"A party without cake..."

"... is just a meeting." - Julia Child

Friday night my sister and brother-in-law and the kids came over for supper and we ate the Black Forest cake. It was really good. ;)

Thursday we were in cakes again. Thursday seemed to be a rough day for a lot of people. There were tears being shed all over place at one point or another. It seemed like a big day with lots to do. We had to bake 2 genoise cakes, mix up custard and butter cream, put together 1 cake, and start putting together a 2nd cake. My chocolate genoise was ok, a little thinner than it should have been, but not a failure. Then some of my friends and I decided to triple the custard recipe and work together to save time. This backfired dramatically because we misread the instructions (not for the recipe, but for how much we needed that day) and so only ended up with enough custard for two people. At first one of the other girls said she would mix up the other recipe for herself, but in the end I volunteered to make the other recipe, for various reasons. But I didn't end up making it until after lunch, which was not too late, but almost. My white genoise turned out perfectly, thankfully. My butter cream... it turned out alright, but I'm not sure I'm doing it right. I think I may need to ask the teacher the next time, because it was kind of a weird consistency.

Anyway... So we ended up making a Boston cake on Thursday. We split the chocolate cake into 2 layers, spread custard between the layers (always soaking the cakes with syrup), then we spread chocolate butter cream around the sides and covered with almonds. For the top of the cake we melted and spread chocolate "fondant", made a swirl design with white fondant, and then marbled them. My fondants weren't warm enough so mine doesn't look right. Then a little piping around the top and a cherry in the middle! We were then supposed to start putting together the second cake, but I really wasn't feeling up to it and there wasn't that much time left anyway, plus I had a lot of clean up to do. I didn't bring home the Boston cake, much to my father's dismay.

Boston

The design looks a lot better when the fondants melt together.

Friday we finished the second cake from Thursday, called Ambassadeur, and made a carrot cake. The Ambassador cake was a white cake split in 3 layers. The layers were filled with mousseline (Goggle translates this to chiffon... does that make sense?) made from custard and butter and flavoured with kirsch, with raspberries sprinkled into the mousseline. We then covered the entire cake with butter cream, and rolled out a strip of pink almond paste which was placed slightly below the middle line of the cake and down the sides. The rest of the cake was covered with almonds, and then we wrote Ambassadeur on the pink strip. Funny story: I somehow didn't realize that ambassador ends with "eur" in French, so I wrote mine in English, which the teacher made me correct, and then kept teasing me the rest of the day by overexaggerating, "AmbassadOR". I tasted the demo, by the way, and it was super yummy! But I'm not bringing mine home.

English - "AmbassadOR"

French. Yeah... it could have been a lot better...

The carrot cake was pretty straightforward. I've never actually made a carrot cake before, and don't like carrots so I don't really eat it anyway, but this recipe was unlike what I think of when I think carrot cake. In my mind, a carrot cake is more or less a spice cake with some grated carrot stirred in. This was more like grated carrot with some eggs and flour to hold it together, and a bit of pineapple. Odd. But my brother requested carrot cake when I made it (so long as there were no raisins), so I will be bringing it home next week. We made a cream cheese glaze for the top (which I kind of messed up), and covered the sides with butter cream and grated, toasted coconut. A little piping around the top, and some butter cream carrots. Mine look silly. Don't laugh. I'm blaming it on the butter cream...

Silly carrots...

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