Mondrian Inspired Baby Shower Cake

Our recent midterm cake was a baby shower themed cake. Originally I was hoping to do a cake that we can really expand our creativity. Since the class has voted baby shower, I decided that I would incorporate my original idea into this project.

Mondrian uses beautiful primary colors and monochromatic colors in his paintings; so I decided that I would recreate the feel for the side design of the cake. To emphasis that it is a baby shower cake, I used marzipan to create a basket and piped basket weave with royal icing on the basket. On top it's a blanket with fondant strip cut outs. The baby girl dress is made with fondant, decorated with Swiss dot royal icing and lace point.

A Quick Update

It's been a while since I last updated. Here are the works that I've done in class in last few weeks. Tomorrow we are starting sugar paste flower with Chef Ron; it's going to be fun!

Father's day theme cake.

Cupcakes topped with marzipan fruits.

Black Forest Cake with Cherry Compote, decorated with chocolate butterflies, white modeling chocolate blossoms.

A Little More Sugar and Chocolate

It's the beginning of second month here at the FCI. As the class progress, the focus is finally starting to shift towards design and techniques. By all means, I LOVE baking and reading recipes, but I would really like to perfect my skills in assembling cakes, piping techniques, and exploring design senses and creativities. Here's a little taste of what we did last night; royal icing piping and fondant making.

On the right here, it's Chef Cynthia showing us how to pipe with royal icing. Though I've done it before, this is something that one can never have enough practice of.

Royal Icing: Snail trails, Cornelli laces, and Swiss dots.

Making rolled fondant from scratch; which by the way is such a wonderful recipe!

A Summer Challenge Awaits

The biggest challenge of the summer will be the brutal heat. I haveno idea how they do it here in NYC, but I complete admire all the pastry chefs and cake makers baking cakes and making butter cream under such high temperature. Not to mention delivering during the summer time but also during the winter snow. Folks, we have it good in California, no more complains!

Friday night was a very fun class. We baked off sheets of American

milk sponge cake, filled and crumb coated it. Then here comes the chocolate cake.. Talking about getting some chocolate action! This is a devil's food cake filled with chocolate ganache, coated with more chocolate ganache, then decorated with chocolate modeling chocolate roses. Got chocolate? Here are pictures of Chef Cynthia doing demo for us...

Making roses from modeling chocolate:

Here are my creations...

Until next time... :)

A Basket of Fruitiness

Hope y'all had a good weekend. I certainly did from all the good eats in the city of New York, and another fun day working at Silk Cakes Studio.

Briefly catch up on what we did last week; we assembled angel's food cake with strawberry buttercream as filling. Did the best we can to square off the cake to prepare for basket weave piping. The finish product may look more difficult than what it is, but with Chef Cynthia's instruction, it was only the matter of eye-hand coordination and lots of patience.

A Basket of Fruitness assembily... The Base: 3 layers of angel food cake, 2 layers of strawberry swiss meringue buttercream.

Choose colors and pipe,

Add shell and rope borders,

And now we topped the cake with fresh strawberries, blueberries and black berries.

There you have it, folks! Now what? Eat it of course. But those of you who know me for a while can probably figure out exactly what I did with my cakes. Yes, I gave it away, as always. But instead of the firemen, I pick the Roosevelt Island Public Safety Department. :) Hope they enjoy it!

Beginning of Another Week, Another Cake, and Goals.

After two weeks of genoise, I'm sure we all have seen and tasted enough of them; at least for me anyway. :) We are going into the third week with a tiered white cake which we will finish on Monday evening. Moving onto the next step of cake decoration 101. (Pictures coming soon!)

While the lessons are in progress, coming out to

NYC from California is not only about going to school, this journey is also about getting the most out of my 5 months time here. No, I am not talking about partying! Well, maybe a little bit. :) It's the networking, fine dinning, sight seeing.., and most importantly, working opportunities. Whether the job is paid or unpaid, stage or volunteer, finding the right places to learn is essential. There's always room to improve; never the "I've done enough of..." or the "I'm good enough". A cake designer is nobody if he/she is not a good pastry chef. A good looking cake is nothing if it does not taste good. We must ask ourselves, as cake designers, "Do we want one time customers? Or do we want them for a life time?"

To be successful is: to work hard, to be creative, to accept constructive criticism, to observe, to practice, to discover, to read, to 'google', to try new things/food, to not be afraid, and to not complain. I am not perfect, and I will work on it.

Till next time, folks... :)

Chocolate Buttercream + Creme Brulee = Happiness

Cake design starts from knowing how to bake a good cake and put together the cake. To be able to market such a visually appealing product, a pastry chef/cake designer should master his/her piping skills. On Monday night class, we began learning how to pipe with the chocolate buttercream that we made earlier in the class. In the photo to the right is the demo piping by Chef Cynthia.

While trying hard to resist eating this amazing chocolate buttercream, Chef Cynthia and Chef Judy finished off the demo from last class; creme brulee. We were all very happy to indulge this silky creation. I must say, this is another amazing recipe from The French Culinary Institute. Looks like I'll be getting a torch soon...!

Now back to work: after crumb coat the cake, the cakes were finished off in a simple design with shell boarders and curled hazelnut chocolate. Yum!

A Not Just Cakes Day

On the third day of class, besides Chef Tim's sanitation class with his awesome sense of humor, genoise cake had a new twist to it: chocolate. The fragrance of cocoa reminds me of externing at The French Laundry, plating chocolate trays in a small room that filled with the smell of Valrhona dark chocolate. Then there was the white cake; a simple recipe that's great for a basic layered cake. What is interesting to me was the make up of this particular recipe. It is a high ratio cake without using any kind of fake fat, such as shortening, liquid shortening (fluid flex), or other hydrogenated fat. Thanks to Chef Cynthia for finding this amazing recipe as I am not a fan of anything that last Forever, if you know what I mean...

Between baking cakes, Chef did demos on creme brulee and creme anglaise. Both crazily full of fat, or should I say, happiness? Too bad I don't have an ice cream machine, because homemade ice cream is really that much better!

2nd Day of The Class

How do you serve your delicious creations without knowing how to safely handle food? For the first two hours of class, we had Chef Tim giving us lecture on sanitation. That makes you, future guinea pigs, safe to eat everything we make and not to worry about getting sick. :)

After we had our family dinner, which once again, was another amazing dinner, we assembled our genoise cake with the buttercream made on Monday. A great cake assembly lesson 101: Evenly slice the cake layers, soak with flavored simple syrup, add filling, stack cake layers, crumb coat, cover the cake, decorate, and of course, EAT. May I just tell you how amazing the cake tasted after soaking with dark rum simple syrup? Simply, W.O.W.

Here are some photos from class. Chef Cynthia putting extra buttercream and simple syrup away and cutting her demo cake to share with the class.

First Day of School

First day of Cake Design class at The French Culinary Institute was fantastic! For a class of 12, we are very lucky to have two chef instructors: Chef Cynthia and Chef Judy. They were very patient and knowledgeable; extremely involved with students' progress and learning ability. I feel so spoiled there! When 8:30 came around, we got family dinner too! Salad, pork tenderloin, sweet potato, and vegetables... We didn't have to go home hungry after we end our class around 10:30pm. I have to say, though, walking into that class room and first person there to greet us...Chef Ron Ben Israel, was extremely exciting! He was so cute and as excited about the class as rest of us. When he was leaving, he certainly left with style! A cute messenger bag and a hat. Nice...! Chef Ron!

Check out the photos from first day! http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150590984945019.682015.168777155018

Finally, First Day of School Is Almost Here

What a great and adventurous weekend I had before class starts on Monday. My friend Nami and I went to Brooklyn for the first time. We were heading down to Brooklyn Museum to visit the Mummy Exhibition and also to be inspired by the art works there. I Googled the address via my phone, got off the subway train stop and realized that we had to walk for a little over two miles! How was that possible? Well, apparently it was leading us to the Transportation Museum, on the other side of the town... Oh boy, did we do some walking exercise. By the time we got to the Brooklyn Museum, we were exhausted. Seeing the mummies were, however, so worth it. We finished off the weekend by having a nice dinner with friends; pizza at Olio and gelato at Grom.

Until next time, exciting blog about our first day of Cake Design & Technique. :)

A Little Vacation Before Class Starts...

After the orientation, there are about four days of free time before school begins. I am fortunate to room with my fellow Cake Design classmate, Nami, and we have been adventuring New York City together since day one. I must say that we have been doing quite well; the fact that in the past three days, we visited Chinatown three times, tried quite a few good hole in the wall restaurants, found a tailor for uniform alteration, learned to take and switch subways... I am also lucky to have another roommate who arrived a day earlier and was able to take the train with her for the first time, getting some great tips from her about how to get around town. Some really good tools that I used were the map provided by school, my Android phone with Google map and Yelp application. One important thing was also to make sure that we had an idea of what we were going to do for the day, Google local businesses, addresses, research good restaurants reviews, etc. A big thanks to my roommate Karen for telling me about the Unlimited pass for subway train rides; if it wasn't for it being unlimited, I would be spending hundreds from getting off the wrong stop.

Now the weekend comes, tomorrow we will be visiting a farmer's market across the street from our apartment. Then museums for the rest of the day. Perhaps a nice brunch on Sunday at our school restaurant L'Ecole. Until next blog...!

NYC

Coming to New York City to learn from Master Chef Ron Ben Israel is to further my education in the art of cake making. However, this five months experience is going to be much more than just school. There are so many places to visit, people to meet, food to eat, and everything else. I'm extremely excited about sharing my journey with everyone.

We had our orientation yesterday, and it was very informative. The exciting part was how helpful and resourceful FCI's career resources are. The volunteering opportunities, internships, and networks... I love how well managed and organized this school is. I cannot wait to get it all started!