Each team got a fresh bucket of white fondant and we were off! My partner and I got to work greasing the fake cake rounds (made of styrofoam) with some Crisco and then colored our fondant a peachy-orange for the base. Since the design is retro, we're going for 1970's colors too: orange, brown and yellow.
Once we'd gotten the color we wanted, we rolled out the fondant and covered each of the four tiers. It was my first time covering a round cake and it was harder than I thought! Fortunately, my partner had experience working with fondant and she was happy to teach me some new tricks. We tag-teamed the larger layers and stacked the cake, gluing each layer together with some royal icing. The fondant isn't completely smooth because the styrofoam layers were pretty nicked up to begin with. Thankfully we're covering it with lots of cutouts!
Then we got started on making our gumpaste roses. It was absolutely critical that we finished them today so that they could dry overnight. I learned that it takes me about 30 minutes just to make one rose, not including the greenery for it and painting later. Ugh! Now I know why these things get expensive! We made a bunch of rosebuds and some loose petals too. After lunch, I busted out about 20 leaves as fillers while my partner colored the rest of our fondant brown in preparation for tomorrow.
I'm really happy with our progress today and I'm looking forward to finishing it up tomorrow! We'll have 3 hours to do it all, which should be ample. And I'm glad we have extra flowers and leaves too.. Just in case!
Anthony Bourdain (author of Kitchen Confidential and host of No Reservations) was at our school today, at a totally inconvenient time for us to go (during class). For some reason (politics?) the school didn't advertise it well and stuck him in the smallest theater on campus. It was at 1pm and the theater was full at 11am, with a huge line around the building. Apparently there was some filming happening for the show. Mr. Bourdain is an alum of the school (1978! haha!) so his name is advertised as "Anthony Bourdain '78"... hmm someday I will be Aubrey M. '10! Haha! I'm not into celebrity chefs so I didn't see what the big fuss was about.
Work was fun! We had a brownie tasting (German Chocolate Brownies!) that was pretty good and I did a lot of work on a new book that the school is putting out for bakers. It's more of an instructional book than a recipe book, so I had a lot of fun doing research for that.
Off to study for our final tomorrow!!!
1 comment:
The colors of my '77 room, exactly! Can't wait to see it!
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