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Template and workspace
Description: I taped the template on a pice of art board so I can move it around easily, like work on the filigree in front of TV!
Template
Description: Close up of the template, it looks like there are lots of line!
Finished filigree
Description: The cakes require 8 pieces, but I made 12 so the extras are backup. These things break easily!
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Double sided
Description: To make the filigree strong, I did double side to enforce the thickness of the piece. The second side is actually smoother, probably because after first run, I know what icing consistency to use to get better smooth finish.
Basic cake
Description: The cake is covered with fondant during class. After the chocolate heart fondant cake, I got better to get smooth base. I just need to work on to get a pefect flat cake.
Crimping
Description: I don't have a crimper but was interested at it. The instructor has some crimper for us to play around with. I have to say, it's a good tool to have!
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Crimping closeup
Description: One thing I learn is, crimping has to be done as soon as possible. When the fondant is dried, it tends to get crusty and may crack when apply the crimping method.
Shell border variation
Description: I have been doing single color shell border for a while, it's time to try different varieties. It's more work to alternate the color, but it's worth it. Besides, I need some thing to cover the seam at the base.
Brush embroidery
Description: I learned this technique a while back ago but just never apply it. The cake is quite tall and if I put molded flower on it, I won't be able to cover the lid of the cake caddy, so I opt for this method. Aparently I need to work on my symmetry instead of just eye ball it.
Brush embroidery closeup
Description: Getting the pattern on a dry fondant surface could be difficult, but the icing would cover some flaws.
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Base dots
Description: The filigree is secure by royal icing dots at the base. I still need to work on dots because sometimes I get pointy dots when pulling the tip away, sometimes they get uneven size.
Filigree on side of the cake
Description: The filigrees just lay on the cake. My cake is quite tall so the filigrees do not close nicely.
Finished cake.... sort of
Description: The top of the cake is a bit dry with too much white surface, and the crimping can't be seen very well.
Finished cake
Description: Okay, I over did it, now it looks like a Xmas cake from a distant!
String work is the most delicate technique in the cake decoration world. I have seen is in books and show, and attempted a few times using a tip #1. As I just get a tip #0 recently, I have set my heart to really learn this technique to see how far I can go. It's around Valentine day, so I choose a heart shape cake.
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Cake base
Description: To go with the chocolate theme of Valentine, I choose Devil's food cake made from scratch and covered with thin layer of butter cream. The cake came out quite tall because I use 1.5 batch of cake batter. I need to cover the cake with fondant so it needs to be about 4" tall, which is the standard height of wedding type cake.
Covered with commercial fondant
Description: This is the first time I use commercial fondant instead of home made Marshmellow fondant. It's very nice to work with and doesn't get too stretchy. It's a Dark Chocolate flavor fondant.
Getting better
Description: This is my 4th time working with fondant cake, I think I have improved in handling the fondant. As you can see, the base is very smooth with no wrinkle.
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Opps....
Description: I overlooked the pointy side of the heart, so the fondant stuck to the buttercream icing and it was too late for me to go back and re-pleat.
Garland Frill
Description: One of the new technique I used is fondant garland frill. I don't have the right frilling tool, so it came out okay, not great.
String work part 1
Description: I started at the back of the cake to see how it goes. The starting part is always the hard part because I'm not used to the small tip, and trying to get a straight line is not easy!
String work part 2
Description: As I move toward the side of the cake, I get small breakage, mainly because I was tired from squeezing the piping bag and got impatient.
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String work 3
Description: After doing some adjustment to the consistency of the icing and changed piping bag several times, the string works get better and cleaner.
Finished cake...... sort of
Description: Since the string work is so messy, I didn't border to put a cake center piece, not to mention it was very late at night!
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Cake serving
Description: The cake is made with Devil's food cake from scratch, with milk chocolate froasting filling, covered with vanilla butter cream then dark chocolate fondant. The fondant is not very thick as you can see, it's slightly over 1/8" thick. The cake itself is moist and have good texture.
What happened:
- I almost get blister on my index finger for wrapping the piping bag around it to get a tight grip so I can squeeze the icing harder.
- I changed piping bag more than 5 times to re-adjust icing consistency
- By squeezing piping bag too hard, I got tention headache!!!!
What I learned about string work:
- If icing get curly coming out of the bag, the bag is squeezed too hard. Reduce pressure and pull away from cake fast to untangle the curl.
- If string get curvy instead of straight, try to pull and drop the line faster.
- If string get stretchy and break, increase thickness consistency of the icing.
- Use fresh royal icing!!!!!
- Do not watch comedy show when working on string work! I was watching Family Guy when working on the cake. Just when I was in the middle of the piping and pulling out a string, a funny part came on and I was caught either try not to laugh or screw the icing. I giggled and drop the string...
- Use a sturdy cake board. My string work broke when transferring the cake from turn table to the carrying caddy because the cardboard bend a bit and cause a shift of verticle level on the cake.
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Filigree template
Description: The template was provided by the instructor. It's covered with saran wrap since that's what we have in the classroom, instead of wax paper.
Iced filigree
Description: I made six of them but one broke during when I remove the saran wrap. It's best to let them dry overnight before peelling them off.
Filigree surface
Description: I happen to have mixed a correct consistency icing so the icing ran smoothly and doesn't give me too much pointy spike when the piping tip is pull away.
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Decorated Case base
Description: The base cake is quite standard, shell borders, flowers, drapes work.
Elegance
Description: I'm happy with the shell border, they're the most consistent looking version I ever had, it must be the icing consistency thing. The drape work is new, so I'm still trying to figure out the angle of the tips as it curves up.
Cake top
Description: It was late at night, with all the extra icing laying around, I just make simple roses bouquet. The icing consistency is not very stiff so the roses came out a bit flat. The advantage of not too stiff consistency icing is I could get a smooth petal instead of torn one like carnation.
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Filigree on cake
Description: With only 5 filigree left, I manage to divide the cake evenely along with the drape work.
Filigree insert
Description: Part of the filigree has to be inserted into the cake to hide the edge since the cake is not exactly 90 degree.
More filigree
Description: I have some left over filigrees from my friend's wedding shower cake, so I'm patching the cake top with more delicate pre-made pieces. Since I'm not using Royal icing to suppor the triangle net filigree, I can't make them stand up consider all the transportation involve later on. So I just lay them on the cake instead.
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Triangle filigree
Description: The triangle filigree was made with tip size 1, which is quite thick. I just bought some 0 and 00 size tips, so I will stay with smaller size tip in the future.
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Finished cake
Description: The design of the cake is taken from a line art image. The line art outline is pressed onto the cake, and later on touch up using toothpick/niddle.
Painting
Description: The color is painted on using paint brush, just like acrylic painting. As you can see I'm not a painter, the soft icing surface makes painting less controllable as you can't go back and keep brushing the same spot too ofen.
Ruffles on the side.
Description: I'm running out of idea for border. Instead of trying to messe with new thing, I decided to practice some old technique - ruffles! The ruffles get more evenly space now, but the height of the ruffles could be improved so they all look more linear.
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Bare naked cake
Description: The flourless chocolate cakes were baked in silicone muffin and half-sphere pan, over water bath.
Broken hearts....
Description: Once the cakes were chilled overnight, it's more managible. However, pushing the cake out of the mold is challenging and some heart surface stuck to the pan as no flexible spatula can get to those area to loosen it up.
Cover up
Description: Chocolate candy for Valentine is sooooo boring. Ganache covered individual size flourless chocolate cake is a better treat!
Differnet coating
Description: The halfsphere cakes were covered by the chocolate mirror glaze, while the hearts are covered with regular ganache. The spheres cooled down and lost its sheen while I was working on the hearts.
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Shinny heart
Description: The regular ganache keeps it sheen longer because of the use of butter and corn syrup.
Messy!
Description: For the ease of clean up, I didn't let the ganache set on the wire rack. Some ganache flow to the parchment as it set.
Smoother sphere.
Description: The chocolate mirror glaze is thicker because of the use of gelatine. The thick glaze set faster so doesn't give bumps on the surface, as well as not trapping air bubble in the glaze.
Little heart on the cake.
Description: After putting the royal icing color flow heart on the cake, it looks like a Chinese tradition grave. In the Chinese grave's cake, the heart would be a gravestone!
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Finished cake
Description: This cake is a different recipe with different baking time.
Major different
Description: The cake is flatter, but not very tall. It doesn't have crack but not enough browning.
Sponge cake?
Description: If you just look at the picture, it looks like a sponge cake!
Texture
Description: The cake texture is still like and spongy, but not mousse like soft fluffy like the one in my first Japanese cake.
My friends had a Wizard of Oz theme for the Xmas party. To make it more difficult, they only want finger food! With the totally non Xmas theme, I have to experiment with this little Sunflowers, which is the flower of Kansas state, where Dorothy and Toto came from.
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Little sunflowers
Description: The yellow is pretty good, but I have to cover the center with more icing just to prevent the cake from drying out.
Cake on the stick
Description: The cakes/puffs where baked in small dome pan, then secure on skewers that have been painted with green color for the stem.
Front of cake
Description: The cake is made with yellow cake mix. The browning in the center of some of the cakes look good enought for center, but not all cakes have the brown spots. Green fondant was used for the calyx part.
Cake construction
Description: Because of the thickness of the skewers and not having stiff consistency royal icing, I was not able to pip some leaves on the stick, so I have to settle with some grass on the ground, which is the fudge cube.
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Front of cake
Description: People at the party doesn't know the flower is eatable.
Back of cake
Description: The back of the cake is plain, and totally exposed to air. After a few hours, the cake dried out. A solution to this problem would be to brush it with sugar syrup, or paint the back with white chocolate.
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1st Attempt
Description: The fist time I bake the cake, I took it out of the oven right after it's done and put on the cooling rack to cook like the instruction said.
Because of the sudden drop in environment temperature, the cake sunk quite a bit.
2nd Attempt
Description: A month later, I make another cake to fill an order. This time I took the cake out of the oven, and let it cool in the water bath so it's a gradual drop of temperature hence the cake doesn't sink that much.
I don't have a slicing/serving cake photo because the cake is kind of crumy and quite messy to serve. However, the texture is very good, like a brownie.
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The cake
Description: The cake has chilled overnight and unmold. The lighter color spots on the cake surface was the result of water condensation dripped from the saran wrap I used to cover the cake.
Height of cake
Description: The cake seems to have good height, about 2.5", which is not bad!
It sunk!
Description: The cake need to pull out of oven while the center is still jigglely. As it sets, the center sunk a little bit.
Texture
Description: The texture looks very fluffy, you can't tell it's flourless!
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Coverup
Description: After getting advised from a chef forum, I decided to cover up the sinkage with Chocolate Mirror Glaze (I made that for the experiment a while back ago)
Glaze surface
Description: It's winter time so the glaze cool off very quickly. I didn't heat the glaze enought as I'm afraid of killing the gelatine. I thought I have tapped the glaze container enought to tap out all the bubble, aparently the glaze is too think that some bubbles were trapped in the glaze.
Depends on which angle you look at the glaze, the sheen is more prominent in certain angle.
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Leaves pieces
Description: This is the first time I have a gumpaste project after return from the Tulsa cake convention. I learned a lot such as using luster powder to create depth to the flower/leaves. I also bought some veiner for lily leave. I'm not that good at the paintbrush and once you put the powder on, it's hard to brush it off since the surface of the gumpast is still a bit moist. From the distance and when you have a bunch of the object, it hide the detail away.
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Lily of the valley
Description: This is the last flower I learn from my gumpaste class. Since I don't have any up coming gumpaste class, I decided to use up all the gumpaste I have mixed. Each sprig consist of 13 small flowers. This is the first time I use egg white to glue them together, I have to say egg white is the only way to glue gumpaste!!!
If you look close up, each flower is not perfect and some wire piece too far into the flower. Again, with a few sprigs together, you won't notice the details and imperfect part.
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Completed project
Description: Putting the flower and leave together in a pot, it looks quite natural. The green color of the leave is a bit fake, perhaps I should have more yellow to the paste the next time I mix a green color paste. The soil is actually moss.
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Naked Cake
Description: The chocolate pound cake was baked in a silicone bundt pan. The black spots you see are chocolate chip. The recipe didn't call for it, but some people in the office are chocoholic so I just jazz thing up a bit by adding some semi-sweet chocolate chip.
Shinny.....
Description: Remember I did some experiment with Chocolate Mirror Glaze? Well the glaze was frozen for a couple weeks after I did the experiment.
I rewarm the glaze and just pour on the cake. Because of the gelatine in the glaze, it sets very well and doesn't give air bubble, resulting in a rubber/plasticy shinny glaze. The glaze is still a bit warm so the sheen is the best.
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Finished cake (giant donut!!!!)
Description: The glaze is very thick and it sets before is has the chance to flow all the way down under the rack. That make clean up easy and actually acceptable. If this is a torte, I would make sure the whole thing is cover by the glaze, but for a bundt cake, showing a bit of the cake itself is fine.
I don't have the serving picture of this cake because it's for a birthday celebration and there were just too many thing going on when we serve the cake. The texture is crumy but moise. It's not a dense cake like a true pound cake. It's more like a cake mix texture with less liquid.
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Cake construction
Description: The cake is a mix of fudge cake and yellow cake.
Initial decoration
Description: The initial decoration was completed with different elements. I don't have any idea about the top part. Chocolate shaving doesn't goes well with the design on the side.
Side decoration
Description: The ruffles looks pretty good compare with the last time I try. Drape works is not that good because of the bad icing recipe.
Completed top
Description: It's the morning before I have to go to work. Since I can't think of anything else when I go to bed the last night, I had to just grab some stock lily flowers I made with Royal icing that has my home made stamens.
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Completed cake
Description: The flowers go pretty well with the cake! After this experience, I just realize it's challenging to decorate a chocolate color cake since color coordination is difficult.
Dig in!
Description: Slicing the cake is easy (look at the clean top cut), but getting the cake out of the board is messy, it could be because I don't have the right tool when I serve this cake at work.
Checkerboard pattern (side one)
Description: The checkerboard is not very clear. It could be because the batter consistency is different and I didn't press the divider down hard when pouring the different color batter.
Checkerboard pattern (side two)
Description: The other side seems okay, but each layer has different thickness. It probably easier to use pastry bag to fill the pan, with two different person pipe different rings of batter, after all, I only have two hand!
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The crust
Description: Graham cracker crump with chopped pecan. It looks like a regular crump crust to me.
Cheesecake batter
Description: Pumpkin cheesecake batter. There isn't a whole lot of pumpkin puree, so it's not very orange color.
Baked cake
Description: The baked cheesecake doesn't seems to rise a lot. The browning is very subtle, and no crack top!!!!
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Set and unmolded cheesecake.
Description: After the cheesecake cold and set overnight, the pumpkin color actually gets more prominent.
Cake texture
Description: The cheesecake has very good texture, too bad it's not very tall.
Perfect flat!
Description: I'm really impressed with the flatness of the cheesecake! It's by far the flattest cheesecake I ever baked, flatter then the Killer Chocolate Cheesecake I baked a while back ago.
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Water condensation
Description: I'm not sure if it's the environment or the nature of the pumpkin, the cheesecake starts to have liquid condensation on top once leave at room for a while.
My friend's sister organized her a pre-wedding party, and invited me over. About 30+ Malaysians will be attending the party. That gave me an opportunity to make a large scale cake for experiment and practice, especially having seen all the tier cakes from the Tulsa cake convention and seen the demonstration by the pastry chef (Andrew Shotts). I learned a lot through this time consuming two days cake baking and decorating project.
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Top tier
Description: Top tier cake is a 6" cake with the following construction:- sponge cake
- Italian buttercream + pastry cream
- sponge cake
- Strawberry gelatin
- sponge cake
- Italian buttercream + pastry cream
- sponge cake
Seven layer!!!! The pre-ice cake is already 4" tall.
Bottom tier
Description: Bottom tier is 10" cake with the same construction as the top tier.
Having a flavored gelatine layer is a major mistake attempt. It overflows to the side, created a slippery surface which the butter cream will have hard time to stick to. Besides, it take a few hours for the gelatine to set, prolonged the cake construction time.
Initial construction
Description: The cake was covered with buttercream icing then marshmallow fondant.
The gelatine layer sweats during thawing process, made process of icing cake challenging. I had to apply thick layer of butter cream to stop the cream from sliding off the side.
On top of that, I had to roll out thicker layer of fondant to make sure the fondant doesn't melt by the sweat.
Overtime, you can see the base of the cake get bulge, I believe it was because the butter cream on the gelatine part slide off the side, and trap by the fondant. The more I push it up, the more is slide off the side as the gelatine continue to sweat.
Top centerpiece
Description: I did not have time to make any gum paste centerpiece. Besides, I have many list of experiment item I need to attempt, so I decided to reuse some of the fondant roses that I made for my fondant class, they're life saver!
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Base banner (experiment 1)
Description: I purchased textured rolling pin when I was at the cake convention. It's a good opportunity to use it now. The fondant was a bit thick as I was making sure there's enough fondant to get press into the imprint.
Finished cake
Description: From the initial constructed cake, I started to add elements to build the complete cake.
Center piece string work (experiment 2)
Description: A few days before making the cake, I did experiment and practice with some string work using royal icing. They're very fragile and I broke at least 15 of these triangle fence while attempt to put them on the cake.
The initial concept was to put the fence on the base layer so they lean against the top tier cake. With 2" around the base of the top tier, the fence doesn't stand well and slide off the cake then broke.
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Side filler (experiment 3 and 4)
Description: Small rose patch was done using mold, it took, a couple tries to figure out the correct amount of fondant to push into the mold so that they come out even.
Drape work was bad because of the bad buttercream icing recipe. The butter cream doesn't have enough fat content hence the icing is grainy because of high powder sugar content.
Gum paste hearts
Description: The initial idea was to have the gumpaste hearts adhere to the triangle fence and have the fence lean against the top tier. Since I broke all the triangle fence with the heart on it, I have to rescue the heart piece and stick them in between roses. It's a cake for a love/wedding, so heart is a very important element.
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Completed cake
Description: From a distance, the cake looks pretty good. None cake decorator wouldn't see the flaws, and it definitely was a good learning opportunity for me. Besides of all, I don't have to eat all the cake.
Facts about this cake:
- More than 20 lb!
- 13" tall (I measured it because I had to stick it into a fridge when I get to the destination)
- 2 days of baking, assembling and decoration, not counting the royal icing piping that I did in front of TV for 3 evening.
- The sponge cake uses about 20 eggs, while the icing and fondant uses at least 4 lbs of powder sugar.
- The lace fence didn't break when drive to the destination, but broke when carry up and down stairs.
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Cake with the couple
Description: The cake itself is not that big as you can compair with the people, but it's really heavy!
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How it all started
Description: Chopped fruit soaked in brandy. The fruit I used are:
- dried cranberry
- candied cherry (red + green)
- dried prune
- dried apricot
- golden raisin
- dried dates
- dried pineapple
Cake batter
Description: One recipe yield a lot of batter! It fills the 5 qt bowl I have, and just okay for my KitchenAid to stir and mix. There is about 16 cups of batter there!
Small loaf portion for giveaway.
Description: The small silicone loaf pan works out very well. Since they will be given away as gift, I just top them with candied cherry for simple decoration.
When it first came out of the oven, it smell heavenly and sweet, with color and texture like a quick bread.
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Round fruitcake
Description: I only have one silicone mini load pan, so I had to put the remanding batter into a 7" round cake pan, and it's 3" tall. The cake looks dense and pretty flat.
Aging process
Description: The cakes need to be brushed with liquor for a week, then age for about 1 month so the flavor would get mellow. As the cake age, the cake gets darker, moister and denser.
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Wrapped cakes
Description: The mini loafs make wrapping easy. Since it will have strong flavor, I think the mini loafs works out really good.
Since the fist cactus cake didn't come out as good as I wanted, I decided to try it again. This time I will stick with the suggest pan size for the cake.
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Finished cake
Description: Since I'm using the recommended size pan, (6" sphere instead of 8"), the cake holds it shape instead of collapse. It also look quite porportion to the terracotta base.
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Improved Flower
Description: I get better with the leaf tip and manage to pip a pointy flower petal. The flower has better proportion to the smaller size cactus.
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Thorn
Description: The instruction suggest to put 5 thorn for each cactus bump, I was being lazy and tired, so I put only 3, and in some parts I put 4 to 5 and see if it make any different.
From a distant, you can get away with three thorns.
Thorn first insert to cake
Description: I use a different recipe for the butter cream. This recipe has real butter in it, hence increase the water content of the cream.
The royal icing thrown is dry when it first insert to the cake.
Thron color change
Description: Once the thorn is in the cake for a while, it absorb the water content from the cream, created a different depth of color by accident, neat!
Mud
Description: The mud is mad out of crush chocolate wafer cookies. They look quite real.
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Serving the cake
Description: The cake is made out of caremal flavor cake (from mix!). A 6" ball is quite huge so I just cut a corner and see if I can get a clean pyramid shape slice of cake.
Just cut a wedge
Description: Cutting a pyramid out of the cake is tricky and you don't get the chocolate filling, so I cutted a wedge. You can see the cake is actually made out of two half sphere cake and glue together by the chocolate filling in the middle.