nothing in particular

The final lesson of cake making, intermediate stage.
As you can probably guess from the green powder below, we are making green tea cake today =D

Items to be made today:
- Green Tea Gateau
- Mark's Scones
- Checkered Board Cookies

Today will be K's final chance to practise cake making in class, so I will be in supervisory mode a.k.a eye power.



K's feeling very nervous as he folds the cake cos Judy says the height of this cake will determine the folding skills of the baker O_O



Mixing the mixture, after green tea powder has been added =>green mixture.
After all ingredients are mixed fully, the cake is popped into the oven asap as no extra raising additives added.



Now the next item, checkered board cookies. This time I will start mixing first while K takes a breather. We are still in the midst of wondering why cookie making has been incorporated in this course though..hmm~



Dough is formed after beating for awhile. This recipe has no eggs but has 190grams of butter, 70grams of icing sugar >_<'

Separate out about 3/5 of the dough, mix with coco powder, divide the remaining 2/5 into 2 portions.

Still mixing the coco powder into the dough, hard to incorporate the powder as it was was flying around lol~



Oops, time to take the green tea cake out of the oven. Takes about 20mins for it to get thoroughly cooked. We looked around and K's cake was in the average range for height so grats to him~ he passed the little test.



Hmm tracing paper was not cut in exact size, as the result one side was alittle down sloping.



Finally the coco powder decided to merge into the dough, now divide them into 3 portions and roll them into 4" by 6" rectangles(same goes for the white dough). Fortunately the dough was not too tough to work with and we finally got them into the approx. thickness of about 4mm.



Off the dough goes into the fast chiller before they melt.



After the dough has hardened from freezing, stack them up in alternating colors.
Then cut them across length wise into 6pcs. Stack them(3pcs) side by side with alternating colors from horizontally. After that, stack them(3pcs) with alternating colors in vertically too.
*hard to explain*



Top left:Remember we have one extra piece of brown color dough? Now roll this out and wrap it round the checkered dough (after it has been chilled).
Top right: Leftovers from trimming
Btm left: The overall look from side, trim the brown dough sticking out if any then freeze the entire dough.
Btm right: Cut out into EQUAL thickness then bake till brown.

It is important that the separate checkered pieces are tightly pressed together(use water to dab) cos it affects the overall look later on. Another thing is thickness of the dough should be approx the same so that the checkered design looks neat. And last but not least, the brown dough that we use to wrap around the checkered design should not be rolled too thinly as it affects the overall look as well.



After the cookie cooked, this is how it looks. Tastes quite light and crispy.



Now its time to do the green tea butter cream for the Green Tea Gateau.
From top left, clockwise: Cooking sugar in 20grams of water oh wow~; beating eggs with sugar syrup; K who is about to add cold butter into the mixture; the look of the butter+sugar syrup+yolk ..like scrambled eggs.

Judy told us to continue beating even if the mixture looks horrendous..so we continued for another 20mins >_>



From top left, clockwise: Preparation for Green Tea Gateau filling, cooked red beans; the green tea buttercream; finally done with covering the cake with cream; sifted green tea powder on top of the cake.

While we were trying to spread the cream evenly onto the cake, the Malay lady from the group behind us came and ask if she can help me. I told her its fine cos I can do myself except that I am warming the spreading knife now. *associated with gelatin present in the recipe* -.-

After that was done, we went on to sift green tea powder over the cake and the sift was too big as the result, too much powder fell through and there goes my design..I had used a cooling rake under the sift to create some "patterns".



We were bushed by now and barely listening to Judy's instructions on making the scones. But well, they turned out fine.

YH says that the scones we made are different from Provence's such that ours is more wet and moist inside. Well, Judy says the scones are meant to be served warm with jam for spreading and english tea.



Now back to the Green Tea Gateau. We were provided with tracing paper and tempered white couverture chocolate, so we started doodling on the paper by piping designs. Once they set->harden, we can use them for cake decoration.



The next thing I know is...K cut the cake into 2 and stuffed them into boxes before I could put my white chocolate decoration on them :@

In the end, they got separated..before they got decorated aww~



Half a cake with YY <3>

Went home after a satisfying dinner at Liang Court Marutama..I opened up my cake box and saw the above. O.o what happened?? The design "came out" lol~ think it was due to the buttercream melting at room temperature -_-'