Cake Making Lesson Stage 1 - Lesson 2

Last Saturday was our second lesson for the Cake Making Stage 1 course. This week, my partner and I were not as unluckily as our first lesson. Well, at least we didn't break any bowl, and our cakes rose beautifully.

In Lesson 2 , we were taught to make 3 different flavours of chiffon cakes. Namely banana chiffon, citric chiffon and the pandan chiffon. At the end of the lesson, we were taught how to glaze and decorate the citric chiffon with a orange glaze made of jelly powder, orange juice and some colouring. The trick to have the glaze look beautiful and smooth was to pour the glaze quickly onto the cake before it hardens and DO NOT use any utensils to try to smoothen the glaze or else the glaze will turn drastically ugly if you do not do it fast enough.

My partner and I could proudly say that our glaze is one of the nicer looking ones out of the many groups in our class. Though I already have some basic knowledge on making chiffon but I was surprised that there were some secrets in making a good chiffon that I wasn't aware of. No wonder my chiffon sometimes turn out good and sometimes turn out not so light and fluffy.

This Cake Making Stage 1 course is a very popular course at the school and is fully booked for the subsequent months up till the November class. Can you imagine that!

I suddenly remembered that I had once met a lady in one of my classes previously who had critised that the courses held at BITC which stands for Baking Industry Training Centre was better. And how she determined that it was better was because the school didn't weigh and prepare the ingredients ahead for the students while at Creative Culinaire, the ingredients would usually be weighed for us before the start of the class.

I didn't share the same thoughts as this lady as I wonder why would I want to be paying $340 for 4 lessons just to spend 1/2 the time rushing around with the other classmates to weight out the ingredients for the lesson. So what if we attain the skill of weighing each item perfectly but yet not able to use the correct skill and technique to bake a good cake. I would think the skill and techniques are more difficult to master than the skill of being able to weigh out ingredients accurately. Don't you think so?