Chef Matthew was already at the 3rd floor patisserie kitchen at 7:50am with everything prepped and ready to go. We are to make a lemon cake and butter cream and then prep it for cake decorating today.
The lemon cake uses the creaming method - you first cream the butter in the mixer (use fire torch to warm bowl up to soften (not melt) the butter), then gradually add sugar, lemon zest and egg in the bowl (wait for each ingredient to be fully mixed before adding another one). Sift flour and baking powder together and add to the mixer on low setting. Finally add milk to achieve a dropping consistency.
We then continued to make the butter cream. Sugar and water were heated on in a pan to achieve a thread texture. This is then immediately poured to the mixer with well beaten eggs and egg yolks. Once fully mixed it is then time to add softened butter and beat until the right consistency is reached.
Sounds rather easy to make a lemon cake and butter cream right? WRONG! The whole experience could not have been more disastrous and stressful for me. My cake looked ugly and you could see bits of it not being perfectly baked when it was sliced in half horizontally. My butter cream was runnier and more yellow my other classmates'. It is as if the same nightmare repeated itself from when I attended a cake baking course not long ago - none of my cakes turned out ok and I am starting to think that maybe being a baker is not a wise career choice :(
The most horrifying thing is.......we now had to assemble and prep the cake as we are to use it for cake decorating in the next lesson. The cake already looked bad to begin with after the brown bits were chopped off (chef Matthew wanted a "white cake" look). After filling it with maple syrup and the runny butter cream I made earlier, the cake kind of tilted to one side while others look nice and straight. Honestly I had the urge to simply smash my cake to the ground and walk out of the room........
The last thing we did to prep the cake was "casting". Chef Matthew used two blenders to help us blend our leftover cake bits (the brown bits we chopped off) with apricot jam to reach a spreadable consistency. We then had to use palette knives to smooth the jam/cake mixture over our cakes (which had been set in a blast fridge for at least 30 minutes) to give perfect straight and smooth surface and sharp edges. This proved to be too difficult for me again........my cake was already tilting and bumpy so it took a long while fill the gaps. My palette knife skills is not really up to scratch to nothing could be smoothed no matter how much I tried. Chef Matthew again came to the rescue. He simply applied more jam/cake mixture to the sloping side of the cake and dipped the palette knife in hot water to make the mixture more spreadable. He then demonstrated that the correct way to hold a palette knife is at an angle. The end result was definitely much better than what I originally came up with. It was then time to pack up for the day.
It was a confident destroying lesson for me as nothing turned out to be just right. Even forgot to take photos of the cake (which I will repost after I see it again). However, perseverance is my motto and there will always be more challenges along the way! Practice and patience are the two things I absolutely need right now.
The journey continues......fingers crossed that the next lesson will be so much better!
Sparkling Piggy
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