Pumpkin and Spice

I'm a big fan of the blog Cake Wrecks. The blog focuses on hilariously hideous professional cakes gone wrong. Ugly decorations, weird airbrushing, strange spelling mistakes... it's all there, and it's all so, so funny. It is everything I (as a professional baker) aspire not to be!

Every Sunday, though, Jen (the bloggeress), runs a feature called "Sweet Sundays". Every Sweet Sunday has a theme, and features beautiful, well-done cakes that reflect that theme. This week's theme was "The Undead Wed"- and the Goth wedding cake I made for my final project in my advanced cakes class was one of the featured cakes!

I realized I have some random little tidbits  that I keep forgetting to tack onto other blog posts.

I'm very excited to tell you that I have finished up my externship hours (as far as the school is concerned), all my paperwork is turned in, and I am officially graduated (and with a 4.0 at that!) The ceremony is in June- since it's a rolling admission schedule, they do two graduation ceremonies per year. I doubt I'm going to go... I'll probably just pick up my diploma and accessories (we get a new chef's coat, a tall chef's hat, and a Le Cordon Bleu medal upon graduation) at the school and forgo the ceremony.

So, while I was on vacation, I received an award from Blonde Duck over at A Duck in Her Pond. She's really fabulous and if you haven't been to her blog before, go- she's funny, adventurous, a wonderful writer, and have I mentioned she's funny? In addition to quirky food posts, she also posts original short stories that are real page turners... or would be if computers had pages you could turn. I was so flattered that she'd think of little ol' me to give an award!

In turn, I get to pass it along to five fabulous bloggers!

I just finished my very last kitchen class of pastry school! I'm obviously excited, as it means I'm almost done with school, but it's a little bittersweet because the kitchen classes are the best part of school. All I have left are some classroom classes- cost control, computers, a wine class amongst others. I do have a three week break from classes in September, as some of my credits from my BFA transferred and I don't have to take English.
I thought in honor of my final kitchen class I'd post a little retrospective of some of my favorite pictures and projects that haven't yet appeared on the blog.

This was a project from a cake class. We had to make a cake with our choice of cake flavor, filling and icing. Mine was based on an Arnold Palmer- a beverage named after the golfer consisting of half iced tea and half lemonade. This is an iced tea chiffon cake with lemon curd filling, sweet tea syrup and lemon-tea italian butter cream. The lemon/mint garnish is supposed to recall a glass of iced tea. It was delish, and very summery.

Well, last week while the site was down, I had my final week of chocolate and sugar class. We were on the sugar module, which was a very different experience. I've made edible sugar- candies, caramel, spun sugar, but this was structural sugar. This was statues and objects modeled out of hot sugar...

Sugar sculpture isn't really home baker territory. It's pastry chef territory. Not trying to be snooty, but given that it's labor intensive, requires a good deal of specialized equipment and that the final product is only edible in the very most technical sense of the word, it's not really something one would bother with at home. It's also really hot. Really, really hot.