November « 2009 « Cutie Cake Café

22Nov/090

Food & Cute – Two of My Favorite Things

One of my favorite things about this season is that Blue Bell starts selling their amazingly delicious peppermint ice cream. It is, without a doubt, my favorite ice cream of all time. And doesn't it look pretty in that adorable little penguin cup I got at Target?!

I also found those super cute kawaii food stickers at Borders today and couldn't pass them up! ^_^

In other news, I was busy making dinosaurs and snails out of gum paste during my make-up class this week (while the rest of the class was making flowers). It was pretty fun. The dinosaur's tail broke off, but here's a picture of my little snail!

Tagged as: cups, gum paste, ice cream, kawaii No Comments

15Nov/090

For Fun & Practice

This past week I went to class not only during nights like usual, but also two days during the morning classes. The morning class was working on sugar this week, so I got to practice with that some more. In the beginning, I didn't really like working with sugar (it's hot and finicky), but now that I've got the hang of it, I'm really starting to enjoy it. On Thursday, my instructor did a demo on how to make a bird with sugar, so I made one too! I followed his general demos, but changed things up a bit to suit my tastes. Here's the results:

And in my normal (night) class, when we finished up with the dessert buffet, my teacher made us practice our piping (again). This time I decided to try and appeal to what they really want us to do (instead of something I find more fun, like my mermaid cake). My teacher was pleased. I actually think my piping is getting a lot better. I took a picture for later reference when we have to make a cake to go on top of our croquembouches in a couple weeks.

Tagged as: pulled sugar, royal icing No Comments

13Nov/091

Petit Fors and Custard Cups

This week at school has been super busy. We did a dessert buffet for the Open House on Thursday night, so each of us had to create two mini desserts for the buffet. We had to consider color, shape, flavor, texture, volume, warm/cold, etc.

My two initial ideas were these (click to view them bigger):

The results? Well, I didn't realize just HOW small they had to be, so my idea for the Mayan Chocolate cakes had to be scaled down a bit more than I wanted. I omitted the chantilly cream in the center.My joconde biscuit turned out lighter in color than I intended, so I had to change from a chocolate mousse on top to a bavarian cream so that the colors matched better. Also, the pecans in the ganache were way too big, so they screwed up the uniformity of my display. Argh. I also wanted to make blue chocolate decorations for the tops, but I couldn't get the color I wanted, so I went with dark chocolate instead. My instructor chastised me for using blue, because the French say that the color on the outside needs to indicate the flavor on the inside. Bah! I still think the colors turned out gorgeous.

The other dessert turned out pretty much as I had planned. I decided against the brittle, however, because I didn't want it to get soggy and melt into the custards while they sat in the fridge between Tuesday and Thursday night. I also didn't get to put a cherry jelly inside the chocolate straws - it just wasn't feasible since they're so delicate. These were absolutely delicious, but the lime flavor kind of overpowered the coconut. Boo.