Day 60

Today was the end of the first half of Term 2.  This means I'm 3/4 of the way through the school part of the program.  I'm also whatever 3/4 of 2/3 is through the entire program. :-D  In less than a month I will be starting my externship at a bakery/restaurant somewhere in Portland.  Speaking of which, I have an interview set for a week from Saturday at Pix Patisserie (pixpatisserie.com) and I'm totally stoked!

Ok, so today everything was due at 5:15p.  We had to fill chocolates and make truffles and I had to finish my wedding cake.  I'll start with the chocolates.

You start by filling a mold with tempered chocolate and tapping on it to get all the air bubbles out.  Then it gets turned over and dumped back into the bowl of  chocolate so it leaves cavities.

Each cavity gets filled with filling.  We have hand-made fondant (peppermint), caramel that I made and truffle filling (raspberry-rum)

More tempered chocolate gets poured over them and then leveled to form the bottom.  After it's set, the temper should cause the chocolate to shrink a little and pull away from the mold.  The molds get tapped out onto parchment to remove the pieces

These are candied pecan clusters coated in dark chocolate

Here's everything, ready to be checked off.  Sadly, my fondant-filled chocolates didn't get checked off because too many of them broke on their way out of the mold.  Chef said I had a nice temper on the chocolate though and that everything came out well.  The balls in the middle are the raspberry-rum truffles

I spent the first hour or so of class finishing up my cake.  This morning I spent some time when I got home finishing the topper for the cake, the TARDIS light.

I ended up cutting the white bit down, I removed 2 columns from the original design to get to this point.  It's all just sugar paste and royal icing!

When I got it on the cake I realized that it was too tall and took off the bottom row so that it fit a little better

and then added one of my 5 flowers to the back of it in a tribute to Rose, my favorite of the companions

Here are some of my other flowers, just tried to do something alien looking

Sorry for the glare, my camera was having trouble focusing

This is one of my favorites, I think

The Dalek bumps on the bottom band came out great!  They're made out of the same sugar paste as the band and then painted with gold luster dust

The Time Lord sigil I made broke as I was packing it up...I decided it fit since the Time Lords were destroyed anyway so I used the crack to my advantage (sort of)

Here's the finished product, Adipose and all!

This was definitely a learning experience and there are certainly things I would do differently next time or if I had to do it over, but it was a lot of fun and I feel like I'm walking away with a good understanding of each product, their capabilities and their weak points.  Overall, I'm pretty happy with how the cake turned out!