As expected, school has been very busy lately. My last day of classes is quickly approaching and blogging has had to take a back seat. My lab days have also been extremely crazy and challenging. For the past three weeks we've solely focused on working with chocolate, working with sugar and wedding cakes.
The first week we learned how to properly temper chocolate using a slab of marble. This makes the entire process a lot faster as the chocolate cools quickly. As usual, we would bring the chocolate up to 50-55 deegrees Celsius in a bain marie. Then you need to cool the chocolate to 27 degrees Celsius to start the crystalization process. We did this by pouring it onto the marble, then using flat spatulas to move the chocolate around on the cool surface. Once it was at the proper temperature, we could then warm it back up to 31-32 degrees Celsius to make it easier to work with. After learning how to temper properly, we could make several different decorations or desserts. We poured chocolate into little truffle molds that were different shapes, we made leaves made of chocolate and we even made a decorative basket out of chocolate! For the basket, we learned that by slowly adding a little water to the chocolate, it will cause it to seize and make the chocolate thicker and thicker. This made it possible for us to pipe the chocolate over a bowl forming the base of the basket. This thick chocolate concoction also dries very quickly and hard and can be used as a glue. The very last day of our chocolate week, we were made to temper the chocolate without a thermometer and only by touch! It was EXTREMELY difficult. I obviously don't have enough experience temper this way, but I tried my best and sort of succeeded. I managed to melt the chocolate and get it hot enough, then I cooled it until I thought it seemed thicker, then I attempted to bring the temperature back up slightly. Unfortunately when my teacher came around to grade me by measuring the temperature, the cohcolate was at 33.6 degrees Celsius. Considering the fact that I've only technically been doing this for a week, I thought I did fairly well... that's not what my teacher thought however... Overall, I feel as though the chocolate week was a success. This week we will be starting our chocolate showpiece where we each have to make a sculpture made out of chocolate by ourselves!!! I hope that the practice I've had will make making this showpiece less challenging... We shall see.

The next week we focused on sugar. This was very painful and difficult. Our teacher told us that this is a very important skill for us to learn as there are only a handful of people in Ontario that can work with sugar well. So having this knowledge will hopefully help when looking for employment. We first started with casting sugar. This involves bringing a large amount of isomalt (a form of sugar) with a small amount of water to a boil until it comes up to 165 degrees Celsius; needless to say that this is where the painful part began. Once the bubbles in the sugar stop rising to the surface, you can colour it and pour it into any shaped mold. We also sprinkled a little metallic dust over the sugar and blew it a little making it have a cool effect. Once cooled, the mold can be removed and and the sugar is hard and solid. We then started pulling sugar; this is where the real pain began! You would start the process the sane way as before, but would pour the boiling sugar on a silpat (stick free mat) allowing it to cool until it was a little harder, but malleable. Working under a heat lamp (that can actually give off a lot of heat!), we would take the sugar which was approximately 65-75 degrees Celsius and pull and twist it several times until it became shiny. We would do this with our hands!!! The only thing we had between our flesh and the close-to-boiling-hot-sugar was plastic gloves... these didn't really protect us from the heat. By pulling the sugar, we were able to to make ribbons of sugar by placing two different colours next to each other and pulling them together making stripes. We could then form the pulled sugar by cooling it a little and forming it into the desired shape. You can stick pieces together by heating one side with a heat lamp making it melt a little. This is how we made a ribbon/bow. The last technique we learned was how to blow sugar. This was the most difficult part. As with pulling, we would heat the sugar until it was malleable. A small piece of this would be shaped into a ball, then formed around your thumb (making a bowl-like shape). We had a pump that had a small tip at the end, and we would stick the bowl shpae to it. While keeping the sugar at a perfect temperature; not too hot and not too cold, we would slowly pump air into the sugar while forming it into whatever shaped we want (I formed it into an apple because it's just a circle!). The trick to doing this (apparently- I haven't quite mastered it yet) is to have the perfect balance between heat and cold. I didn't really succeed in this. Hopefully I will magically be able to do this for the sugar showpiece we make next week.

Finally, last week we focused on wedding cakes. Seeing as we've already worked with fondant and flower making, it wasn't too difficult. We used styrofoam boards instead of cake. In some ways, this made making the wedding cake more difficult as styrofoam is very light and can't stay still when pressure is applied- something necessary when icing the cake. We covered the tiers with fondant, made fondant roses and learned different piping techniques. It wasn't anything too difficult or new. We were also required to use pillars to hold up the top tier. This isn't really to my taste, but oh well! I thought I did fairly well on my wedding cake and was pleased with the outcome. The most difficult part of the entire week didn't even involve making the wedding cake- it involved destroying it! Since we needed to re-use the styrofoam boards (they're actually quite expensive), the minute after our cake was graded, we needed to take it all apart and wash off the styrofoam. It was very sad seeing all that work end up in the garbage bin. I will be making another wedding cake in two weeks and will be able to decorate it however I want, so I'm looking forward to that!