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.
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| 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.
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| Start with a big dollop of cream on top |
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| Then smooth it all out |
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| 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.
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| 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!
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| 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).
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| Practice |
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| 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.
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| Really pretty cookie display |
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| 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?
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