Halloween-y things.

Today was almost the last day of testing. Along with another member of my group, I started with piping the chocolate objects that I'd forgotten to do on Friday -- a chocolate fence, and a base for the Halloween scene that would eventually go on the cake. Then we put these in the fridge to cool. (Well, the bases I put in the blast freezer, maybe for a little bit too long. And also before the chocolate could completely harden, the acetate paper blew all over the place and got all crinkled so the chocolate bases were a crazy/not flat shape and we had to trim them around the edges during which I broke about 1/3 of mine off. But it all turned out okay in the end.)

While our chocolate stuff was cooling/hardening, we put our buttercream in a KitchenAid (with a paddle attachment, on medium speed) to soften it up. Then we spread a final layer of icing on our chocolate sponges and ran the decorating comb along the sides for, well, decoration. Jean-Luc said the tops didn't have to be smooth this time, but rather, they were supposed to be wavy, "like Earth". So, that was good. We put these back in the fridge after they were iced, because we had to do more chocolate work and we didn't want the buttercream to melt off of the cakes while we were doing that.

To create our Halloween scene, we were supposed to add the haunted house, a yellow moon, some trees, a fence, a gravestone, a ghost, various Halloween-y animals (birds, bats, cats), grass, and so on to the chocolate base. To do this, Jean-Luc showed us how to melt some of the chocolate on the bottom of whatever object you were sticking on by rubbing it on top of a metal plate that is placed on a pot of hot water. Then, once the chocolate is melted, you place it onto the base and spray some chocolate cooling spray on it. Now, like he usually does, Jean-Luc made this look super easy. What didn't come across while he was demonstrating was that if you happen to take too long to melt the chocolate, the heat from your hands will probably melt the wrong parts of your chocolate and then all of your things will crumble to pieces in your hands. Not that I'm speaking from experience or anything. I was really determined to finish today because I just want all of the Halloween stuff to be over, but because this was a shorter class, we had to start cleaning up at 9:10 a.m. At around 9:15 (...), I still wasn't done yet and Jean-Luc said it would be okay to finish it off tomorrow morning. I'm not too pleased about it, but I'd rather finish the little I have to do tomorrow than potentially break everything while in a rush. All I really need to do is put everything onto my cake, which isn't really much. If I'm feeling particularly enthusiastic, I might adjust some of the other things that I stuck on in a hurry. I'm also secretly worried that it will all fall to pieces overnight, so hopefully that doesn't happen (I even reassured the other group member that it wouldn't).

I won't post a picture of the cake until it's finished. But I took some more close-up pictures of my favourite Halloween cookies from last week. Weirdly, the colours in the icing sort of ran a little (particularly the red, green, and black), so the cookies didn't look as great today as they did on Friday. Still cute enough to warrant pictures though. 

Note: skeletal hand.

Adorable and anatomically correct spider.

Hard to make the drippy RIP look intentional.

I actually LOVE this one.

Check out those piping lettering skills.