I arrived in the kitchen at 6:30 a.m. today because that's when Jean-Luc said he got to school usually. I really wanted to get my cake iced so that I could stop worrying that it wouldn't be done in time. I made a Swiss buttercream (I didn't overwhip it this time) and cut my cake into three layers. I also made a soaking syrup to spread on the cake before I put the icing down. I iced between the two layers and then did a crumb coat on the outside. Then it went in the blast freezer so that the icing could set. Other people started to arrive as I was icing the cake and I wasn't partner-less today, so that was great. What was also great was that she actually liked my idea, because it would have been hard to come up with a totally new one if we disagreed on what to do. She coloured the marzipan a bunch of different colours for the decorations and I worked on getting the fondant to be a "navy" blue.
There wasn't actually food colouring for navy, only royal, sky, turquoise, and basically every other blue that there is. I started with royal blue, because I thought it would be the darkest. It wasn't. I added some black to make it darker. It didn't really work. (I also accidentally started doing this on the wooden bread table. WHOOPS.) Eventually, I just went into the decorating room and experimented with a different blue. Jean-Luc helped. Apparently sky blue is actually the darkest. So, I put in the blue and then added a LOT of black and mixed it in for what seemed like a really long time. I didn't get it quite as dark as it was in my head, but I think it was satisfactory for the moment and given the time constraints. [Side note: my fondant colouring process was so intense that even though I wore gloves, I still have blue spots all over my hands... HOW?]
Once that was done, we made our decorations. The marzipan decorations were a brown park bench, a black lamp post, a pair of red mittens, some grey (read: purple) and black rocks, and trees in two different shades of green. We were going to try to use green royal icing to pipe onto the trees to give them a raised effect, but it didn't really work. I tried to pipe royal icing "stars" to put in the blue fondant so that it looked like a lake reflecting the stars, but that wasn't that successful either. The royal icing wasn't being very nice today. I eventually just started making asterisks instead of stars... which is pretty much the same thing, right? Right. The lamp post kept falling over, so we just stuck a LOT of toothpicks in it and prayed that it would stay... I hope it will. The "lamp" is an isomalt half-globe with gold dust in it. I wanted to use the smaller one but I dropped it on the floor and broke it. [This is why I should never rush...]
After this, we were almost ready to put the fondant on our cake. I was starting to get anxious, which, in retrospect, I didn't need to do because we actually finished with lots of time left. Before we could roll out the fondant, I took the cake out of the freezer and smoothed out any bumpy parts of the icing with a palette knife. Then, we rolled out the fondant, "flouring" the table with icing sugar. Our first attempt at placing it on the cake failed miserably, partially because the fondant got dry really fast and partially because the cake was still on the cake stand, so gravity worked against us and made the sides crack. Whoops. My partner suggested we might have to colour the fondant again because it was so dry, but we just re-kneaded the pieces and they got better, which was good. Because I was not ready to make more. We took it off the cake stand (why is that so difficult?) and rolled out the fondant again. Then we used the rolling pin to lift it up and cover the cake, smoothing out the top first, then the edges slowly from the top to the bottom. Then we trimmed off the excess and picked up the cake (seriously, I am really bad at this) and placed the fondant under the sides and put the cake back down.
While initially, I wanted to make patches of snow with fondant, we still had a bunch of royal icing, so it made sense to just use that. So, I spooned some "snow" onto the cake in two patches and basically spread it out with my fingers into an abstract shape that also went down the sides of the cake. We made it look textured intentionally because, you know, snow. Then, we placed the trees in one patch and the bench, lamp post, mittens, rocks, and a couple more trees for good measure on the second patch of snow. After that, we placed the royal icing "stars" onto the patch of blue in the middle. Then, we dredged the whole thing in icing sugar and I also found some silver glittery stuff which we added as well. It looked cute. It wasn't exactly what I pictured, but it was cute. Also, someone came by and said, "I like this. Sort of like a "Silent Night", right?" And that made me really happy because that sort of is what we were going for, I think, so that is what I am calling our cake.
After it was all finished, we took a bunch of pictures, and then had to move it to a box. Neither of us did this and we must have sounded quite apprehensive (read: terrified) about it, because someone else in the class removed it from the table and put it onto the clean piece of cardboard for us. Then we put it in the box. (And took more pictures.)
Jean-Luc came by afterwards and we had already closed the box, but he told us to open it again, because he was taking pictures of all of the cakes. He said, "You guys did a good job." Which maybe he would say to everyone, no matter what, but I'll take it!
And then it was clean-up time. We got to leave super early today because Jean-Luc basically decided that we wouldn't start any rotation-related thing today. So, the rotations will go until Wednesday instead of Tuesday next week. By about 10:45 a.m. we were pretty much all cleaned up and got to go home! It was nice to finish early after feeling like we are always the last ones done cleaning up.
Now that I've worked with fondant once, I am not as terrified of the prospect of working with it. I do definitely want to practice making figurines and decorating cakes in the meantime and now I know how. So, yay. Also, making cakes is going to be super easy at home now because MY KITCHENAID ARRIVED IN THE MAIL. I can't wait to take it out of the box and make something amazing.
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Today's Recipes
Chocolate Genoise
Swiss Buttercream
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