

now one of the skills that i am loving that we've learned is how to square off and mask a cake. it's not that i came to class with ZERO knowledge of this, but i DID come here with zero ability to do it without it being painfully laborious and annoying (annoying because i KNEW it shouldn't be as hard as it was). i can now say that i can pretty efficiently, quickly and accurately square off and mask a cake. is it bad that such a simple task excites me?? i know, my chef/cake idols will laugh, but we all start small, don't we? and what's the point of working in cake if you can't build a proper foundation right? so my excitement, however silly, is completely genuine. i can square off AND mask a cake! YAY!! woohoo! (and how appropriate is it that the picture i am showing is actually a SQUARE cake?! (haha, of course i can do this with other shaped cakes too...)

before

after!

well, it is exciting to me...

while these chilled in our fridge, we learned from Chef several different piping methods to create a beautiful, classic basket weave pattern in butter cream.

i've also learned something very important about myself...i have hot hands. i have HOT HOT hands. i mean, i know i've sort of discovered this whilst working with sugar paste upstate last summer, but wow, if i'm not quick i can melt butter cream just by holding it. guess i'm hot-blooded. haha.

now, granted i live in my own little world... but i giggled to myself the other night. it reminds me of one of the lines my husband has said to me on more than one occasion while shopping for groceries. watch it. yeah, we're dorks. and i'm totally smitten. but it's also TRUE. i could melt all this stuff. with my bare hands.

luckily, i've learned to work swiftly and with a few tricks to keep from over-heating the butter cream while piping. i fell in love with piping the basket weave. so much so that i've even made a cake since for a neighbor that features this exact design. it was a major hit! who wouldn't want a basket full of berries? sign me up!

want to hear something even MORE amazing?? despite the fact that it was filled with strawberry butter cream, my husband ATE IT? not only ate it, but ate a couple pieces of it! mr.-ewww-bleh-disgusting-jelly-reminds-me-of-the-blob-i-don't-eat-JELLY!!! ate it! now if that doesn't convince you it's super-delicious, i don't think anything will! i was AMAZED! i have secret, magical powers...obviously.

anyway, the cake was a great, summery treat and it looks so complex, yet is so simple! i'm also enjoying the fact that we're beginning to get into the whole design of cakes! not that i don't love baking and learning recipes and techniques, because i do! but i really want to get into designing and decorating cakes! and as we begin our second month of school, i'm super psyched to see what's on the menu!

more to come,

xo

m