You would think I would be excited or relieved...but really to be honest I am just flat out sad. I have officially been out of school for one week and two days but am kind of still in denial. It feels like I am on some sort of break and will be going back soon to hang with all of my classmates in the kitchen...but I won't. So that is extremely sad. On a brighter note, the last few weeks of classes were amazing!!! Probably some of the funnest weeks in the whole program! So, here is what I've done since I last posted!...
Cake number two...
Baby Shower Cake
This cake was super fun!...and a lot less time consuming than the children's birthday cake that's for sure! You will see a lot of the same things on mine and everyone else's from my class because there were a lot of specific requirements for this cake. We all had to have a crib, ruffles, a baby, a blanket, the oval for it to sit on, a pearl border, piped script, cornelli lace, and string work.
The cake inside is chiffon with swiss buttercream. It is covered in fondant and all the piping was done with royal icing. The bows, oval, and crib were made with pastillage. The baby and teddy were made with marzipan. The small pink bows, ruffles, and blanket were made with gum paste.
I'll be honest, all these babies floating around in the kitchen kind of made me want a real baby. hahahaha
Oh and when I was getting mine graded Chef G questioned me on whether my fondant was from the batch we used in class. haha...he said it was the best covered cake he had ever seen! : ) Woo woo! Also, I ended up getting a 99. So Chef was going through all the requirements and took off 1 point for having a crack in my gum paste blankie. Then he told me I was done and I asked him what my score was so he added it up and the total came to 99 and he goes, "what? this should be 100." So I said, "then why don't you give me 100?" And he just laughed. Uhhhh ok! haha...he is sometimes the most confusing and strange guy but he is super hilarious.
Ok, here are my classmates cakes! : )
Alright, so there is this cake challenge going on that I have decided I must try to win! Here's the scoop, anybody can submit a picture of a cake for a fee online. There are two categories, themed cake and wedding cake. Any person can submit a cake for both categories by one or both submission dates which are in May and August. So I can submit 4 cakes total. A themed and a wedding by the end of May and a themed and a wedding by the end of August. So, for the themed cake I decided to convert my children's birthday cake to a tiered cake so that it would qualify to enter into the contest (the cakes have to be at least 24 inches tall). So...I spent a LOT of time in the practice kitchen working on:
Cake number three...
CINDERELLA 2.0 : )
So this cake is covered styrofoam, that way it can be left downstairs for display for a while. Ugh, this cake took way longer than I had planned for...as always. Preparing the styrofoam takes time because you have to glue them together, sand them, then cover them in fondant. Then of course the fondant faded from nice hot pink to a nasty uneven barely light pink. But that presented a fun opportunity because I got to learn how to use the airbrush! Then I had to make extra decorations, like more bows and more scissors because I threw away all my spares and the pair from my previous cake broke on the drive home from school. The day I was going to finish I stacked the cakes and started gluing on decorations, thinking I would finish in a jiffy...you'd think I would have learned by now, things just aren't that easy. I had the freaking hardest time with the light pink draping!!! We tried gum paste, we tried fondant. I worked on it for seriously like 3 or 4 hours! It even drove me to eat a slice of cheesecake that I was offered in the practice kitchen (I am not eating sugar as of right now). So yeah, rough day. But it ALWAYS feels sooooooo good once you're finished!!! : ) : ) : )
this is how we transported the cake downstairs for display...walking veeeerrrrryyy slowly so none of the little figures or needles broke.
The second day it was on display tons of people from my class kept on coming up to me to inform me the scissors were already broken! Course I assumed it was some other student because people can't seem to keep their hands off things...but it turns out it was an admissions rep who did it on accident while moving it to it's final position. It was funny, she came running up one day to apologize! Anyway, it was the scissors in the back so I didn't care that much anyway.
But hey can I say having a cake on display is AWESOME because it makes you kind of feel like a celebrity. I am telling you, people have hunted me down in the kitchens and hallways just to tell me they like my cake! : )
So as I mentioned before, the last like 4 weeks of school I basically lived in the practice kitchen. I went early to school to work on my projects, went to class, then stayed after school to work on my projects. The few weeks I was working on my super-sized Cinderella cake and a bazillion filled chocolate truffles we were working on gumpaste flowers in class. This was convenient because it allowed me a lot of free time to be able to work on my extra projects.
When I say I lived in the practice kitchen I literally mean I spent ALL day there. It took me like 30 or more minutes every morning to pack my meals for the day. haha... This is a picture of me eating my oatmeal breakfast out of a mixing bowl. It was the only bowl in the kitchen I could find! We had to take a picture because everybody thought I was so weird! Arlete especially thought it was super nasty...I still don't really get why. It is just a bowl!
This is my Easter lily! My favorite flower that I made.
Stargazer lily
Me lookin like a doof with my flowers :. )
Calla lily
Yellow rose
White rose
My finished bouquet
Ok, I must say, I was not all that happy with my flowers. I feel like if I wasn't doing a whole bunch of other projects at the same time I was working on them I would have done a better job...but I just didn't have the desire because I wanted to focus my attention on other things. I also thought I would enjoy making them more, because I usually love meticulous focused tasks like that but gumpaste is too finicky to work with to enjoy making flowers. It's like, you get one petal made and dried and colored after hours of work and in one second it snaps. UGH.
Another project I worked on in between my chocolatiering and my wedding cake one weekend was personalized chocolates for my instructors at school. All the instructors and other staff I met at school are all so awesome I wanted to show my appreciation somehow. Plus I have loved my time at school so much and have learned so much, I felt that I needed to let all those who made that happen know how thankful I am to them and how much I'll miss them.
So I gave them little baggies of chocolates that I molded and wrapped myself. : ) There are milk and dark chocolates with heath bits and white chocolates with oreo bits. Then there were also chocolate covered oreos. I designed and printed the wrappers, which I was pretty proud of. Seriously, PowerPoint is super useful if you don't have any sort of design program! The pattern is the checkered chef pant! : )
Cake number four...
Masquerade Wedding Cake
Alrighty, here she is...my final project! I think if I could spend ridiculous amounts of money and throw the most awesome party ever for my wedding it would be a masquerade ball. So I decided to make a wedding cake to go along with that theme.
Things got off to a bit of a late start with this cake. I made pastillage and molded the masks and cut out all the other pieces for my topper on a Friday. The next Monday I sanded the masks and other pieces and started piping them with royal icing. I also sanded and glued together my pieces of styrofoam...which didn't arrive until that very day...which is ridiculous! Chef G gave us 3 days to put together a whole wedding cake!...and to think we had two whole weeks to work on our children's birthday cake. Crazy right? But it was a good challenge that's for sure...at times I was seriously scared I wasn't going to finish in time...but I did! Anyway, Tuesday I covered my cakes in fondant and continued to decorate my masks with icing, paint, and apply gold and silver leafing. I also painted the other pastillage pieces for my topper and glued them together with royal icing. Wednesday I did all the piping and painting on my cake. Monday I was in the practice kitchen from 6 AM to 6 PM, open to close. Tuesday I was there from 6 AM to 10:00 PM...we got special permission to stay after hours. On Wednesday I was there from 6 AM to 10:30 PM AND I had to transport (very carefully) my cake home in order to finish the painting!!! I had no choice! It was due on the next day! : ) Thursday I headed into the practice kitchen at 6 AM, after no good-night's rest (I wouldn't be me if I didn't have to pull at least one all-nighter to finish this cake), and assembled my cake topper and added a bit of silver leafing to my cake. FINISHED! But even then I couldn't relax because I had another project so right away I started baking brownies! haha...you will see that project after enjoying some pics of my wedding cake...
This is the guy masquerade mask! I LOVE how it turned out!...just as I had imagined it in my head. We've got piping and gold paint, gold leafing, blue paint, and I also carved texture into it and did a light cocoa painting on it. I even shaded some areas with various colors of gold petal dust. It's the details that make the difference! : )
This is the lady's masquerade mask. This one also turned out how I pictured it for the most part. I love it and I think it's pretty but there is something about it that kind of annoys me, the problem is I don't know what. But I really have no complaints. One of the culinary instructors came in while I was working on this and complimented me on the movement and depth I created on the left eye. Then she went on to tell me she has a degree in design and that I must have also studied art. When I told her I minored in visual arts she said that she could tell! That made me really happy because sometimes I wonder if my artistic abilities are real or not. haha...Like, I like to be considered an artist, but only if I really am good...cause a lot of people say they are artists you know? Anyway, so yeah, that is that.
Ok, I took so many pictures and cannot be bothered to organize them all right now into a logical order so here are a whole bunch of pictures of my cake!
Yes, each dot was hand painted. : ) ...precisely why I had to transport my cake home to finish it! SOOO time consuming, but, in my opinion, so worth it.
Also, just want to say these pictures don't really do my cake justice. Some of the colors don't look accurate in the pics and you cannot see how sparkly and shiny it is except for in real life. I am happy to say, though, that the table where it is displayed has good spotlights and shows of my sparkles really well! Woo woo! : D
I was so afraid to place my topper on the cake for the longest time. Eventually I just went for it, but for the first little bit I kept it resting on the table. Not only is pastillage super fragile, that thing was glued together with royal icing!!! (I will admit I cheated and glued the two masks on with hot glue, courtesy of Tim, but the bases were glued with royal icing and that was holding all the weight). Anyway, one wrong move or tap and the whole thing could come apart...and if it came apart it wouldn't be fixable, it would shatter.
My finished topper! So, I kind of went crazy on the topper. We were required to have a pastillage topper but there was no size requirement. I had been wanting to make a pastillage centerpiece though, so I decided to just make a centerpiece type deal as my topper to meet my requirement.
Our other requirements were flowers, piped string work, fondant, a pearl border, and more than one tier. Chef wanted to allow for our creativity so some of the other requirements we could just present separately if we didn't want them on our cake. For example, we were supposed to have lace points, which is when you pipe royal icing onto parchment paper, allow it to dry, and then place it on your cake. Well, I had no place for that rubbish so I just whipped one out the day of. The funny thing is, when I got my cake graded Chef G just went straight down my grading sheet giving me full points in every category without even checking them off...so he didn't even look on my lace points! haha : )
I like this pic but the color bugs me!...it looks like mustard yellow but it isn't in real life! It is a beautiful gold!
Me and Tim's cakes tied for the tallest! : )
Now this is a better representation of that beautiful gold I mentioned earlier : )
They ordered me to move my cake to this table in the lobby next to my other one the very same day I turned it in. : ) So I moved it and finally glued the topper onto the cake.
We like to call this "The Brittnee Table"
(And don't ask me what the fancy-looking plate in the center is all about. I have no idea what it is or why it's there!)
So, I ended up getting 100% on this cake. : ) Which, I think I earned considering the amount of time and effort I put into it! Seriously the last few weeks of school were so awesome and tiring all at the same time. When I would go in to school at 6 AM I would wake up at 3:30 to work out, get ready, then drive to the school. The days I didn't stay past hours in the practice kitchen I would go to bed at like 9! haha...I felt like such a granny. Anyway, I was so involved and passionate about this cake and the other projects I was working on that, even though I was tired, I never lost motivation. It was a pretty awesome feeling to be so excited about something. I worked so hard and laughed so much in the last few weeks of school that it makes me happy to know that I will look back and know that I made the most of the rest of my time at Le Cordon Bleu. I got so much closer to all my friends there in the last few weeks and also learned a ton! Anyway, I am really proud of this cake! It is my new favorite that I have ever made.
When I went up to get graded Chef G didn't really say much. He asked me if I learned anything in this block and of course I said yes. Because even when were working with things I had done before I learned new tips and tricks. Plus, being in the class gave me the opportunity to try new things. Every experience, even repetitive, gives us a chance to learn something new. Then he told me that he was really impressed and that the techniques and work I did on this cake would take most people 5 or more years to learn, let alone three weeks. : ) : ) : ) You see, getting a compliment from Chef G is near impossible. He is like an unemotional proud grandpa that won't express his feelings! HA! But really, it made me very happy to hear him say something nice. Oh but I also must tell this...so he always starts out by teasing me, like to scare me about my grade or something. Like on my chocolate box he immediately asked me "what's wrong with this?" and on my baby shower cake he says "mmm where's your crimping? there's a crack in your blanket." So on this one the first thing he says is, "I think I'm going to have to fail you because your cake is toxic." haha I just laughed and said, "No it isn't. Everything is edible." Then he went on to say nice things. Anyway, that is that.
But as I worked on this cake for what felt like a bazillion hours and people kept coming in and asking if I'll even finish in time or telling me I was crazy I wasn't thinking about getting a good grade. I really just wanted to be proud of my cake. I wanted to create something that I would be happy to show off. And in my opinion I accomplished that! : ) I love how it turned out. Now, obviously, it isn't perfect, and there are a few things that I would do differently next time, but I am very very happy with it. I think it may have even turned out better than I imagined it would, which makes me super happy!...especially because I did this all in less than a week!
I cannot wait to send in the pictures to the cake contest! I have NO IDEA if I even have a chance of making it to the finals...but wouldn't it be awesome to be flown to Michigan in November with an assistant and participate in a live competition!? YES. Dream big right?
Ok ok ok...this post is getting ridiculously long...but here are my classmates cakes! There are some REALLY awesome ones!
I think this is my favorite cake out of the class. Something about it is just so nice. It is simple and clean, the colors work, and aren't those birds just the cutest?
This is Tim's cake. Tim is insane. haha...no but it turned out awesome! He spent as much time in the practice kitchen as me! We had some loooooong days together.
Another one of my favorites. Just so well-executed.
Another one of my favorites. Definitely makes me want a simple wedding on the beach on a nice breezy day!
Well, there you have it. I am done with school. It has been a week and two days since I have been out but it feels like it's been 3 years! I miss seeing all my LCB friends' faces everyday. I am a definite change-resistor, which makes life hard. I think it is time for me to read "Who moved my cheese?" again...
Hope you enjoyed!
I know, you don't want to see more...but I almost forgot...I have one more project to post about. Don't worry won't take long. It has to do with those brownies I talked about earlier. I made my roommate Diana her favorite chocolate ganache brownies (dark chocolate, raspberry, and orange flavor!) and some cake pops as a gift to congratulate her on graduating with her Master's degree!!! Here are some pics:
Ok, finally done!
Au Revoir!
