nothing in particular

Finally have a chance to attend "Cake making intermediate stage"..that GH who joined me last year for beginners' stage is often busy. So now K, who has no experience in cake making is gonna try to be a 插班生 this time round. Pics are taken using K's Olympus cos I left my K800i at home T_T

Today we are making:
1.) Pecan German Chocolate Cake
2.) European Pecan Loaf Cake


The ingredients for today includes: flour, unsweetened chocolate, eggs, dessicated coconut, roasted pecan nuts, brown sugar..and many others not shown XDD



Not much time to take pictures zzz~ We started making the chocolate cake first.
First cream the butter, salt and sugar together. Once fluffy, add the egg yolks, vanilla essence then finally the melted chocolate bit by bit so that mixture is smooth.

Following that, flour + baking soda and buttermilk was added alternatively and mixed in using hands. To be exact, using my arms. Poor K was flustered like a koose™
* Koose: (noun)When K is flustered, confused, gan cheong..he behaves abnormally.




The chocolate cake ..finally done, after much energy spent on folding in the mixture. But K pressed it too hard whilst it was in the oven(to test if its done) and hence the depression from his fingers >_<''



Next thing to be done is the filling for the chocolate cake which involves dessicated coconut, pecan nuts, butter, evaporated milk, sugar and yolks. First, cut the cake into 3 levels. The cake was quite crumbly and so we didn't have level surfaces to start with -______-'




After cooking the filling on stove, its spreaded over cake.




The final product after trimming the edges. Seems like it was too hard for K cos the cake was too crumbly and thus hard to handle.




Meanwhile, we rushed to start the next cake that involves green apples (thinly sliced), cinnamon powder. As we were falling behind the rest of the class, BAD THINGS STARTED HAPPENING. First, I mixed the butter with the wrong sugar(it was supposed to be brown), two..i forgot to add vanilla essence..then the egg white seems over done as it was our first time using the mixer.

For this cake, I let K have the honour of mixing the egg white(beaten) together with the rest of the mixture. After returning from washing all the utensils, K was done and we finally sent our cake in last >_>"'. Fortunately, there's always time to catch up for cake classes.

The final product above. It seems like the apples were too heavy and too much batter was put into the containers..well, the teacher said 3/4 full. @_@''





K preparing the crumbly cake for coating of ganache (pouring molten chocolate over the cake)




After that, Judy taught us to use plastic sheets for making deco for the side of the chocolate cake.
First cut a suitable piece of plastic sheet, then using some coloring(oil base) and mix them with some white chocolate(melted). Pipe the design over the plastic sheet, let it harden alittle.(above pic) Use the remaining white chocolate(melted), spread it over the plastic sheet like in the bottom pic.



Our fugly design -_-''' It was not easy to make that white chocolate sheet stick to the cake, which means trimming the cake has to be done more accurately. Piping the design onto the top of the cake was something new for K..so there were some bloppers. Yah lah..i suck too ._.'




Judy's creation. But she has brass wares for the creation of the flowers..so what to do~ morale of the story is use your own creativity.

Update: The chocolate cake tastes great except that its too crumbly, so Judy suggested that the baking agents can be reduced further in portions. Alternatively, you can put the cake in the fridge before serving at room temp.

Some other reasons for being that crumbly, we suspect could be the problem with mixing in dry chocolate mixture (chocolate + boiling water), unlevelled spoons of baking agent.