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... :)