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.

For our round cakes, we generally cut them into 3 layers on a revolving cake stand.  The best way to cut the layers is with a long serrated knife; its tip should never get trapped inside the cake.  Hold and spin the top of the cake with one hand, and with the other, hold the knife horizontally so that it makes a shallow cut into the side of the cake.  When it’s gone all the way around, saw the knife into the cake more as you continue spinning, using the groove created by the first spin as a guide for the knife, until it is cut all the way through.  It’s amazing how smoothly and evenly the cake will be cut.  Generally, it’s best to cut off the domed top of the cake, and then mark two lines that divide the cake into thirds before going for the full cuts.  If the layers that you cut are very thin, you can slide them onto cardboard rounds so that they don’t break in transit.  I like to stack the layers back into their original order; some stack them in reverse order and upside down so that the layer with the most defined edges (that was the bottom of the cake) winds up on top.
For our 1/4 sheet cakes, we bake the batter in a thin layer in a parchment-lined sheet pan, let it cool, put a parchment on top, and flip it over.  If you peel the parchment halfway off (folding it down to make sure), then you can cut the cake almost perfectly in half.  Then peel the remaining parchment off starting from a side that is perpendicular to the halfway fold and again peel halfway off (folding it down to make sure), so that the parchment is now folded into a size that is a quarter of the cake.  Cut the cake.  There are now two perfectly cut quarters.  Lift up one quarter and place it on top of the other side of the cake so that you can use it as a template to finish cutting the cake into quarters.  The benefit of this method is that it saves you having to cut a large rectangular cake into layers, but because it’s baked so thin, the batter has to be evenly spread in the sheet pan or else there will be thick and thin areas.  Once you start stacking and filling the cake, it’s a pain to try to compensate for the bumps.  Also, this method will leave you with 4 layers per sheet pan, so either you’ll have an extra piece or you can use the extra piece in another cake.

We had to shape marzipan as a homework assignment, and we will have to make marzipan roses for our practical; we use them as decorations for cakes. I highly recommend it as a stress-reliever. Marzipan has the perfect amount of give, so that it can be shaped into almost anything within reason, without fear of overworking it. And it’s just challenging enough to give you a certain satisfaction with what you shape; half the fun is figuring out the most elegant design for a desired shape. It can be colored, too, but I’m happy with its natural tone… especially since washing food coloring off my hands or constantly changing pairs of gloves wouldn’t be nearly as zen.

The roses are made by rolling one piece of marzipan into a conical shape. Then, marble-sized pieces are put between the layers of a ziploc bag and flattened with the back of a spoon into petal shapes before being wrapped around the cone. The petals should be wider on the outside of the rose. And the edges are flattened just a little bit thinner for a petal effect.

For the next two weeks, we will be focused on cake decor.  We’ve already made buttercream and marzipan roses, and we are once again doing our piping homework with that shortening concoction for practice.  We’re decorating a cake a day, and next week, we will decorate a two-tier buttercream wedding cake with a topper (we’ll be doing contemporary rolled fondant wedding cakes later in the program).  I was always the kid in school who could never think of something to draw out of the blue, so I have to think fast and think of (and research) some designs that I want to work with for this block.

For the third week, we’ll be working with sugar: pulling sugar, blowing sugar, and creating a sugar showpiece.  Sounds like (somewhat dangerous) fun.