For Fun & Practice

This past week I went to class not only during nights like usual, but also two days during the morning classes. The morning class was working on sugar this week, so I got to practice with that some more. In the beginning, I didn't really like working with sugar (it's hot and finicky), but now that I've got the hang of it, I'm really starting to enjoy it. On Thursday, my instructor did a demo on how to make a bird with sugar, so I made one too! I followed his general demos, but changed things up a bit to suit my tastes. Here's the results:



And in my normal (night) class, when we finished up with the dessert buffet, my teacher made us practice our piping (again). This time I decided to try and appeal to what they really want us to do (instead of something I find more fun, like my mermaid cake). My teacher was pleased. I actually think my piping is getting a lot better. I took a picture for later reference when we have to make a cake to go on top of our croquembouches in a couple weeks.

Beginnings in Sugarcraft

I've spent the past two months working on various projects in my pastry class, all of which added up to a final presentation and grade. Last night was our final night, where we had to present five of our creations in an attractive display: wedding cake, pastillage showpiece, sugar showpiece, chocolate box, and a fresh-made mousse cake. (Be sure to click all the images to see them larger.)

The Wedding Cake

As I'm sure you already know, my wedding cake was the mermaid cake I wrote about not too long ago. Since they were foam forms, we were able to keep them for the past few weeks until the final.

The Pastillage Showpiece

I have already written about this too, but only had some crappy cell phone pictures to show you. Now I was able to take some better ones with my real camera!

The Sugar Showpiece

The sugar showpiece was to be an underwater scene made entirely of sugar. The base, water, seaweed, and coral were made of poured sugar (boil it to horrendous temperatures and pour into various things for different effects). The pumice was made of rock sugar (boil sugar and add a spoonful of royal icing at a certain temperature to make it all foamy). The fish and jellyfish were made of isomalt, which was blown and pulled for various effects. Unfortunately, most of my jellyfish's tentacles broke off. :(

The Chocolate Box

The chocolate box was made completely out of chocolate, which we tempered the hard way - on a marble slab. :P The decorations on top were piped onto plastic and very carefully glued on with chocolate (and the help of some awesome chef's grade canned air stuff to freeze the chocolate solid very quickly).

The Mousse Cake - Night and Fire

For the mousse cake, we had a few different ones to choose from. I chose this one because, well, I like it! The bottom is a pistachio genoise, the middle is a chocolate hazelnut mousse, and the top is a raspberry mousse. It's topped of with a thin layer of raspberry glaze, wrapped in some more tempered chocolate, and decorated with some of my leftover chocolate decorations (from the box) and strawberries (because we were all out of raspberries - boo!).


All in all, I'm pretty pleased with the way things turned out, although everything could have been a lot better. :P