This was my individual cake project that I worked on the past two days (one and a half actually). It was a lot of pressure to get it done on time and making sure it looks neat and clean. Since Since Easter's at our door, I wanted to do something on that theme. I spent a couple of hours in the library searching through hundreds of books and got inspired, which resulted in this Eastery combination.
The cake consists of basic sponge layers soaked with vanilla symple syrup and frosted with Italian buttercream. As most of you probably don't know, is that I'm not that excited when I have to frost a cake. I did quite a bit of that on extern, but I haven't mastered it yet and I always get frustrated, but all I need is practice, practice, practice.
After my cake was all ''nice'' and covered in buttercream, I put the white chocolate egg that I did the previous day and layed it in the spun sugar nest. The flowers, which I love doing (hard to tell, huh?), were made out of gumpaste and attached with a thin green wire.
That was a brief description of my work, and the next two days I will be working in a team with Stacey :)) and all I can say is that we got a pretty...uh...interesting task.
Just you wait and see.

I am sure you will ask yourself the same thing I did today: Are those real?
No they are not, but for us future pastry chefs, they are. They are called gumpaste flowers. Gumpaste can be made from scratch or store bought where you just add water. It contains ingredients such as powdered sugar, gelatin, water, sometimes glucose or egg white, sometimes shortening, and some form of strengthening gum called Tragacanth Gum (or Gum-Tex) which makes the gum paste pliable and easy to work with.




This was the first time I worked with it and I was more then happy with the final result, but most importantly, I enjoyed working with it. I really loved it!
There are four more days left of this block (I know, it goes by so fast!) and there are 2 big projects on the way, which I'll reveal to you next week.

In conclusion, as Stacey would say: ''Don't act like you're not impressed'' ;)

As promised, here are my two showpieces I did last week!
The first two days I worked on the chocolate one, which was very interesting and time consuming, but I enjoyed it a lot and managed to stay clean, because chocolate is a very messy work. I know you'll have many question on how I did this, and as complicated as it seems, it really isn't. You just have to know a few little tricks ;)
As far as the sugar's concerned, that was definitely a challenging one. I never worked with it before, so I didn't know what to expect. Most of us got frustrated at some point, because it's really hard and demanding. You have to get the feel for it which takes time. I think everything would've been easier if it wasn't hot, hehe :))

Today was a day full of excitement! Except working on my chocolate showpiece in class, which will be reviewed some time this week, I attended the presentation held by the World's best Barista champion - James Hoffmann. If you're not familiar with the word ''Barista'' it refers to a professional who is highly skilled in coffee preparation. We were really fortunate to be a part of such an event, and meet James, an outstanding self taught and talented young man. Stacey and I had a really nice chat with him and he was so kind and made two cappuccino's for us. A real cappuccino made by the best barista in the World.
It was a once in a lifetime experience.





James Hoffmann making our cappuccino's