Baking Project

Step 1

Get ready your marzipan and fruit cake. Knead the marzipan for a while if it is too hard.

Step 2

Roll your marzipan to the required thickness. I would say from 5 mm to 1 cm, depending on the critical illness state of your cake. If too much holes and bumps (too chronic), make the marzipan thicker to hide them.

Step 3

The whole cake must be covered with marzipan, including the bottom. Make a circle with a cake board. (Same size as the cake itself).

Step 4

Place the marzipan on top of the cake. Before that, brush the cake with piping gel or apricot glaze (acts as a glue).

Step 5

Put a cake board on top of the marzipan, and turn the cake upside down so that the marzipan is at the bottom. Then gently remove the cake board.

Step 6

This process is called ’stuffing’ (according to my teacher, lah). Since the cake is slightly domed, there are some gaps to fill. Just stuffed it with more marzipan.

Step 7

Now the cake is ready to receive the top layer of marzipan. Brush with piping gel.

Step 8

Roll a big round shape and cover the cake, the way you do with fondant.

Step 9

Use a fondant smoother to smooth the surface. The cake is ready to eat, or covered with fondant.

Thanks.

p/s : No hard feeling on the book cover ye, it’s just for fun.

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Today is the first day of the course. In UK, the course is run once a week, total of 5 weeks. So basically it’s a 5 days course. Here it is split into 3 weeks. I’m so tired but at the same time, excited to see what’s in store for tomorrow. Let me show you what I got today..

Loads of gadgets.. this is the best present in my whole life ! Okay, I know you’re a little bit jealous right now . Don’t be, I am poorer by RM3K due to this course. Anyway, all these equipments are PME brand. I already have some in my collection, but having extras wouldn’t hurt ! Plus I could lend it to my students during class.

There’s one book though, which I don’t think I want. So I am giving it away to one lucky reader.

I bought this book many months ago and the price was RM57.50 then.

So, anybody wants this book ? All you have to do is leave a comment to this post, don’t forget to include your email or link. Closing date is 8th Nov, this Saturday. Unfortunately I can open this to Malaysians only. The book will be posted to the lucky winner, chosen at random by using Random Integer Generator. The winner will be announce here.

More pics of the class at my Flickr. Take care.

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Beads made from isomalt

Today has been a wonderful day for me. I’m still tired, but excited to download all the pictures from the above event. ICES stands for International Cake Exploration Societe, and the Malaysian rep is our Miss Rosalind Chan (of ICCA, PJ). Here’s the brief description about ICES Day of Sharing :

West Meets East/ ICES Day of Sharing

Watching and learning from two renowned cake decorators. Ms Rosalind Chan and Mr Alex Tan See Fong demonstrating the latest techniques in cake decorating from the West and East.
Ms Rosalind Chan will be showing the method of creating ladies accessories like jewellery box, high heel shoes, necklaces, cosmetics, etc with the latest cake decorating tools. Masterchef Alex Tan will be showing his popular simple and fast yet interesting ways of creating cartoon character cakes from his latest book, Cartoon Cake Decorating.

So the day begin with Rosalind showing us a few new gadgets like moulds for shoes and swag, lace cutters, beadmaker and new designs using isomalt. Here’s her doing the demo.

The purse, shoes and jewelry, all from sugar.

ICCA is also selling moulds to make these beautiful babies, to be used with chocolate or tinted isomalt. Cute ya ?

You can check out ICCA shop in PJ, for cake decorating equipments - Wilton, FMM, Patchwork cutters and some Canadian brands.

After lunch, Chef Alex Tan showed us about 7 cake demos using his product. He is quite funny and the shy-shy type . Rosalind and us had so much fun teasing him, since he’s the only guy there and the rest are all girls/ makcik-makcik.. Mainly his technique is colouring with the airbrush and using lots of compound chocolate.

(looks like a phone to me )

How to use this mini airbrush ? Chef said - on the machine, put some oil-based colouring in the round cup, and then press that little button thingy. When you need to change colours, just wash the round cup and put in new colour. Sounds easy (in theory la..) . 

Chef at work :

Yummy chocolates..

Cartoon characters made using Tan See Fong’s moulds. Easy to use, just melt the chocolate, pour it in the mould and put in the fridge for a while.

The completed cakes. Alex was using non-dairy whipping cream to frost all these cakes.

Some sample of flowers using their piping tips and air brushed.

Well, all in all I enjoyed the event and learn a few new things. Hopefully I’ll be able to attend more of ICES Day of sharing. Oh yes, I also met Miss Jo, who created MyCakeDecoClub. (Check out the link !) Happy caking .

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My brother called yesterday and announce that he’s taking us for lunch to celebrate my dad’s belated birthday. I had always wanted to make a nice birthday cake for my dad, but was waiting for him to come to KL from our hometown in Perak. My dad had just arrived in KL yesterday. Due to the short notice I only had time to bake some cupcakes and decorated with whatever fondant / gumpaste decorations I had in store. And thank God I’ve also made extra icing the day before, so that really saved me some time.

Here are the cupcakes, it says ‘Happy Birthday Wan’. ‘Wan’ means grandfather in Malay language. My daughter and nieces call my dad ‘Wan’.

Somehow, I think the decoration looked a bit too much, too crowded..

Anyway, since I made the basket weave pattern, for those of you who don’t know, here’s my note on how to create one. The tip I’m using is this :

The rope border was made using a star tube. I brush the inside of my piping bag with yellow colouring and then fill it with white icing. When I press out the icing, it will have a tinge of yellow.

Hope this information is useful.

Ok, take care. Tara luv !

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