Chocolate

Hello!

As a child, I loved chocolate. After being in school, I've grown to dislike chocolate...immensely. Well this term, my 5th term, is ALL about chocolate (and sugar). Our first week started with learning how to temper chocolate, which was completely new to me! I've never really understood why chocolate is tempered and how to do it, but once I learned, it makes a lot of sense and it's incredibly easy to do!

The first week, we made chocolate covered strawberries and little tuxedo strawberries that were absolutely adorable.

SO PRECIOUS! These are great as party favors at weddings or as dessert at weddings!! They are so much fun to make.

As the term progresses, we are going to be making a chocolate box, a chocolate showpiece that has to be at least 12 inches tall. We have to make pastillage showpiece, a cocoa painting, sugar showpieces, and marzipan fruit! 

It's definitely going to be a very long and very stressful 10 weeks!!!  But I'm excited to learn new tricks and ideas that can for sure be incorporated into desserts and cakes! 

Next up: Chocolate Box! 

Umi-Zoomi Cake

Hello all,

I recently did a Team Umi-Zoomi birthday cake for someone's daughter.

This was an interesting cake for me because I had never really worked with fondant before, so this was a first (well besides my ACF cake) but this was FOR someone who was PAYING me. 

I made marshmallow fondant because of the taste and because it is way easier to make than regular fondant! 

I started with making the characters, Milli, Bot, and Geo. They ended up coming out pretty accurately. And I realized that the green guy (without eyes and a mouth) could be made into a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, which I thought was awesome for future reference. 

Once I had my little people made, I continued on with decorating the cake: 

For this, I added a ruler across the bottom of the cake, as a border, and I added shapes to the sides to give the cake some texture and visual interest (and because Umi-Zoomi is all about shapes).

The shapes and the ruler came out WAY better than I could have imagined. I was beyond excited with how they turned out. So then, I moved on to the top of the cake: 

I added Milli, Bot, and Geo to the top of the cake and then had to write Happy Birthday Sophia on it..like so:

I was definitely quite proud of how this cake turned out. It was a lot of fun and I really enjoyed being able to make a cake that made a little girl's birthday that much more special! 

-B