Just another day at the spa.

It has been a few days straight out of Cake Boss or Ace of Cakes. If you have ever seen those shows, you will have absolutely NO idea what my day was like. There was likely less frustration, more precision, and actual cake underneath all the fondant. Yesterday and today we worked through cake decorating. Earlier in our cake lessons, we learned how to split, fill and mask a cake. We learned how to cover a cake with buttercream and make piped decorations. This was really an extension of that day. Last Friday, we made our own rolled fondant and then yesterday, we added any necessary colouring and covered our tiers with it. Today was then, prepping all of our decorations and finishing our cake. In retrospect, I saved myself a significant amount of breathing exercises by opting out of the flower brigade. Others in my class made beautiful flowers, SERIOUSLY. But I know that my flower afternoon would have been made up of muttering under my breath, throwing hunks of fondant across the room and then inevitably changing my flowers to balls of fondant, with or without a seam showing. The colour may not even match.

So I did some research, which was primarily comprised of me sitting on weddinggawker for hours at a time and looking at what people more detail oriented and coordinated than I am did with their opportunity to decorate a special occasion cake. I was really drawn towards simplicity, and by that I mean of course, less work. I wanted something to do with preferably cut outs, aka cookie cutters. I didn't know what colours I wanted either. Chef made it clear that we were making a wedding cake, that this wasn't just an opportunity to decorate a crazy cake. That meant soft colours. I started thinking of the kinds of cakes that I'm drawn to. Not a lot of flowers. Not a lot of scrollwork, if any. A lot of dots. Circles. Lines. I added these things up in my head and came up with K'nex. But I also came up with Art Deco! Art Deco is very clean, linear. It uses the repetition of shapes to create depth and height. It was the 30's, I couldn't resist. Colors are where I can't chill out. Even when I was in fashion studies, I was the one doing a lavender high-waist dress with a champagne bodice when everyone else was doing black and white. So here as well I couldn't just do turquoise and chocolate brown like everyone else. (*It's funny because no one in the class actually used that colour combination. I'm such a whiner.)

I started off with colour blocking my tiers a little bit. This involved WAY overworking my fondant and so it got a little crackly. But across the internet, you can't tell! The bottom at this stage made me think of Nibbler from Futurama immediately followed by breasts. And then maybe a penguin. Originally I wanted kind of an antique peach colour with a cool slate grey against the white fondant. But instead I achieved a pale pink  and a dark purple. The colours were still fine, just not as they were initially intended.

On the second tier, I really like the addition of taller columns, continuing on with the layer and the colour scheme. No one would actually want to eat my cake, because it has SO MUCH fondant on it. But working with the repetition of colours and shapes, it kind of became classy. We had to have a topper. I didn't know what to do for a topper with the style of my cake. I still like it better without the topper but I think the topper gives the cake a strong retro feeling. Kind of like a lounge singer. In a good or bad way, not sure.

This is the close up, and my favourite angle of the cake. Just two tiers. A monochromatic grey on grey would be classy. Or even a pale grey and a white. For someone to get married on New Years Eve. You could of course do green and black, if you wanted to be really Art Deco.

After I started working on the second tier and then on the finishing aspects, I found that I actually really liked it! A project that I was loathe to get involved in, I actually came away from it proud of my design. Not everyone liked it but like I said, I DON'T DO FLOWERS. We all have our strengths. The PM teacher came in and took a picture of mine because she said it was a good example of a cake that is 'easy to achieve but still beautiful'. I'm good with that.

On MOnday, we also finished our petit fours. We glazed them with pastry fondant (different than the fondant regarded above) and piped designs on top. They taste kind of like a donut, if a donut had a bajillion layers. One girl said it looked like the buildings from Inception when you lined them up in rows. This of course inspired a lot of kicking over the 'towers' with one's fingers and then stomping around the kitchen like a T-Rex. We all did it, I swear. I think it would have been fun to ice them all like dominos but it was good to practice our piping. I thought the domino theme would be cool for a New Years party too. I'm seeing a theme. Maybe I'm just wishing for a New Years.

Tomorrow we do fruitcake….yahoo. And then we start prepping for our Midterm! I do not remember bread. I do not remember anything earlier than last week. Who am I kidding -the weekend. I remember THE WEEKEND. We're gonna be practicing bread, pate a choux, tart shells and chocolate truffle. And then our skills are inflicted on the general public when we bake for the restaurant. In two weeks, I will be looking back on all of this, and it will feel like kindergarten, when you wish that you could still play at the water table and colour with HUGE felt markers when you're now forced to do big kid stuff like practice your cursive writing and remember your times tables up to 5. Except now we're plating desserts and trying not to give paying customers Staphylococcus. Easy shit.

Find a donut. Kick it over like a boss (with your fingers of course). Chow down. Repeat.