The cake decorating programming was finally approaching to its end - thought this day would never come! We pretty much used the last three lessons of the course making more sugar flowers (I also spent a huge amount of my own time doing so at home - sleep was a scarce thing!), icing fruitcakes with marzipan and sugar paste, layering the cakes into three tiers and fully decorate the whole thing. Le Cordon Bleu also managed to squeeze in a cake business session to talk us through what is required to set up our own food business - they brought in an external lecturer who actually owned her own business to share with us her experiences.
It actually felt like the whole world was against me while putting the cakes together. My knife skills was (and still is) not up to scratch and no matter what I did none of the cakes were perfectly level. The base cake was rather thin to begin with and after slicing the top off it became even thinner. Chef Matthew saw it and offered to gave me a spare one as replacement. Battling with marzipan and sugar paste became part of me and it took me longer than required to have all cakes fully iced.
Stacking the cake was fun. Chef Julie talked us through why doweling a cake is very important for tiered cakes. Cutting the dowels was hard though - it felt like I was going to chop my fingers off at any moment! Unfortunately my cakes looked rather wobbly after being stacked so I had to keep on adding sugar paste to the bottom of the cakes until each tier is perfectly level.
I really enjoyed the last stage of the cake decoration - putting flowers on the cakes! I had made so many sugar flowers for me to decorate the cake in many ways.
This is supposed to be a magnolia (tutorial from pretty witty cake - https://www.prettywittycakes.co.uk/video-tutorials/fantasy-magnolia) but somehow it ended up looking like......just a random flower no one recognises
Blossoms and hydrangeas
Daisies
I was lucky enough to have the help from a Le Cordon Bleu student who volunteered to be the class assistance for the final lesson - she saved me a lot of time by smoothing my royal icing pearls after piping and gave me suggestions on how I should utilise my flowers. She actually wanted me to put less flowers on the cake but I did not want my flowers to go to waste. What I ended up with is a very girly and extremely flowery cake:
I even had spare flowers to make into bouquets :) These spare flowers are now part of my living room decoration - result!
After chef Matthew's done taking pictures of everyone's cake, we then proceeded to another classroom for celebration and to get our programme certificate:
This is really one hard to acquire certificate!
I am simply relieved that the programme is fully over. It did indeed give you a nice insight on the cake decorating world but at the same time it was rather rushed. I was always running out of time to do something and felt that each topic could've been taught more thoroughly. To summarise, I felt that I've learnt a lot from the programme but at the same time nothing was learnt well. I would recommend anyone who wishes to take the programme to at least have some cake decorating related skills (e.g. at least have iced a cake with sugar paste to know what it is about and/or know how to use a palate knife well). Was it worth it? I cannot really say right now as I am still evaluating the usefulness of the programme - I am certainly baking and decorating more cakes then before though! Thank you so much to my friends and families for being my cake decorating business guinea pigs and said nothing but praises when tucking in ugly looking cakes - my baking passion is still going strong and I look forward to the day that I set up my own business :)
Sparkling Piggy
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