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 two week block was focused on cake decor on layer cakes. We generally made chiffon or sponge cakes and Italian Meringue buttercream every couple of days, but the focus was on what goes on top of a cake (especially since, unfortunately, neither the icing nor the cake tasted too good). We learned about marzipan, pastilliage, royal icing, and chocolate decor; and we also made buttercream wedding cakes.

I can appreciate what many do with the blank canvas of a perfectly iced cake, but I realized that I am not that type. I sort of like the challenge of, say, making a cherry pie look beautiful based on how its formed and how it falls into place. Cakes are too much of a free for all for me. Unless I have someone or something very specific in mind to decorate, I have hard time thinking of an interesting design; and it bothers me to do something ordinary. Plus, icing layer upon layer of these cakes wore me down after a while. As I mentioned before, I had issues with food coloring, so mine are a little more, um, muted than they should be.  But, it was still an interesting adventure into a new field.

We learned about different marzipan borders to go around the cake. I thought that I’d try to use the shape of the twisted rope design to imagine a recipient for the cake…. It was pretty nautical, so I made the rope very long, and wrapped the border from the bottom of the cake, up the side, and coiled on top so that it would be fit for a captain.

Plaques are good, quick ways to personalize a cake without worrying about icing mistakes too much; you pipe the message before placing it on the cake. The aged effect was by toasting the sides of the plaque with a torch.

Reverse shells are on the top border.

This day was chocolate decor day. We tempered dark chocolate with the seeding method. The trick that makes all of these decors possible is to spread the chocolate evenly to the correct thickness before manipulating it; I’d say, maybe 1/16″, maybe a little thicker. They’re all spread to the same thickness, so once that’s mastered, they’re pretty easy. We worked on marble surfaces.

The cigarettes are made by spreading the chocolate into about a 5 inch wide band in front of you, and trimming the sides so that it’s a long rectangle. When it loses its gloss and sets a little, you scrape the chocolate diagonally from about an inch from the end of the band so that it curls into a cigarette shape. If it doesn’t curl, it hasn’t set enough yet, has set too much, or wasn’t tempered properly. The striped cigarette was made by spreading white chocolate, running through it was an icing comb, spreading dark chocolate on top, and then proceeding as normal. Mine never really curled on its own, but I was able to roll them up…

The squares and curved triangles are made by spreading the chocolate on acetate sheets (and transfer sheets, which have patterned colored cocoa butter on them). When they set a little, they’re trimmed and cut into shapes with a small spatula. When they’re no longer tacky, the squares are covered with parchment paper and weighed down with a fiberglass square so that they don’t curl up. The curved triangles are covered with parchment paper, and then rolled diagonally around a PVC pipe and chilled. To unmold them, you have to take out the pipe, and hold the remains vertically, and shake up and down to get the parchment off. Then the acetate is unrolled and the triangles break off onto the table… which is kind of scary to see — though the triangles themselves rarely break into smaller pieces.

I spent most of this day trying to figure out ways of doing my wedding cake that I’d make the next day, so this cake was very much an afterthought. As I was trying to figure out what to do with it with a few minutes left in class, someone offered extra green icing in a leaf tipped bag, so I took it. I don’t think the border that I made with it quite works… but that’s good to know. I didn’t even have enough time to make a full marzipan rose, so that’s supposed to be a rosebud.

The bear was made of out flood work. Flood work is sort of like tracing a coloring book picture, and it’s usually does with either royal icing or chocolate. We put an acetate sheet over a picture, and traced over the outline with dark or white chocolate (all semper for flood, so it doesn’t need tempering). Then, we filled in the color withe white chocolate colored with oil or powder coloring (water-based colorings seize up the chocolate). I think that this turned out okay, but I regret that the bear’s tummy isn’t a different color than the rest of it. You can also see where it broke, but you can “re-attach” the pieces by laying the closely together on the cake.

This cake also had a flood work design, and the natural food coloring colored border. I’d probably re-arrange the design a little if I were to do it again, and darken the flood work coloring and make the outline color black rather than white.

And this was my final piping homework. I think I’ve come a long way… Just goes to show that weeks upon weeks of doing piping homework does yield a bit of progress.

However much I love cookies, they’re easily equated with drudgery in the food prep world.  A large batch of batter can be made and a few may be baked off right away, but it’s awfully convenient to enlist a person, arm her with an ice cream scoop, and instruct her to scoop the batter into little mounds in interminable rows onto baking sheets.  They can then be frozen and baked fresh as needed, but the beauty of the individual cookie is easily lost in the process.

So, I was happy to find Isabella’s Cookies at Cooke’s Market in El Segundo, Los Angeles, which has rejuvenated my jaded cookie sensibility.  These are cookies are sold in markets across LA.  My favorite so far is the Muffy Cookie. It had white chocolate, blueberries, and milk chocolate covered blueberries, and it has the uncanny taste of a blueberry muffin.  The dough part seems to have a little less brown sugar than the dough of a chocolate chip cookie, and I think that the particular sweetness of the white chocolate somehow helps to evoke the muffin flavor.

The Twister is another good one — chocolate toffee pieces with chunks of milk chocolate.  I’m looking forward to getting my hands on their CranApple Fritter Cookie, with oatmeal, apples, cranberries, white chocolate chips, and cinnamon.

Isabella’s Cookies seem like the Ben & Jerry’s of the cookie world.  Made out of an eclectic mix of wholesome ingredients (unbleached flour, fresh butter and eggs, no preservatives, no hydrogenated oils or high fructose corn syrup), they’re fun and tasty.  They’re moist and voluminous, but a little less sweet than cookies normally found in supermarkets, so they taste like real food… and are very addictive.  They also make me want to play around with doughs and flavorings of cookies more…

This block focused on cake decor, and it was a little tough for me navigate through. There was a locus of this uneasiness: food coloring. Cakes are known for their vibrant colors, but for me, food should taste how it looks — I just couldn’t bring myself to blithely squeeze color into my icing. If something is red, I think of such delicious flavors as raspberries… beets… cherries… But food coloring in icing undermines this; it’s color for the sake of color. Since I am more interested in the taste of food, I would rather that artificial colors be used artistically in paintings and pieces of inedible art. Also, I consciously avoid foods with food coloring in my normal life, so to use it in my culinary life seems disingenuous. I don’t have any hard proof that it’s bad for humans, and I don’t have anything against decorators who want to use it or people who want to eat it, and I know that very little is needed to color something… but it’s just a personal lifestyle choice for me to make and eat naturally colored foods. That just feels right for me.

So, I tossed these thoughts around in my head as I made my cakes as color-free as possible, until I finally asked the Chef Instructor about alternatives to food coloring, thinking that I could experiment with fruit purees. It turned out that the school has samples of natural food coloring!

Their website says that they’re made from fruits, vegetables, and other edible plants. Because of that, the colors actually have the flavors of what they’re made with (and the bottles of coloring must be refrigerated, hence the nifty cooler above). We only had six colors, but I liked the way they looked: less plastic, a little more real. This is how I colored my buttercream with the Tangerine color:

So, in my ideal world, I’d still have all my frosting burst with fresh flavors, but this seems like a more viable alternative that keeps the fun of colors in cakes. And all I had to do was ask about it…

For this section, we had to design and make a two-tier traditional buttercream wedding cake (we’ll make a modern fondant-covered one later in the program). My design started as a play on swag (the drapery-like half moon design often found on traditional cakes) so that it would take on the shape of a champagne coupe and have swiss dots inside to simulate the bubbles. I worried having to pipe perfectly shaped coupes on two layers of cake (and practiced it, with frightful results), but luckily, hit upon the idea of cutting out marzipan from a stencil fashioned out of this cup. I made the cut outs before a three day weekend, so unfortunately, they dried out a little and didn’t curve onto the cake as much as I would have liked. I made shallow incisions with a butter knife into the base of the top of the glass, brushed them with sparkly luster dust, stuck them onto the cake with gloves, and then piped the swiss dots on them. I thought about piping them randomly, but the cups seemed to small to do that. The cake layers are actually only 6″ and 8″, so they were tiny — if they had been bigger, I would have done champagne flutes with more lines of bubbles.

For the topper, we had options to use such materials as pastilliage, royal icing, fondant, and sugar. I wanted to have the effect of champagne bursting out of an opened bottle, so I opted for the sugar. We used isomalt, which is a synthetic sugar substitute that dries quite clear (of course, the topper isn’t meant for eating). We used a ration of 4:1 with water, and heated it to 340 degrees Fahrenheit. We let it cool a little before pouring it into a large piping cone made out of two layers of whole sheets of parchment. We cut the bottom with scissors and piped wearing heavy duty gloves — this wasn’t quite precision work for me. I managed to made roughly the same oval-on-oval-on-oval pattern over and over again, and when they were cool, I piped a large cirular blob of sugar, and stuck them in, holding them until they were set enough to stand. I probably should have used part regular sugar, since I was after a champagne color. I have to admit that the flash on my camera turned the topper more brown in the picture than it really was. I shaped a cork out of marzipan with brown food coloring marbled, and I planned to have it halfway up the topper, but it just looked like a random brown lump, so I left it out.

I wasn’t sure what kind of border I should use, so I just opted for a simple coil of marzipan, but if I were to do it again, I’d at least color it, flatten it, or shape it a little more to fit with the glass motif better.

I didn’t know anything about wedding cake construction before this, so it was cool to get a glimpse into how they are put together.  Before putting the second layer on, we stuck a straw into the bottom cake, and cut it level with the frosting.  We cut four more pieces of straw to the same length, and stuck them all around the center of the bottom layer.  This gives more structural support and helps to make the top layer to sit level, however slightly uneven the bottom layer may be.