Strawberry Shortcake for Happy Ernie-day!

Everyone says "Happy 'Bert-day'", but what about Ernie? He should get some recognition too. After all, someone can only write "Birthday" so many times in an hour...

But back to cake. 

Remember those giant sheets of carrot cake? We quickly cut them up, trimmed them, and filled them with a fluffy cream cheese frosting. Yum! :)

Each slice got topped with a pre-made marzipan carrot and a sprinkle of praline crunchies. In the background is a picture of the giant cake scrap bucket filled with all those scrumptious carrot cake trimmings, complete with cream cheese frosting. Anything we did not eat (read: could not possible eat any more) will get mixed with other cake scraps and turned into rum balls later in the year.

The cake of the day today was strawberry shortcake! Did you know the original shortcake wasn't so much a cake as it was a biscuit (or scone as we call it in North America)? The earliest recipe that is associated with strawberry shortcake is a European biscuit split open and filled with strawberries. My favourite, by far, is the Japanese rendition of strawberry shortcake - layers of sponge cake filled with whipped cream and strawberries, and topped with a whole strawberry! Simple, light, and delicious!

Making the cake batter was a bit of a disaster. After whipping the batter in the Kitchen Aid it came out so intensely velvety smooth I had the urge to lick it...and forgot to add my oil. :P I poured the batter into the prepared cake pans and was just about to put them into the oven when I looked at V. She had also panned her cakes and just realized she had forgotten her oil. That's when I realized I did too! I looked at S and told her I forgot it and you know what? So did she! We were all scrambling to pour the batter back into a bowl, add the oil, and reportion it all the while trying to lose as little air as possible. See, before portioning, we had to keep checking our specific gravity and we three very nicely fit into the 0.45 to 0.5 range required. By having to handle the batter so much and mixing in oil, we were all afraid our specific gravities would be completely messed up. Oh well, into the oven and we'll see what happens. :P

16 mixers whipping at high at the same time = very noisy!

Calculating specific gravity

The cakes came out beautifully despite the mix up and we turned them into beautiful and delicious strawberry shortcakes. S took hers home because she loves strawberry shortcake. I suspect she will eat most of it all by herself. :P

You can see the piece of cake trimming I was snacking on in the background near the strawberry stems. The crusts are the best parts as they have concentrated carmelized flavour. It's too bad they get cut off. But not to worry! I shall eat them! Waste not want not, right?

 We also practiced piping buttercream roses today as it will be on our next piping exam.

Start with a bud

Add some petals

Lots of petals

Practice roses

While I was practicing piping yesterday I heard some male voices talking beside me. Wondering who that was since the only male in our class is the Chef and that was certainly not his voice, I looked up and was surprised to see two cooks from the class next to us were staring over my shoulders. The cooks next to us are currently taking a basic baking course and we share the ovens. We also send food back and forth. A deliciously awesome deal if I say so myself. :D

Raisin cinnamon scone with cherry and
whipped cream filling

Sweet glazed pork

Lemon Hazelnut Crunch and Poopy Chocolate?

Have you ever made an emulsion sponge cake before? Until today, I had never heard of one before!

K-89 emulsion. It looks like simple yellow shortening but it enables bakers to make a cake with more sugar. It also made for a really fine textured cake. I ran my fingers over a slice of the cake and it was so smooth, almost like running my fingers over the table top. This is what the cake batter looked like after whipping it on high for exactly three minutes. No more, no less.

Looks like merginue!

It was sliced into three layers with lemon italian buttercream.

Somewhat even layers

The little brown bits are crunch hazelnut prarline pieces. So good! Like a cross between toffee and hazelnuts.  If only I weren't making this for class. I would sprinkle the praline crunch between layers for a wonderfully delicious nutty crunch. :)

Hazelnutty goodness!

To garnish we got to try our hand at chocolate tempering. Tempering chocolate is a process in which chocolate is heated and cooled to specific temperatures to encourage the development of a specific crystal. Making that one specific crystal formation dominant in the final chocolate is what gives chocolate that shine and crisp snap when you bite into it. Tempering is not difficult but it requires one's full attention. The best temperature for working with the chocolate is 31-32C, but if the chocolate hits 33C, it needs to be tempered all over again.

Roll the chocolate to give it a tube shape

After it sets, carefully peel the acetate paper off

This roll was cut into two pieces by heating thin metal to carefully melt through it. In my case, I used the Chef's torch to heat up my offset spatula. Gently, but quickly, place it on the lemon hazelnut crunch cake and done!

Don't cut through, melt through!

We also made carrot cake, chocolate pound cake and more chocolate pieces!

Giant sheet of carrot cake

Christmas themed transfer sheet

The life of a chocolate cake:

Start with a cookie base and raspberry jam

Add chocolate cake and chocolate buttercream

Another layer of cake and raspberry jam

More buttercream and the final layer of cake

Smooth it out and pipe some chocolate dots

Finish with frozen buttercream dots and chocolate pieces.

Is it just me, or do those buttercream dots remind you of something that comes out the behind? :P That color and that piping! Really, who decides the style of our cakes!? Those dots reminded me of a book of cake wrecks that had an entire chapter dedicated to cakes that, despite good intentions, looked like feces were thrown at it. Either way, it made for some good laughs, however immature. :P

Tomorrow we'll get to turn that giant sheet of carrot cake into individual portions as a change of pace to the 6 inch cakes we have been making thus far.

Chef: "You walk into a bakeshop and it's just you. You're not gonna buy a 6 inch cake for yourself."

Me: "You're right, I'd get the 10 inch." :)

Sponges, Winter Wonderland, and Happeh Burtday!

After three days of pies, we started sponge cakes. Sponge cakes entail a variety of cakes that are leavened mostly, if not all, by air. Angel Food cakes and chiffon cakes fall neatly into that category which is what we started with.

One very accurate way of measuring the success of your batter is to calculate its specific gravity. Specific gravity is the ratio of batter weight over water weight at the same volume. In other words, the lower your specific gravity, the less dense your batter is, the more air you have in it, the lighter your final product. On the opposite end, the higher your specific gravity, the denser your final product will be. For Angel Food, the specific gravity should be 0.3 to 0.4 and for chiffon, 0.4-0.45.

Final Angel Food Cakes

My specific gravity was 0.5 for my angel food! Sponge cake batters are very delicate and everything works against you. Any tapping or even the passage of time gradually pops those previous little air bubbles in the batter. Most of the angel food cakes baked up short in our class. The main reason, however, was that each tube pan simply didn't have enough batter. Though my dismal specific gravity didn't help either. :P

We masked (coated) the angel food cake in orange whipped cream and drizzled chocolate ganache overtop. As garnish, we used transfer papers to decorate chocolate and then cut them into triangles.

Start with a big dollop of cream on top

Then smooth it all out

Gotta work on consistent triangles :P

Transfer papers are pretty awesome and come in all sorts of colors and designs. A transfer paper is a sheet of plastic that has a design printed on it in cocoa butter. When the cocoa butter comes in contact with warm chocolate, it melts onto the chocolate and creates beautiful designs. Making chocolate decorations is a lot of fun, but it can also be really frustrating. We used one sheet to make triangles and one to make circles. I had to redo the circles three times! The chocolate kept hardening before I could use my cutter to cut all the circles. As a result, I ended up with a lot of broken circles. If you ever have the same problems, there are two solutions 1) work faster or 2) cut your transfer sheet into pieces and work with the smaller pieces instead.

There's a transfer sheet under all that chocolate

Today we made chiffon cakes. My specific gravity was 0.49, a little bit better than my angel food cake. To finished we piped raspberry cream rosettes and placed circular chocolate pieces on top. The red pieces in the middles are freeze dried raspberries. They're crunchy and tart!

Nice and tall...er

Personally, I felt the angel food cake was decorated too heavily and the chiffon was decorated too lightly considering the density of each cake. It made me wonder how the final standard appearance of our products is determined.

Today was our first piping exam. At the end of one hour, we were required to present two pieces of paper. Each piece of paper represents the top of a 6 inch cake and should have a shell piped border in buttercream and "Happy Birthday" in chocolate. There must be enough space for a name underneath and a rose (to be made in future piping exams).

Practice

My exam entry

Thursday was the current Customer Relationship Management class' bake sale. Their theme was Winter Wonderland. I think they did a wonderful job! The Marketplace was decorated with snow flakes and had a blue and white theme.

Really pretty cookie display

Bags of chocolates and chocolate dipped pretzels

The perks of being in Baking or Culinary? Free food! An extra charlotte rouge from the class next door was given to us. It was filled with whipped cream and a bravarian cream. The best part were the raspberry jelly rolls on the outside. We also got fresh hot pizza from the Culinary class. :)

Did you know today is Black Friday? I totally forgot until I came to class and V told me about the bargains she snapped up today. Did you wake up early and brave the crowds too?

Pies, Pies, and More Pies!

Another jam packed day! Time moves by so quickly in class that everyone is scrambling to keep up with the material.

Yesterday was focused on getting the fillings for our apple and pumpkin pies done and to roll out the doughs for the various pies. A few of the super fast workers managed to get their apple pies baked as well.

Press the dough into the shell and trim the edges...

To make it nice and clean!

The cream pies and pumpkin pies got crimped edges. Unfortunately, a lot of the crimping got squished when we blind baked them because they were baked upside down! I had never heard of that method before. I was expecting pie weights or something similar. When blind baking a shell (baking a pie shell without filling), weights are often used to help the shell keep its shape and to help prevent the shell from bubbling. Baking upside down was interesting and eliminated the need to buy pie weights.

Crimped edges are so pretty

I didn't get a picture of my own apple pie so here's one of the Chefs'. (Also his burnt pumpkin pies in the back.)

Chef's apple pie

My group ended up staying late to finish up the meringue for our lemon meringues, but it was worth the effort. They all turned out really nicely. :) Plus, I love using the torch! Who doesn't love the smell of s'mores and playing with fire? :P

Toasted just right

Our Chef wanted each of us to make a marzipan banana to top our chocolate banana cream pies, but I didn't have the time to make one. I still think they look delicious (and they taste delicious too).

Not-too-rich chocolate banana cream pie

And finally the best part of the day - marzipan pumpkins! Aren't they cute? I thought 16 was way too many for one pie. I would have preferred three in the middle with some vine. But that's okay, I liked making the pumpkins anyway.

Life cycle of a marzipan pumpkin (left to right)

Adorable pumpkin-ness

Each classmate made 2 pies of each type of pie. That means in total, we made 4 (types of pie) * 2 (of each) * 16 (people) = 128 pies!!! Holy pies, batman!