- Make German buttercream for our chocolate sponges
- Cut chocolate sponges into three layers, and ice them [with the buttercream]
- Make chocolate decorations for our Halloween cake [the aforementioned sponge]
- Pipe all of our shortbread cookies with our Halloween designs
I managed to finish most of the stuff we had to get done. I didn't finish a few of the chocolate Halloween decorations, but I think we'll still have time to do them on Monday as well. All I have left is to do a mould of chocolate tombstones, pipe a freehand fence, and make a circular-ish shaped base of chocolate for the haunted house that I piped today. On Monday, we finish our Halloween cake, so I'll just have to get the chocolate stuff out of the way first.
Our entire group started with the buttercream first. German buttercream is actually delicious that an explanation won't even do it justice. It is essentially creamed butter and vanilla, whipped pastry cream, and melted semi-sweet chocolate. After mixing the butter and the pastry cream together, a small amount of that is added to the chocolate mixture and then this is added back into the buttercream mixture [also known as tempering]. It. Is. So. Delicious. After this, we cut our cakes into three hopefully even layers, which Jean-Luc inspected before we could go to the next step. He was checking for evenness of the layers and for flour clumps in the middle of the sponge (which I think would mean bad folding technique). After the go-ahead from Jean-Luc, we could ice our cakes. First we brushed each layer with a simple syrup, then added the buttercream. We did this for each layer and the top. Then we iced the sides, waiting for Jean-Luc to give us the okay, and put it back in the fridge. The finishing touches will be for Monday.
At this point, part of the group wanted to do their chocolate work, but I really wanted to pipe my shortbread cookie designs, because I knew that would take longer and not be ideal if rushed. I tried to jump on the chocolate bandwagon, but the chocolate that was melted was getting super lumpy and needed to be re-melted and re-tempered, so I gave up halfway through a cornet full of chocolate. One other group member also wanted to work on her cookies first, so we jumped ship and switched tasks. We had to make a bunch more royal icing and add colour to it to get the colours that we wanted; yesterday, we definitely didn't make enough, so today we were sure to make a lot. It was also easier to work on the piping with only two people sharing a bunch of different colours, as opposed to five. The icing for piping had to be thicker than the icing for glazing, because you didn't want all of your fine piping lines to run into each other, ruining your obviously awesome detail work. I spent some time yesterday coming up with designs, but some of them I just made up on the spot (like a hilarious ghost pastry chef wearing an apron, a hat, and oven mitts). My hands started shaking and cramping up a lot towards the end, so I sort of gave up... Jean-Luc is only marking the best four designs, so I think my weird splotchy spider web pumpkin will be saved from being assigned a grade.
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| Here is all of them in their glory. |
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| These are the nine best ones, in my opinion. You can't really tell from the picture, but in the first gravestone, there is a skeletal hand reaching up from the grass. I think the gravestones were my favourite shape to do. |
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| These are the nine not best ones. I sort of gave up on the skulls/Frankenstein. Mostly because I got tired of waiting for the right colours. I don't know if you can tell... |
I wish I had taken pictures of some of the other people's cookies... some of them were intensely amazing. Full on silhouettes of witches and black cats and haunted houses; a mummy; a giant spiderweb with spider... the talent of the people in my class really overwhelms me sometimes. The one tricky thing about working with royal icing is that it dries out super quickly, so it's really important to keep your containers covered even for the minute you're not using them. For a first attempt at piping icing onto cookies, I think I did a pretty good job.
Speaking of pretty good jobs... Jean-Luc met with each of us today to tell us about our progress to date in the course. One of the first things he said to me when I met with him (after he said, "The one thing we need to address is your attitude... I'm just kidding." Ha, ha) was, "I really don't have anything bad to say." Apparently, I am doing better in the class than I thought I was. He said that I was talented (!) and that my product was good, especially in the last little bit, and also that I really apply myself and other great things. He, not surprisingly, pointed out that one of the biggest things is that I doubt myself and that I have to try not to get frustrated if I can't do things right away or don't do them right. ("If you burn the sugar twice, I'm not going to give you a mark of 65. Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone burns things. Even I burn things.") Fair enough. The only other thing he mentioned was speed, which is an okay problem to have, because we're all just learning. He said that one of the biggest issues that employers have with people who have done this program is speed. But he also said it was okay to be slower for now, but not to get frustrated if he is encouraging us to go a little faster. I am starting to get the feeling he wants me to tone down the frustration a little...? Well, I'll try.
After this and once we were done piping our cookies, I was pretty ready to be done for the day. But I along with one other person from our group still hadn't done my chocolate decorations yet and we technically were supposed to finish them today. After some intense internal conflict, we decided to just get as much as we could over with and that way we wouldn't be rushing through piping chocolate on Monday morning. I am glad that we got it out of the way today (even though we forgot about a few things and also didn't have time to do the moulds), because it will reduce the amount of chocolate work we'll have to do later. Working with chocolate is NOT my favourite. It is just so messy. And gets on EVERYTHING.
I will be glad once all of our Halloween stuff / testing is over. It has been a pretty intense week. I cannot believe it's already Friday again. It feels like I was just washing my uniform for the week (and now I have to do it again).
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Today's Recipes
German Buttercream
500 g butter
750 g pastry cream
15 ml vanilla
250 g semi-sweet chocolate
Shortbread Cookies
100 g margarine
300 g butter
8 g salt
300 g sugar
15 ml vanilla
2 eggs
25 ml milk
750 g flour
Royal Icing*
500 g icing sugar
85 g egg whites
2 ml lemon juice
food colouring (various)
*Add water to thin it out
*Add icing sugar to thicken
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