For this practical, we had to decorate a 1/4 sheet cake; decorate a 1-layer fake wedding cake (the base was styrofoam); make 12 each of chocolate decor such as chocolate cigarettes, curled triangles, and squares; and make a marzipan rose. We made our 1/4 sheet cake in advance, so no ovens this time — mostly just icing, chocolate, and marzipan to play with. I ended up with a 92, so that was nice.

We had 45 minutes to do the flood work the day before; flood work is sort of like tracing from a coloring book, while using melted chocolate out of a parchment cone. We had to have at least 3 colors (with oil-based colorings, so the chocolate wouldn’t seize from water-based ones), and we used white semper chocolate for the colored parts and dark semper chocolate for the outlines. When I first started the block, I thought that the dark outlines might be too overpowering so I experimented with white outline lines and none at all, but my conclusion is that the dark outlines give the most desirable clean and crisp look.

Icing the corners can be a little tricky. You have to start at the corner and scrape in to the sides of the cake, alternating on both sides of the corner until it’s sharp and even.

We had to decorate this styrofoam base as if it were the top layer of a wedding cake, using a variety of borders, design, and buttercream roses with leaves. The styrofoam only needed a crumb coat-like layer of buttercream, but it was probably the hardest thing on this practical. Maybe I’m not used to perfectly straight lines and a hard, very light base, but I tried for so long to get it right that eventually my eyes hurt a little from trying to tell the white icing apart from the white styrofoam. And I just couldn’t ice the top of the sides properly — you can see the styrofoam pretty clearly — the icing just kept getting scraped off there. Otherwise, I did swag, string work, bead border, shell border, and the roses and leaves. The swag is done with a petal tip, with the fat end toward the cake as you pipe — which I did for a couple of them — but at some point, I rotated the bag so that the fat end was pointing out. I think that it looks okay either way, but consistency is the important thing.

Those are my roses and leaves. We make the roses on something like a screw with a metal round on top, which can be twirled around; then scissor blades are put under the rose to lift it, and then when it’s placed on on the cake, the blades are closed and pulled away. Design-wise, it might have been nice to create a dome of flowers on top of each other, rather than just a flat circle of them.

We tempered dark chocolate to make these decor pieces. The key to success for all of them is to spread the chocolate flat and even to the correct thickness on the surface (we used our marble table-tops). Then, it’s just a matter of what you are going to do with them.

The chocolate cigarettes are made by spreading about a 4″ wide strip of chocolate, and waiting for it to set up just enough to curl, and you scrape at about a 45 degree angle about 1″ from the end of the strip to get the right shape.

The squares and triangles are both spread onto acetate (the squares on a transfer sheet with colored cocoa butter). They’re cut when they lose their gloss. The squares are topped with parchment and a fiberglass square so that it doesn’t curl up. The triangles are cut out of a rectangular spread of chocolate, topped with parchment and rolled around a PVC pipe. I spread my triangles a bit too thick — which I realized once I started cutting them — and some chocolate splooged out from under the parchment when I was rolling it. Luckily, I was still able to get enough triangles.

This was my marzipan rose. It turned out that I was making my petals too thin, so they curled down a little too much; they should only be a little tapered right at the edge. The leaves should also be scored with veins.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 13th, 2006 at 10:46 pm and is filed under Culinary School. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.