And onto candies

This week was mainly all about our wedding cakes, though we did start candies today.  The candies were yummy!  We made chocolate caramels, peanut brittle, and pralines.  I really liked the pralines more than I expected and now see why Chef was offering to take our extras off our hands!  I have had them before but remember them being a lot harder of a candy, but ours came out fairly soft.  We are going to be doing a candy platter next Wednesday on the last day of class, so we are keeping 7 of each type of candy for that.  But there is of course plenty extra to take home!  :)

So here is a picture of our actual work kitchen.  I had some pictures before of the service kitchen where we plate desserts for the restaurant, but this is the main kitchen we do our work in.  I took it after class so it is all clean and pretty looking, but usually it is much messier as we are working with all the flour and such.  Daniel and Ashely are working on their wedding cakes in the picture.  Each set of tables is a different group.  The closest tables (by where I am taking the picture) are the service group and behind where I am are the large ingredient bins of flour and sugar and such.  The empty group of tables are the bread group, with the ovens off the picture to the right.  Daniel is working on his cake at the prep group tables, and Ashley is working on her cake at the furthest back tables, which are the service group tables.

And on to my wedding cake!  So here is the start of the cake.  I first covered all three foam rounds with a colored fondant and a pink band at the bottom.  Then I decided to make these pink loops (which Chef says are bunny ears, but they are not!) and I am going to fill them with royal icing lace.  My colors had originally all been bright, bright, BRIGHT colors, buuuuuut over the span of one day, the (little) sunlight in the room they're kept in bleached them somewhat, but the blue seems to have made it through fairly bright the best so far.  If you look closely, you can see the purple one has spots of darker purple - the original shade - in this picture.  The purple tier was the one hardest hit and most faded.  It still looks pretty, but definitely faded from the original color.

This is the cage where we keep our project items (eg. petit fours, cakes, candies) so hopefully no other students will bump into them accidentally.  Unfortunately, now my cake has the tan lines of the bars on the cage from the fading in the sun, so now I keep mine by the emergency exit door next to a solid wall where not much sun hits it.  I like to say my cake is a vampire now!  :)

I also made a large egg carton full of little flowers that are supposed to look like lily-of-the-valley flowers.  I know they're a poisonous flower, but they're super pretty and I just didn't think big roses would look good on this cake design.  Originally I was going to do johnny-jump-ups or lilacs, but we didn't have an ingredient in to make gum paste and the sugar paste (fondant) just wasn't working for them.  I am happy with the lily-of-the-valley though!  Now just where to put them on the cake at...  

Well, tomorrow will be spent filling in all the non-bunny ears with lace and doing my drop lace too.  A long day probably, but it will be closer to being done!  :)