Pastry Chef School: Cake Decorating and Coffee Cakes
This week in pastry school we decorated cakes with Laci Sandoval and baked coffee cakes.
This stunning two tier Geode Cake is the vanilla cake we assembled last week. The bottom tier is a dummy cake. Both are wrapped in purple marbled fondant.
How to make a Geode Cake?
- Prep the cake: Once the buttercream cake is chilled, cut out a crack the the size of about eighth the cake with a paring knife. Cover the new edges in buttercream and chill. Crumb coat with a thin layer of buttercream. Drape in rolled out fondant making sure the fondant sticks to the buttercream.
- Apply piping gel: get white rock candy to stick the the entire crack using piping gel and tweezers. Apply piping gel with brush. Leave a 1cm border without rock candy.
- Paint an ombre: choose a food color for the center and paint the central rock candy with it. Mix in a bit of kirsch/vodka to dilute and paint the layer around it. Repeat dilution and painting until painted all the way to the edge.
- Cover that last 1cm with white rock candy.
This Floral Buttercream cake has hundreds of intricate piping details I piped. How to make this cake:
- Color Buttercream: choose a palette. Mix in with your buttercream with a spoon and load piping bags. I went with five pastel colors.
- Pipe the big rosettes on top and along the sides.
- Pipe ever smaller rosettes
- Pipe ever smaller stars using the same piping tips
- Fill in the blanks with green tipped leafs.
Each tier of the geode cake was covered in marbled purple fondant. How to make marbled fondant:
- Knead white fondant with food colors until it’s the darkest colour of the marbling.
- Mix pieces of the darkest shade fondant with ever increasing quantities of white fondant to make a gradient of fondant colors.
3. Roll out all the gradients shades into snakes and combine to a single layer. fold and roll that out like you would do for any fondant.
This week we also made Dacquoise. We assembled those into small Dacquoise sandwiches with Ganache filling.
What’s a dacquoise? It’s just a french meringue that’s folded into with 4:2:2:1 ratio of 10x sugar: ground hazelnuts : ground almonds : ap flour. We then piped those into greased 3" ring mold, sprinkled with sliced almonds, dusted with powdered sugar and baked on 325°F for 20m.
This week we also made a bunch of coffee cakes. This Citrus Coffee Cake is just a creamed cake w/ lemon Meyer zest and sourcream. We then covered the cake in lemon meyer 2:1 syrup and candied Meyer lemon peel.
How to quick candy peel? Make a 2:1 simple syrup. Cut peel into thin <1mm strips. Blanche in different boiling water 3 times. On the final blanch, add citrus segments too and then remove the segment flesh from the skin. Candy the thinly sliced (and now-blanched) peel in the syrup for 1.5h-2h. Five minutes before the end add the citrus flesh.
This Chocolate Coffee cake looks beautiful and tastes great. It has this beautiful chocolate glaze poured on top that’s mostly 1:1 cream:chocolate with coffee liqueur, corn syrup, espresso powder and salt.
This week we made a bunch of different coffee cakes. All the batters are creamed cake mixtures with sour-cream, some had a “filling” between layers of cake, and some had a streusel on top.
What’s the difference between a crumble and a Streusel? German Streusel’s have more butter and are effectively shortbread cookie sprinkled on top of cakes. American Crumble topping have less butter and flour (compared to sugar); just enough to hold the crumble together.
Read more about my pastry adventures by reading about assembling the decorated cakes last week:
