Happy Birthday Cake

This is Chef's cake.

The cake is devils food with a poured white chocolate ganache which started out as Italian Butter Cream. Pouring a glaze on a cake is quite a trick. Everything must be the right temperature. After you rapidly pour the glaze on you tip the cake to get the excess glaze on the top of the cake to slide off. If the glaze is too cold, it will ripple and leave ridges down the back side of the cake.

The rose, leaves, and Happy Birthday plaque are made from white modeling chocolate. That is some interesting stuff too. When it is warm, it is pliable and a little sticky. We roll it out with cornstarch rather than powdered sugar. When it is cold, it as hard as a rock. Chef Jake told us to pound it into smaller pieces and then massage them until they are warm and pliable and will stick together. This created quite a racket in the class room. One of the other students decided to wrap his lump in chef wrap (aka Saran wrap) and put it in his pocket until after lunch. I found out that the process works. I have no idea what my Safety and Sanitation teacher would say about this practice. Out in the real world there would not be time to use this warming process.

Invariably someone walks through our kitchen and says "I love this class. Someone is always having a birthday.".

This is my cake. I am happy I finished it at home during my winter break. It is less than perfect, but I learned something. I need the lettering for a competency so will make the scroll again with better lettering. I also need a modeling chocolate rose with 3 rows of petals rather than 1 as I did here.

If I scrape the frosting off this the kids will probably eat it since it is a devils food cake and I put a chocolate filling in it.