Royal Baby Shower Cake

I recently finished up my first class at the CIA on the other side of my externship, Confectionery Arts. It's a class that I've been looking forward too since I started pastry school because of the chance to experiment with cake decorating mediums I might not use on my own like chocolate, pulled sugar, and the royal icing string work featured on today's cake:

This is a dummy cake that was a partner build, and I worked on it over the course of two classes with my teammate Emma. The design was assigned to us by our chef and we made all the decorating elements by hand. It's covered in light blue rolled fondant and the darker blue pieces coming off of the sides are made from gum paste. All of the white on the cake is Royal Icing. Because of our color choices I thought it ended up looking a bit like it belonged as a centerpiece to a swanky shower for a new mama-to-be!

Royal icing is the type of decorating medium that is a jack of all trades. It can be used as a rock hard drying glue, a paint to embellish cakes and fill in stencils, or delicately piped strings suspended in air as seen on this cake here. String work is a very old school technique for cake decorating but it's something that I've always wanted to try my hand at. Royal icing strings are a tedious business, but I think it is a gorgeous way to embellish a cake. Let's get a close up on those strings:

My teammate Emma also made this sweet sugar sculpture (pun intended) to sit a top this beauty while I went a little cross-eyed dropping all of those strings. 

Our result was definitely a style much different from the type of cakes I normally do, but so delicate and beautiful. I will definitely use Royal icing as a medium for wedding cakes again, especially lace or detailed piping. 

Sculpting with Sugar

This week I have a new sugar showpiece to share here that I made in my Confectionery Arts class. Similar to a chocolate sculpture, a sugar sculpture doesn't have much purpose in life except to sit there and look gorgeous. Rough life. Although it is 100% edible, it would taste like a lollipop without flavor and not in a very good way. So just feast your eyes with this one, but sugar sculptures are a beautiful way to top off a wedding cake or adorn a table centerpiece. They can also be preserved for as long as you can keep them away from their evil enemy, humidity.

This piece is made from a combination of sugar decoration methods. The leaves, bow and roses are made from pulling cooked sugar, the hearts are made from blowing sugar, and the whole thing sits on a poured sugar base. Pulling sugar gives it an iridescent, shiny finish and glass-like consistency. The hearts are actually completely hollow and were shaped by hand.

The rose petals and bow loops are each made individually and then attached by melting the ends over an open flame and sticking together. 

In the same way as chocolate, you can make just about anything out of sugar using different methods of cooking and decorating.

It's hard to believe this piece was once just a mountain of granulated sugar!