Le Cordon Blue Cake Decorating Programme 4 - The disaster continues....

After an eventful second lesson at Le Cordon Bleu, I was honestly hoping for things to settle down a bit in the third one, only to have my cake making/decorating confidence completely shattered during this lesson. 

The afternoon began with us lining and greasing 4 tins each and melting ingredients over a hob for chocolate fudge cake. After this is done the chef then showed us how to make marzipan from scratch. This is when everything went downhill. My goldfish brain simply didn't have the capacity to memorise every single detail of the demonstration. The list of things done/went wrong during this lesson just goes on and on and on and here are some examples:

1. Cream of tartar for the marzipan was added when the pan was still on the hob (when it shouldn't be)
2. It took forever to dry the marzipan mixture on the hob and the marzipan mixture actually got burned a bit at the the bottom of the pan
3. Very little time was left to work with the marzipan mixture on the working bench until it is cooled and paste like - everyone was already moving onto the next thing. Worst thing was that too much icing sugar was added to the marzipan went into pieces instead of forming into a nice looking dough. The chef simply came to my bench and scraped the marzipan mixture into a ball and told me to wrap it up (whilst looking rather serious).......didn't even get to have the chance to handle it myself properly
4. Mixing sifted dry ingredients with the melted chocolate fudge mixture took forever when everyone else seemed to get on with the task fast and easy..........
5. Applying marzipan (thankfully not the ones we made during the lesson) to the wonky lemon cake I made in the previous lesson proved to be difficult
6. Rolling out fondant icing for the first time to cover the cake in a short time resulted in really thick icing and ugly looking cake (the icing at the base of the cake was all smudged up)

By the time we finished covering the cake with fondant icing is was already 7pm (the lesson started at 3pm). I was in an emotional train wreck and actually felt like crying! The programme is not supposed to be stressful at all but it just felt like we are on a battlefield all the time. 

After a short 20 minutes break we returned to the kitchen to decorate the cake with royal icing using brush embroidery technique and other techniques we learnt during the first lesson. Whilst my classmates' flowers looked immaculate mine looked like they were chewed on by dogs........... I made another mistake by asking for alcohol to dampen the pain brushes when the chef clearly told us to use water during the demonstration (got another dirty look from him again........). Arrrrrgh!

You can spot icing cracks and the dodgy royal icing piping techniques all over this cake. 

The lesson finished by us lining the cake board with ribbons. It was such a relieve for the series of disasters to be over with but at the same time I felt like a failure holding a cakebox containing an ugly cake on my way home. 

Now I serious dread the next lesson as we are to apply the marzipan we made to the chocolate fudge cake! Luckily my family and friends are supportive and advised me to simply get on with the rest of the programme and then practice in my own time and this is exactly what I intend to do. Fingers crossed that I don't run out of any lessons in tears before the end of the programme! 

Sparkling Piggy