Weeks 19 & 20: Cakes 2

So Level 1 has come and gone, and I'm already 2 weeks into Level 2! It's been such a busy few weeks for me, and I've been unable to post much here. At the moment, it's no less than 80 degrees in my apartment and with my hotter laptop in lap, I'm going to try to keep this brief. A notoriously difficult thing for me to do.

The first item for Cakes 2 was a buche noel, the traditional Christmas cake. Funny story, this year for my company bake off, my cookie dough cupcakes were beat by a buche noel. Making this made me feel vindicated.

No buche noel is complete without marzipan robins and meringue mushrooms

A fraisier is a cake made in a ring mold with strawberries, a sponge cake, a chiboust (pastry cream-based buttercream), and a layer of green marzipan. It always says "Fraisier" on it, and the first time I wrote it on the cake, I spelled it wrong. Oops.



The next cake was a really awesome lemon chiffon with lemon curd (one of my favorite things) and buttercream. We practiced our basketweave technique, and I used the opportunity to practice my marzipan modeling skills. I think whales on cakes are about as cute as it gets.




The white cake was my favorite cake of the unit. It tastes exactly like it came from a box. And I mean that in the best way possible. I'm obviously all about baking from scratch, but boxed cakes are delicious. There's no denying that. This cake was filled and covered with a peach buttercream and covered in marzipan.



I had never had black forest cake before, but it had a chocolate cake with chocolate ganache, cherries, and whipped cream. Not bad, but I found it kind of dry.




Carrying the next two cakes home on the subway one night, I have never felt more popular. I had a board with 2 cheesecakes and the pistachio roulade and entered the subway just as all the Yankees fans were coming home from the game. On a subway car with 50 hungry guys, I had numerous inquiries about the cakes. I think I'm just going to carry cheesecake wherever I go.


This cake was a chocolate roulade with pistachio cream in it and rolled up. The cake is then stood upright. We covered the whole thing with fondant, mine was blue and purple marbled fondant.



I'll be putting up the pictures from our midterm soon. The task was to create a special occasions cake, and my classmates did a really spectacular job with some of the cakes they made.