01/28-29/10 - Class - Cakes

This week we began work on display cakes. It was our intention to make two cakes, one would be a layered chiffon cake covered with Happy Anniversary or something on it. The second was to be a high-ratio chocolate cake that would be carved, covered, and designed to resemble a butterfly. Simply put, things didn't go exactly as planned.

On the first day we baked the cakes, splitting the two cake recipes between the group. Two other members of my group did the chiffon. The first attempt didn't come out, not exactly sure what went wrong since I didn't work on it. But either way we had to make them again. The second try turned out. I did the chocolate cake, but with no better success. When baking, the cake kinda exploded, bubbling up over the rim and then deflating and not really setting. It turns out this happened to all but one group so I'm not exactly sure what happened. I don't think that it would be the recipe since it was from the CIA book but it is strange that it wouldn't work for so many groups. We did finish off the chiffons by layering them and then giving them a crumb coat of buttercream-I used raspberry jam as a filling and flavored the buttercream with raspberry.

On Friday we found that we weren't going to be able to remake the chocolate cake so we had to use the chiffon for the butterfly cake. It is somewhat interesting to see my cake's degeneration from something halfway decent to a mess.

First we cut off a layer of it to make it shorter and then carved it. We then covered it with a layer of fondant. Despite the cuts not being too even, it doesn't look half bad.

Next we piped a design on the wings. We had a template design but we were able to do as we wanted so I sorta followed it and sorta did it my own way. Regardless, you can see what a mess my piping is.

Finally, we colored it with flow icing, which is thinned out icing that is pretty much a liquid consistency that you pipe in to fill the design. Here's where it completely fell apart to create a mess of a cake.

Needless to say, I'm pretty disappointed with this week's results. I'm kinda fearful that I have no skill in this kinda stuff. I don't have the patience or the eye for detail; I have no artistic talent. I like the more physical aspect of actual baking, so I'm not crazy about my classes this quarter, unfortunately.