Knife and Piping Skills

We started off tracing chocolate filagree. Chef melted the chocolate for us. The chocolate we used is low in sugar and waxy. It tastes like bad Halloween candy. We learned how to make coronets - a piping bag made of wax paper. It's pretty hard. I've got it down to where I can make one that works, but it's not as tight or small as they would like it to be. My filagree came out pretty good. When it came to writing Happy Birthday, Congratulations, and Happy Aniversary, I suck. I write way too big and I haven't wrote in cursive since I was forced to back in Jr. high.

Buttercream is gross. More specifically, American buttercream is gross. It mostly consist of shortening and powdered sugar. It's had to get off your skin and stinks something aweful if it's old. Chef made a big batch at the start of class and we reused it everyday. Towards the end it was overworked and occasionally, I would find hair and chocolate pieces in it. We made different shapes - shells, beads/pearls, and rosettes. I suck at all of those, but I'm getitng better at it.

I'm going to have lot of practice since for Cakes I have to get 100 perfect of each checked off to pass the class. Also, we have to have 25 perfect Happy Birthday, Congrats, and Happy Annivesary in chocolate. And a ton of other stuff.

The last part of this class is slicing fruit. We chopped apples, sliced pears, chiffonade mint, fanned strawberries, and supreme oranges. It was the first time I've ever tasted or made a supremed orange. It's a good way to eat oranges if it's not sweet. Getting rid of the membrane gets rid of most of the bitterness.