My Sweet and Saucy

The reason for the lack of blogging these past couple of days was because I had the opportunity to go to the Capital Confectioner’s Cake & Sugar Art Show in Austin, Texas.  Basically I conned my mom into coming with me for the weekend, and she of course said yes, since she is the best mom in the world!  I have to give a big thanks to Kyla who stopped by my blog and let me know about this great convention…without her I definitely wouldn’t of gone.  The convention had a competition side and a class side to it.  I got to watch Bronwen Weber, Autumn Carpenter, Steven Stellingwerf, Nicholas Lodge, and Earlene Moore do demos for a whole day…I was in heaven, expect for the fact that the day before the trip I came down with a dreadful cold and was sick the whole trip, but nonetheless I learned a lot and got to see a bunch of great cakes.  I will hopefully be trying out some of the new techniques that I learned from the trip later this month and sharing them with you, but for now I just want to share all of the cakes I saw with you.  Enjoy the photos…there’s a lot of them!

Well, here is my 2nd cake from my trip to Chicago where I attended Bronwen Weber’s class at the French Pastry School.  Bronwen first made this cake for a chef’s conference…it was a chef’s head on a plate!   This cake was quite tricky since almost all of the face design is done by using your hands to sculpt the fondant covered cake into a realistic face before the fondant dries on you.  I hope you enjoy seeing the photos from the class and realize just how much of a cake genius Bronwen really is!

The cake is started by stacking layer upon layer of cake & buttercream and then attempting to carve out the basic features of the face.

These are the two carved heads…the first one is Bronwen’s & the second is mine.

Next you cover the head in buttercream.

After covering it in buttercream, you cover the whole cake in fondant and quickly, but carefully, shape the face with your hands.  Detail is added with gum paste tools.

Here is my head after I finished the face sculpting part…then it was onto the details, like hair, eyebrows, sideburns, etc.  The hair accents were made out of modeling chocolate and the tie and jacket were made out of fondant.  Sadly, we ran out of time and didn’t get to make the chef’s hat, but it was an interesting technique.  Since the hat was made out of rice paper, it was completely edible (not that I would want to eat it!)

And here is me with my chef’s head!

This past week I had the privilege of attending one of Bronwen Weber’s cake decorating classes.  As I said in a previous post, she is the owner of Frosted Art in Texas and is also a frequent competitor on Food Network’s Challenges.  She is an amazing teacher and I would highly recommend taking any one of her classes…hopefully I will have the chance to take many more!  This class was held at the French Pastry School in Chicago and was an amazing experience for me.  The class was on cake sculpting, which was something that I had never really done before, so I was definitely excited, but also a little nervous.  Each person in the class did their own cake and we had to finish both of them in 3 days…which might seem like a lot of time, but when you are sculpting a 2 foot dinosaur and a person’s head, time seems to fly by.  Although everyone in the class completed both cakes, as you will see in the photos, we didn’t have time to put the finishing touches on them…like covering the cake boards and other details that help the whole cake come together, but nonetheless I hope you have a fun time checking out the photos and seeing how crazy the process is to make a dino out of cake.  

As you can see in this photo, the whole cake structure was made out of PVC pipe, which as a pastry girl I really haven’t used to often.  At least my dad is a plumber though, so next time I make a 2 foot dino I can get the PVC for free! 

We covered the arms, legs, and head in modeling chocolate, which is basically just chocolate and a sugar substance like corn syrup or glucose and tastes somewhat like a Tootsie Roll.  This is such a great technique to use since the modeling chocolate stays right where you put it and will not fall down…amazing!  You can also mold it just like you would play dough and then it hardens slightly to hold its shape.  Two places you can buy modeling chocolate are at Surfas Restaurant Supply or Pastry Chef Central.  You can also make your own modeling chocolate.  A recipe for that can be found at Epicurious.com.

After we covered the body with modeling chocolate, we stacked the cake onto the body frame and carved it into the shape of a dinosaur’s body…or at least we hoped it would come out that way!

Next we covered his body in buttercream.  After he was nicely lathered up, we covered his arms, legs, head, and body in fondant.  Right after we covered the dino’s body in fondant we had to work very quickly to make impressions into the fondant with our hands, so that we could add a life-like quality to him and give his body some definition.  You can buy fondant at multiple places like your local Michael’s, cake decorating store, or online at places like The Baker’s Kitchen.  You can also make your own fondant and you can find a good recipe at What’s Cooking America.  

We then spray painted his body to give him even more definition.  I had never spray painted a cake before so this was quite a learning experience.  

And finally here is my finished dino cake.  I really wish I had the time to add some rough terrain to the board to make it looked like a finished project, but overall I was pretty happy with my first sculpted cake.  As you can see by the photo of my dino and I, he is quite large and so sadly I couldn’t bring him back with me on my flight to California.  Come back soon to see the new cake…a chef’s head on a plate!  

First of all, I wanted to say sorry for the lack of posting this last week.  I went on a trip to Chicago to attend a class with Bronwen Weber, who many of you have probably seen multiple times on the Food Network’s Challenges where she frequently carves, decorates, and designs cakes that are breath-taking.  The class was held at the French Pastry School and the class was on Specialty Sculpted Cakes.  The class was absolutely amazing and I will be posting up many photos of the class during the next couple days.  Right now though, I wanted to tell you about all the fantastic places I got eat at while I was in Chicago.  The first place that my husband and I spotted was Coco Rouge.  Coco Rouge is owned by a husband and wife team who are pastry chefs with a passion for chocolate.  Their uber-hot chocolate lounge is amazing both in its look and taste.  We tried two chocolates there…the first was a Coco-Epice truffle which had roasted pecans, bittersweet ganache, Jamaican allspice, and cardamon.  (This one was my favorite!)  The second truffle was called Leatherwood and it was filled with leatherwood honey, caramelized bittersweet ganache, sea salt, and bee pollen.  Delicious also!  Their truffles are so complex and have multiple flavors throughout them…each second produces a new flavor for your taste buds, how fun is that!  On our way out I couldn’t pass up buying a bag of their truffles that were made with rare bittersweet chocolate and passionfruit ganache (one of the true wonders of the world) which was then rolled in mexican chile powder.  This truffle had a taste that was out of this world too!  Well, here are some of the pictures from the shop and if you are in Chicago I would definitely spot by!