Preparing for the Buffet

This week started out a bit slow, but it definitely picked up.

The secret is a dollop of gooey pecan caramel in the middle

I mentioned before that our class is going to host a dessert buffet. All we knew was that it is going to be Halloween themed. I'm sure I wasn't the only one with lots of ideas racing through her mind. But when Monday rolled around we found out that the Chef had already prepicked all the recipes and that we drew them out of a hat, talk about disappointment! But in industry, you usually don't get to make up your own desserts anyway. My partner and I drew passion fruit curd with coconut tapioca in a test tube. Not really Halloweeny if you ask me. For the four person action station, we drew cotton candy.

Cute holders for our cotton candy

Right away M and I threw out the gelee part of the dessert. Gelee is essentially a jello and we didn't think it would work well in a test tube with a tiny spoon. Instead we replaced it with strawberry poprocks! We found some containers of various sized poprocks and then coated them in strawberry flavoured white chocolate for protection. (Moisture and poprocks makes for sad soggy sugar balls.) M wanted the curd and tapioca to be set at angles and I didn't want to overpower the dessert with poprocks. With those ideas, this is what came out!

The chocolate garnish follows the poprock spiral

It does look more Christmasey than Halloweeny, I have to agree, but no one complained about our colour palate. We may change the poprocks and chocolate garnish to an orange colour for the final product.

Here's a sneak peek at some of the other desserts that will appear on the buffet.

Monte Carlo: layers of chocolate cake, apricot jam, almond and meringue

Milk chocolate popcorn panna cotta with salted caramel and an orange poprock garnish

Awesome pierced tongue black cherry macarons

This is something I've been experimenting with. If I can get it to work, I want to make it a part of our action station.

The dessert buffet will be at lunch time at the 4Nines cafeteria on October 30th. Definitely come check us out if you can! Did I mention there'll be deep fried homemade oreos and deep fried dark chocolate caramels? :P

"We're Not Making Cookies Anymore"

How was everyone's Thanksgiving? I hope it was full of delicious goodies and fun times with those you care about. I didn't have a chance to go home, but my favouritest guy friend (read: boyfriend) and I cooked up a wonderful vegan feast. Yup, we eat vegan at home. My diet currently is 80% vegan, 20% vegetarian. The sneaky 20% mostly comes from treats at school. :P So what did we eat instead of turkey? A lentil walnut loaf! Actually, it wasn't the best dish on our delectable delights. It wasn't bad, but not the tastiest meat-loaf like substitute. Mixing the gravy, stuffing, and roasted garlic mashed potatoes was my favourite. :)

Thanksgiving dinner

The title of this post is actually a quote from one of my Chef's. On our first day back to school, he gave us this huge list of tasks and said "We're not making cookies anymore" which was exactly what the class next to us was making. Fast forward to Special Projects class and we're making cookies, again. Once again, it is all about consistency and perfection. All the cookies had to be the same height and diameter, not too dark, not too light. We had the added "challenge" of packaging them neatly. If the round cookies were too wide, you had to cut them down to size which meant some cookies lost their outer coating of sugar or almonds.

Left to right: Nut shortbread, raspberry linzer, almond sugar cookie, sugar cookie,
fondant dipped lemon, chocolate dipped cherry

Yummy linzer cookies!

We also started making little pumpkin tarts. In the end, it will be a layer of salted chocolate with ganache topped with a pumpkin creameau - a fancy term for pumpkin cream. I haven't tried the creameau yet, but the caramel and ganache were delightful.

Chewy chocolatey deliciousness

In summary, nothing very exciting has happened thus far. The exciting stuff is going to start happening next week. This class is all about setting up a dessert buffet. That means we get to host our own dessert buffet! Each pair makes a dessert for the buffet, and each table of four creates an action station in which we can interact with the customers while making them something scrumptious.

We haven't been assigned our flavours yet, but my partner and I are looking around for inspiration. She loves little silcone moulds and I like poprocks or surprises. The dessert buffet will be Halloween themed so maybe dry ice will make an apperance. :)

It's Curry Time!

Time flies by so fast. I hear that a lot, but seriously, it does. Today was the last day of Wedding cakes which means I finally finished my personal "wedding" cake. But before I reveal my theme (pst, it's related to curry), I want to show you my first sugar flower bouquet.

Unfortunately there was some damage when transporting it from home to school, but I managed to minimize it by glueing pieces back on or painting edges so they weren't so apparent.

It was a lot of fun tying the flowers together. But it was also nerve-racking because as I attached more flowers, it got heavier and the flowers would clink together. The clinking sound is scary when it could mean three weeks worth of work down the drain!

Now onto the cake! Did you guess the theme?

It's a potato! Or at least, that was my intention. A cute l'il potato hanging out in a pot of curry. Soon to be joined by all his other awesome veggie friends.

Tomato taking a peek at Onion while speedy baby Celery speeds around

Poor baby onion fell over!

Fork and Spoon share a moment in the back (of the cake), Dish takes a snooze, and the Chopsticks "stick" around.

Lonely Knife is in a precarious position. Will he fall over and never get back up again?!

He's a knife! Or is he a fish?

One of my favourite parts: the CurrY gaRdeN sign.

It was a silly cake. And it was rough, for sure. Bits of royal icing sticking out, a few visible wires, and worst of all, the pot was badly cracked on the back. But overall, a fun cake. :) My brain can spout off an endless supply of weird ideas like a curry themed cake.

There were so many amazing cakes made by my classmates. I didn't have a chance to take any pictures but if you can, they'll all be for sale at The Marketplace on SAIT campus. Check them out!

"It's always a good time for..."

Fall Goodies

Halloween candy and all those flavours that scream fall are out in full force. Are you excited for the change in seasons? I am! The crispness in the air makes me feel like something exciting is just on the horizon.

We spent this week working in groups to create an edible cake that can be sold in the market place. My group was really indecisive, but last Thursday, I mentioned the idea of a fall themed cake because I had the sudden urge to make a zucchini and pumpkin. Surprisingly, a few of my group members were thinking the same thing! We pulled up some ideas from Google and got to work.

I really wasn't sure how this cake was going to turn out. We wanted pumpkins, we wanted leaves, we wanted a barrel basket. It'll all work together somehow, right?

Our inspiration

We discussed with our chef how we might go about making the pumpkins. We thought that making them out of solid gum paste or mexican paste would make them heavy, both visually and physically. And what did she suggest? She said she would teach us to make blown sugar pumpkins! None of us had ever worked with sugar before so we were all really excited. (Sugar class is next semester.) If you've ever worked with sugar, you'll know it makes you sweat! First things first, we got the isomalt and water up to the temperature of 163C. (Isomalt is a very pure form of sugar that is easier to work with but is also very expensive.) Add the color and then pour it all onto a non-stick mat. Work it a bit to cool it down to around 151C.

That's when you pull out the heat lamp and get to work! Yup, that's right. To make the pumpkins, you have to shape a lump of sugar that is at a lovely scalding 150C! We all wore two pairs of rubber gloves but it still burns through if you're not careful. (I have blisters to prove it!)

Forming sugar around the air pump

Pumpkin patch!

The next day we spray painted them to make the pumpkins less...neon. :)

While that was going on (only one of us could make pumpkins at a time), the rest of us were pumping out leaves. Each one had to be hand stamped, shaped, and left to dry over night. The next day we hand painted them, brushed them with a touch of bronzer, and steamed them to give them shine.

Leaf factory

Securing our sugar pumpkins

Just before we started assembling the cake, M and I banged out some ladybugs as a last minute addition. They added just the right touch, I think. :)

The finished cake was a bit surreal to me. It was hard for me to grasp that I was a part of creating this awesome cake! It was amazing when it was done. The night before I was concerned that we hadn't done enough. I looked at the other cakes being made and they were so fancy! All we had were leaves, pumpkins, and barrel planks. How would that compete? But it did! One of the better cakes, dare I say?

The usual routine for these cakes is to remove the top two tiers for sale in the Marketplace and then to cut up the bottom two tiers (to learn how to properly cut round cake). But our cake was so beautiful, the Chef told us not to cut it. The head of the baking and pastry arts department decided to buy our whole cake as a birthday cake for the founder of our program! What an honor!

I'm sure you're wondering what other awesome cakes our class made. :)

I really loved the Cheshire cat tier of this cake and there was so much detail. This cake was also sold as a whole in the Marketplace rather than being cut up.

Alice in Wonderland

Mushrooms are cute too!

A golden anniversary cake for a special SAIT guest. The amazing thing about this cake is only two people made it while all the other groups had 3 or 4 people. All those poppies took forever, but it was worth it.

Next week we'll be finishing up our sugar flower bouquets and our individual cakes. We have total creative freedom with this cake. I already have a plan in the works and since it's me, you know it will be something "different". :)