sounds like top gear...

yup, well i'm feeling the momentum now. it's a lot like snowboarding. you ride the lift to the top of this mountain. it's a nice ride. you chat on the way up. you take a picture or two of the tree tops, of you and your snow-buddy, of your excitable grin. and you see that you are almost to the top and then all of a sudden, it's time to hop off. you pick your route down and then off you go. it's just you and your skills. and the cold, crisp air. and it all comes down to the trail you pick, your ability to call upon all the knowledge and skills that you already came with and those which you have learned. you fix your gloves, tighten your board, adjust your snow-hat (which is totally adorbs) and off you go. it's go-time.

that's what i think we're up to in class. and all that training i've been doing, all the late-nights, all the extra practice, all the reading, all the visualization. all the sacrifices i've made... i'm sensing that it's all adding up and building into something into which i'm more than happy to lose myself. you can in fact do anything you set your mind to.

this week we've gotten more into decorating and techniques that are involved in styling a cake. at least that's what i call it: styling. (though i'm sure that i didn't invent that :o)

monday we spent some time on sugar and gingerbread cookies. learning how to prepare the dough, how to make your cookies retain their shape without becoming gigantic, unrecognizable blobs of cooked dough. and then how to pipe a border and use run-out or flooding to fill in the cookie to decorate them. holy sugar batman! i can see someone ordering these cookies as a wedding favor! how adorable, yet tedious! haha, i'm SUCH a cake girl. but still, i'll be using these techniques around christmas, when i make the 7 billion cookies i make every year for friends and family. hope you all are looking forward to that! ;o)

we also practiced sponging color onto fondant and then practiced brush embroidery, piping and stenciling with royal icing. now if you know me AT ALL, you know how much i adore brush embroidery. i don't quite know how to explain it, but i can say that it involves music, being in a zone and just quietly thinking and working on some art work. it's just a place i am very comfortably "home." i had sponged a very vibrant floral yellow and green over my cake...i've been thinking a lot about australia lately, and the colors remind me of the daintree and the royal botanic gardens so that's what inspired my color choices. (god, how i miss you oz - can't wait to return to my home away from home!) i decided to only use white royal icing as an overlay because i didn't want to take away from my vibrant background. i can't say that i LOVE sponging color on cake, but it's a unique look that i'm sure has a place somewhere. either way, i loved getting to play with brush embroidery again and getting try some stenciling was fun - i will be incorporating that onto a future wedding cake someday! can you say 'elegant?'

fast forward to wednesday? CUPCAKE DAY! now cupcakes are delightful and i was particularly excited to learn about the vegan chocolate and gluten free versions! gluten-free and vegan are the new 'pink' in cake. and i love to be on the cutting edge of trends. and i can tell you with great certainty that the recipes i have for both are AH. MAY. ZING. seriously. i'm still dreaming about the mascarpone frosting.

oh and the toasted hazelnut. OH. EM. GEE.

here's our red velvet too! yummy!

either way, each team made a cupcake - our team made basic chocolate. (which was really delicious)

and when all was said and done, we all shared our cupcakes and got to take an assortment home. super sweetness.

i also got to play with marzipan to make little fruits and veg. of course, we didn't get a chance to airbrush them, so i played with my photos to give my creations some color anyway...and i have to say, i love how they came out. just remember: almond paste + corn syrup + powdered sugar = adorable yumminess.

today, friday, we have a major test. and that's why i've been a somewhat absentee blogger... i've been really busy studying. and getting my mind in the game. today will involve using the American milk sponge we baked last class to build a cake and eventually decorate it to demonstrate our proficiency with royal icing, etc.

i'm pretty confident about that so long as i can forget about the fact that it's a test and there's a time limit. it's so nerve-wracking! :o) but in a really cool way. i often feel like i'm in some sort of cake boot camp - but a fun one and luckily our chef instructors don't scream at us like they probably do in a real boot camp. cake is for happy, not for crying :o)

anyway, on that note, i've got to get back to studying and getting ready to leave for school. gotta a lot of thinking to do too! luckily i get to ride the train twice a day... helps me think!

ps - we also got an additional AMAZING assortment of new toys to play with for school - think sugar flowers!!! can't wait to get started doing that!

more to come!

xo

m

last week, in the cake pilot...

well consider this a last, lame attempt to catch up. once i post this, i'll be back up-to-date with the blog and can devote more time to my writing.

to recap:

1. we practiced covering a dummy tier with fondant;

2.learned how to make royal icing;

3. learned how to make a paper cornet (pronounced "core-nay");

4. practiced piping snail trails, cornelli lace, and swiss dots;

5. learned how to make (MY FAVORITE SMELL ever) marzipan (with almond paste, corn syrup and 10x sugar);

6. practiced covering a dummy tier with marzipan;

7. made marzipan roses, plaques and vines, as well as crimping;

8. piped lace points to later decorate our plaques with;

9. and practiced piping royal icing drop-lines, hearts, fleur-de-lis, dots, and other decorations.

all in all, a VERY busy week!

here are the photos to show all that i did:

well, that's that!

more to come!

xo

m

heart of dark(chocolate)ness

without darkness, we cannot know light. isn't that how the expression goes? well, something like that anyway.

while working on the angel food cake, we also worked on a devil's food cake. one is know as the food of angels, the other: sinfully, dark, sweet and rich. i don't see why the two can't coexist. the world needs a little of each if you ask me.

we learned to build the devil's food cake in a ring. but to do so, we first made an amazingly, thick, rich chocolate ganache. the smell was amazing. but there is a trade-off. working with chocolate? MESSY! even for me, and i am a neat-freak! messy, messy, messy!

we whipped the ganache in order to thicken it and make it spreadable, once it was cooled enough. we lined the ring and then began to stack and fill our cakes in the ring. (i wore gloves the whole time and given the mess, i wasn't able to take many pictures during the building process for obvious reasons!)

once those cakes were chilled overnight, we made more ganache and poured it over our smooth, chocolatey cakes. i mean, if you love chocolate, you'd LOVE this cake. it's just layers and layers of chocolate cake and chocolate ganache, and then it's covered again in a shiny, poured ganache and THEN it's topped with hand-made chocolate roses!

which brings me to my next part of the evening: making chocolate roses by hand with modeling chocolate. it tastes quite a bit like a soft tootsie roll, and it's a bit sticky (thanks to my hot hands, it is very malleable and i rather enjoy working with it) i could make chocolate roses ALL day! it's fun and the more i practice, the more they look like roses.

before we left for the evening, we decorated our cakes with some of the roses and vines we made. i was in love with how my cake looked. i mean, it weighed 15 pounds (or so it felt) but it was gorgeous! (the ONLY think i didn't like about it was the twisted coil rope around the base: i ran out of time to get it thin enough and so i put a very over-sized coil around the base, which wasn't ideal, but i had to leave to catch a train so...)

here's some shots of the cake! (ps- i gave a small slice to my mom and my husband, who were in LOVE with it - it was a bit rich for me... i gave 3/4ths of it to one of my favorite families (neighbors) across the street. they were overjoyed! and i think they are even more happy to be neighbors with me now that i'm in cake school - haha)

voila:

but my favorite picture, by far, is this one:

once i catch up, i hope to get back to my lengthy blog posts, but i'm working swiftly to catch up before i get too far behind.

more to come! (so much more)

xo

m

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

humble sugary thank you, whoever you are...

to all my fans and friends and supportive anonymous readers,

i treat this little forum as an extension of my brain, and sometimes, wires in one's brain get a little crossed. i was actually so humbled by the notion that anyone even bothered to take the time to comment and caution me and remind me to think about the fact that i was meshing two world's together that simply don't belong... well, what can i say? kindly forgive my rant...or not. :o) but it's a new day and a better day. and i'm looking forward to the rest.

and in honor of that, and to thank those kind, anonymous whispers from the mysterious reaches of the internet... whether you appreciate my explanation or not... i'm posting some flowers i made not too long ago in sugar and thought i'd share what reading you words today feels like to me in sugar:

hope springs eternal.

xo