Fondant decorations finished this a.m., with some lovely results from some of my classmates. The cakes were put aside to be replaced with a different form of torture, sugar work.
This involves making a sugar concoction boiled to 165C, then cooled a little to form a mass and then “pulled” to introduce air. It makes the mass shiny and white, and quite attractive decorations can be made when in the right hands….
Needless to say those weren’t mine. We donned gloves (and some of us a layer of cotton gloves underneath the latex) but it was still uncomfortably hot to work with… we were all dipping our hands in the cold sanitizing sink in the dishroom thankfully by the end of the day and comparing red, raw hands, some blistered.
The task of the day was to make a sugar rose for the top of the wedding cake. Ha, ha. The petals were to be thin and delicate and we were warned not to produce cabbages….Mine looks more like a brussel sprout so I think I succeeded in that hee hee! First effort yielded petals that were too thick, so I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to pull off thinner petals – many of which shattered when I attempted to attach them to the rose centre… there is a happy medium that I couldn’t quite hit. After a frustrating plateau in the middle of the afternoon when it felt like I was getting worse, not better, I think I eventually made some progress. I did ruin one early “rose” by attempting to flatten it on the bottom so that it would stand on the cake. Actually, turns out I tried to flatten the top, not the bottom – perhaps some indication of how excellent it was, when the top couldn’t be distinguished from the bottom?? LOL.
Working with the hot sugar mass meant working under a hot light, and returning it to the microwave frequently to make it malleable (and of course hotter on the hands). Some beautiful efforts – the Australian woman across from me produced gorgeous thin petals, and gallantly tried to impart that knowledge to me… on the other end of the spectrum, others produced “flowers” that were yellowish, and even thicker petalled than mine, so I was a bit cheered by the shared general level of incompetence! I can definitely see that good results could be achieved with practice, and there are reasons to master this craft. We get another effort at roses tomorrow a.m., and then move on to making a butterfly, blown sugar, and casted (molded) sugar which looks intriguing.
Tiring work though, and we thankfully packed up after my partner killed her sugar mass by overcooking in the microwave. More decorating fun tomorrow and a picture of the wedding cake and its’ upcoming sugar showpiece monstrosity on top will be forthcoming. Ice cream week next week, much more my taste both literally and figuratively.