As promised, we started the morning with more sugar rose making, then progressed to making ribbons, spheres, and then final assembly at last. The cast pieces were made by the interns and handed to us, so no learning opportunity there…
It was interesting to see the evolution in rose 1, 2, 3 and 4 (I eventually stuck rose 3 and 4 on the top). Not necessarily appreciated at the time, but definite improvement from the start. Few were able to make sugar blown apples and as predicted there were a number of explosions during the efforts.
Assembly of the top showpiece yielded a wide variety of styles, and some absolutely beautiful cakes overall (the Australian woman across the table has a real penchant for this). I managed to contribute to the ambient sphere explosion noise by breaking not one, but two of the butterflies, eventually gifted the one assembled by the chef during demo to decorate. To be fair, one crash wasn’t my fault entirely, I was attempting to separate the tabletop sugar booths (yet again) further apart from that of the opposite table due to the odour of burning…. at least the third time I’d done so. They were too close together, and the heat of the lamps combined had caused a problem, but it kept getting pushed together again by the opposite table. The edge of the booth when moved hit the assembled butterfly, and down it came crashing in spectacular style (and noise). The second time, really not sure what happened – the leg just gave way, and once again the smashing noise on marble was spectacular! Not the only one to have issues – a couple of other crashes were heard during assembly and cleanup. Then, we had to transport the whole effort to the front table which we all did with breath held tightly – another one bit the dust there but amazingly most made it intact.
The class effort – note the quilting effect on most of them (story in previous posting) with a pearl at the base of each diamond…. – was it worth the effort? The quilting does look nice, albeit absurdly labour intensive, but the pearls???
My only remaining wish at the end of this module was that the butterfly would fly away with my cake….
Many blistered fingers and fingertips in the class after today – we are off for the weekend now to recuperate, with most of the Americans going home for Thanksgiving. International students are dispersing to investigate LA and San Francisco, both within driving distance or easy flying. Friday is also a day off – planning a visit to a chocolatier in town, and a magic show booked for Sunday. Ice cream week next week, yahoo!