Sunday, November 15, 2009

Day 38 - November 13, 2009

Day 38:

Today Kacean came to school with me. Rex had asked her to come and do a demo for the high school kids on something she learned while attending the Western Culinary Institute in Portland. She got an associates degree in Baking and Pastry. Her favorite thing while studying there was chocolate, so she did a chocolate demo. She tempered chocolate and made French and Swiss truffles for the class. She also showed them a few plating designs she does at work at Elements. She was cute, I think she had a good time. She was really nervous but warmed up after a few minutes.

Rex and Kace:

Tempering:

Filling molds with ganache:

Rolling truffles:


Coating the rolled truffles with a tempered chocolate shell:


After the demo we both headed into the kitchen to start baking a wedding cake and 150 cupcakes for her friends wedding next Saturday. The plan is to make a devil's food sheet cake to be the grooms cake. I guess he wants a giraffe with a superman badge on his chest and when you cut off his neck, it will look like it's bleeding when raspberry coulis comes pouring out. I'm not sure what I think about that, except that I'm not a fan of it...

The actual wedding cake is a 2 tier lemon cake with a raspberry mousse filling and then we are going to have 150 cupcakes as well. The stupid thing is going to be decorated with butterflies. I hate butterfly wedding cakes...They never end up looking very good, at least I've never seen one that I like.

We started with the devils food sheet cake, everything seemed to go pretty well without a problem. That's surprising as I stink at baking ... I was super nervous to actually have to make a wedding cake for some girl I don't know. The only reason I thought I would be fine is because I would have Kacean do all the actual baking.

When the devils food was finished we started on the lemon cake. We were going to be using a gold cake recipe of Rex's that she had never made before and just adding lemon flavoring to it.

We had decided to do a double batch to make sure we had enough for the 2 tier cake as well as 150 cupcakes, so I weighed out 10 pounds of flour and 7 pounds of shortening and added it to the biggest mixer we have.

Our huge mixer:



And now for Kelsie's Blonde Moment of the day:

Once I had the flour and shortening in the mixing bowl Kace asked me to turn it on speed 1 and just mix the two together for 4 minutes. In the back of the room, we have the same mixer just smaller and the settings are backwards. The ball on the arm is facing away from the number, and in the front on the huge mixer, I guess it's the other way around. I set the mixer to what I thought was speed 1, which ended up actually being speed 4.


I pushed start and there was a huge cloud of flour that came flying out of the mixer and covered me from head to foot and made probably a circle that went at least 5 feet out from me on both sides. I looked up at Kace and Adrienne and just started laughing. After we all started laughing for a minute, I ran to get the broom and get it swept up before Rex came over and saw it and started teasing me about it.
As soon as I put the broom away, he came over. Good timing. :)

We ended up getting all the cakes baked, and the lemon cake was delicious! We packaged it all up and put it into the freezer to wait until next week when we assemble them.

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