Craftsy Class Review: Decadent Chocolate Cakes

I decided to review this class on Decadent Chocolate Cakes because it's holiday baking time, and because people need to put the cake mix boxes down and learn how to bake a cake from scratch, for pete's sake. If you need a baking refresher, or you just need to learn how to bake a cake without Betty Crocker helping you, this class is for you.

The instructor for the class is Alice Medrich, who has written multiple cookbooks on the topic of desserts and chocolate, and who has been given numerous awards as well. So she knows what she's doing.

The benefit of this class is that it goes over everything instead of just telling you to do it. So when she says fold the egg whites, she shows you how to do that. When she says mix the wet and dry ingredients, you see how to do that the right way. Yes, there is a right way.

There's also a segment about making chocolate fans, so for people who already know how to bake, there's enough info there to learn something. The sections on chocolate itself are informational, and would be good for people who aren't familiar with tempering and melting chocolate to learn from.

The class provides recipes and shows the techniques to make three different cakes, the Queen of Sheba, a Chocolate Raspberry Ruffle cake, and the "Ultimate Birthday Cake." That would be devil's food, apparently. The raspberry cake involves a chocolate genoise, so she goes through the process of making a genoise. Which is a good thing to know. For anyone who wants to call themselves a baker.

The Queen of Sheba also involves a glaze, so there's a section on making a ganache and glazing the cake with it, then using white chocolate to decorate it.

The final review:

Skill level: Beginner to Intermediate
Equipment you have to have: Baking supplies
Sleep-inducing level: Not so bad, but looking at chocolate keeps me alert.
What it assumes you already know: Not very much, it's pretty thorough with the step-by-step.
Unnecessary Difficulty Level Of Methods Demonstrated: Not much
Annoying Host Habits: Not a lot, she's very comfortable teaching.
Level of Helpful Hints Learned: For a beginning scratch baker this would be a wealth of information. For someone who knows how to bake but isn't really familiar with "chocolate theory" it would also be good. If you're an experienced baker and chocolatier, you won't get much out of it.

Go here for the class: Decadent Chocolate Cakes


Kara Buntin owns A Cake To Remember LLC, custom wedding cakes in Richmond VA, and is a Craftsy affiliate.

Pouring Beer Mug Groom's Cake

This groom's cake was a chocolate stout cake with beer buttercream. The cake itself was made out of four 6" rounds, and I covered it with fondant then made the flat side effect by pressing two fondant smoothers against it to flatten it out. The handle was made of isomalt, as was the beer pouring from the can above the cake.

 Kara Buntin owns A Cake To Remember LLC, custom wedding cakes in Richmond VA

It's Rant Time-- Tutorial Hell

So I was thinking about writing this for quite a while, but had been holding off on how to best word it...Then a conversation with some other decorators made me realize that what was bothering me was more than one issue, it's a two-headed monster. It's a matter of too many tutorials, selling them, and the issue of should you be selling them all tied up in a messy little ball.

Let me first say that I've been doing cakes for almost twenty years. A lot has changed in that time, and every time there's an influx of people to cake decorating, they always think they know the "right" way to do things. (The round edges vs sharp edges debate comes to mind...) So if using loads of tutorials is your "right way" of doing things, don't get mad, just keep an open mind and read on. And no, this is not aimed at anyone in particular, it's just my random thoughts, so don't take it personally.

All right then...please take a step back and ask yourself...Do I really need a tutorial for EVERYTHING?  I dare you to go on facebook, look at any news feed that has a decent number of bakers in it, and see how many people mention tutorials for various things. People have become so accustomed to it they don't realize that it isn't necessary to have written instructions for everything.

There's nothing wrong with tutorials in general, but do you really need a tutorial for how to make something like a wreath? (Not to pick on wreaths, that's just what came to mind.) Can't you just look at it and say "well, that looks like a bunch of leaves stuck onto a circle." All it takes is a little effort and I would THINK that most people would be able to figure something simple like that out on their own.

I don't mind doing basic how-tos on things, there are plenty on this blog and on youtube. But if you notice, I don't take a detailed photo of each step of the process. I assume that you're all smart enough to fill in some of the basic blanks. If there's something that I keep getting questions about I'll do a quick video or a short tutorial-type blog post, but I don't see the need to write out a ten page lesson on really basic stuff. I'm also not going to bother doing something that's already on youtube multiple times unless I have a different take on it.

On the other hand, when I do a tutorial to sell it's pretty thorough, and it's always something that encompasses some novelty. I won't do a tutorial to sell that shows you how to put leaves on a wreath. If I did do something like that, it would be free on my blog, or a two-minute video on youtube.

The peony tutorial that I sell online is about 40 pages long, includes four different ways to make the flowers, and also includes information about where to get materials, how to wire petals, etc etc. I'm not going to slap something together and think that it's worthy of being sold to people. I've had a lot of people ask if I sell tutorials on this or that, and it's usually something that makes me think I'd be ripping them off by taking money for it.

Which brings me to the other point...There are too many tutorials being sold that aren't worth the paper they're written on (or the code they're written with). If you pay for a tutorial on how to stick polka dots on a cake you need to rethink that expenditure.

There are also too many tutorials being made by people who really have no business trying to teach anyone anything. When I see someone advertising that they're selling a tutorial on a cake, and the picture of the cake looks like my dog made it, they probably shouldn't be selling it. When someone posts a video showing them cutting out pieces of sticky, fingerprint-covered fondant with a butter knife they should probably put the camera down. If someone's video shows them licking their fingers, no, just no.

There's a very, very low bar to get into the cake business these days. That mediocrity is even more mediocre when it comes to tutorials in general, and selling them specifically. There are plenty of people who are willing to take your money, and because decorators have gotten lazy, and are used to a tutorial for everything, they'll have no problem selling them. With the proliferation of online "cake schools" the market is starting to get saturated, and everyone wants a piece of the action. But that just ends up lowering standards, which is what I see happening in the cake world now.

So my plea for sanity is simply this...First, if you sell tutorials, please, only sell things that took you more than an hour to put together. (Seriously, a good tutorial takes a LOT longer than that.) Only sell things that you're GOOD at. Only sell things that gives new information to the person who's going to buy it, whether that's showing a different way that you do something or by adding more information than you need to.

Second, if you watch a lot of tutorials, do yourself a favor and try to figure it out yourself first. Some things can't be taught without trial and error, and yes, that means that you'll actually have to do some work and be CREATIVE. I think you'll be surprised at how much fun it is to figure out something yourself, and the sense of accomplishment you get when you're not just following instructions. If you want to learn how to make a flower, go look at the flower itself, not a tutorial. You might actually find a different way to do things that works better for you if you're not copying someone else's methods. Because if you really think you're an artist, you can't rely on paint by numbers all the time.

Let me know if you disagree. Then go look at my youtube channel and decide if you think I should make complicated tutorials on anything on it. I think the videos are short, sweet, and priced right (free to watch). But I'm sure I could add some filler and sell them if you really want to pay me to!


Kara Buntin owns A Cake To Remember LLC, custom wedding cakes in Richmond VA

How To Make Plaid Using Patterned Pastes

There was a question on an online cake forum recently about how to make a plaid bow with fondant. Since I'd just done the article about patterned pastes, I thought I'd do a demo on how to make it that way.

It's pretty easy to do plaids and tartans if you paint on fondant, but that can give you muddy colors. The cake in the photo here was done with candy clay strips applied to a flat piece, and food coloring. The downside to doing it like this is that you end up with a raised pattern.

To get the pattern flat, you need to cut pieces out and add them back in in different colors, like marquetry. (If you want to see some amazing marquetry, check out this blog: http://surfacefragments.blogspot.com/2010/07/masterpieces-of-marquetry.html) This isn't nearly as complicated as that, it's more like quilting.

With quilting, you make a patterned block and repeat it over and over, sometimes turning the pattern in different directions. But it's the same pattern. With tartans and plaids, the basic pattern is repeated and you just have to figure out where the repeats happen.

The pattern that the question was about was this photo of bow ties, and I decided to use the bottom pattern because it had the best repeats to demonstrate.

The white bar has a little notched thing going on in the dark part inside it, and I opted to simplify that to make this easier on myself. If you want to recreate a small detail like that it's easy, using the basic method I'm going to show here.

So the repeats in this pattern are the white bar with the dark line inside, and the red section with blue stripes in between. I started with the red part and made a large block of red, then added some gum glue to it and layered blue and red strips to the top to form the stripes. I wrapped that up and let it sit for a few hours to give it time to stick to itself.

 

 

 

 

I then did the white stripe section with the blue stripe inside by layering those pieces. Same process, use gum glue to attach them and wrap them up to sit for a while.

 

 

For this, try to make the strip about the width that the finished stripe will be so that you don't have to press on it to flatten it out too much. That will distort the stripe, and you want to avoid that.

 

Next, roll out a piece of backing paste to put the patterned pieces on. Get this as thin as you can but not paper thin. If you put it through a pasta roller, I'd do it to about a 4 on the Kitchenaid.

 

 

Start cutting thin blocks of the red block off. Try to get them as thin as you can but thick enough that they hold their shape. 1/16- 1/8" is good. To cut the block, I use a blade that's designed for polymer clay. It's basically a long razor blade, and it makes a good clean cut without pulling on the paste and distorting the pattern.

 

Using gum glue, put these strips on the backing paste in a diagonal pattern. Trim the edges off and use the trimmed pieces to fill in any gaps at the base of the backing paste.

 

 

Keep lining up the strips until the whole piece of backing paste is covered. Trim the edges. I wasn't making much effort to keep the stripes even in this example, but if you're doing this for an actual cake you should try to keep the stripes as straight as possible while you're placing them on the backing paste.

 

 

Next step...Remove a strip of the pattern so that you can use your marquetry techniques to insert the new color into the pattern. I looked at the places where the strips joined and used the seams as the spot to cut. Then I cut pieces out so that the red would be square-shaped between the white sections.

 

I used the straight blade again to mark the cuts, then removed the paste with a spatula. Put the spatula blade straight down into the cut, then flip the paste out. 







 

So now you have little ditches where the white strips will go. Cut them off of the block the same way you did the red, then place them in the gaps. be really careful here, you really have to make an effort to keep the stripes straight. You could also do this by cutting individual stripes and inserting them one by one, but they would be hard to handle because of how thin they are.

 

(As an aside, you COULD do this entire thing by rolling out thin pieces, cutting them and layering them one by one on the backing paste. The downside to that is that the thin stripes would be more likely to stretch than if you do it using the block to start.)

 



 

 

If you need to use some more gum glue in the ditches, do so that the stripes stick well. You can press them down with a rolling pin, but don't roll it because that will stretch the stripes.

 

Cut a piece off of the end to be the center for the bow.

 Trim the piece so that it curves at the center like the tie in the photo.

 

 

 

You should be able to  pick the piece up and move it around without the pattern coming off. If it does come off you should stick it down with more gum glue. Wrapping it up and leaving it for a while would be good at this point.

 

When it's been sitting and sticking to itself for a while, fold the edges over to the center. I turned it over and used the other side for the front of the bow, adding the strip to the center and putting plastic wrap in the bow to hold the loops up to dry.

 

 



Trim off any rough edges that might have separated or just didn't adhere correctly.

 

Check the pattern carefully to press down any pieces that might have separated from the backing strip when the loops were folded over. Let the bow dry...

 

 

If you do this with candy clay make sure that the clay itself is soft and pliable. If it hardens up and dries out mid-process it can crack when you try to bend it.

 

Pay attention to the stripes, which I didn't do since this was for demonstration purposes only...If you need to straighten up the stripes you can usually just rub them slightly with your finger and it will push the color slightly in one direction or the other. When you put the stripes in the ditches they need to fit down inside the ditch completely...See the white stripe to the right of the center? It kind of stuck up out of the ditch, and I was too lazy to trim it down. But it looks too fat in the end, so now you see what will happen if you don't make sure everything fits!!!

 

That's the basic idea, though, without the precision...Add the precision and you can do some nice plaids that look like one continuous sheet of paste without seams or raised pieces.

 

 

Kara Buntin owns A Cake To Remember LLC, custom wedding cakes in Richmond VA

Stack of Books Wedding Cake

This was a wedding cake for a couple who had a history with the plays of Shakespeare. They wanted a stack of books that would represent some of the plays that meant a lot to them, and the top tier was an open book with a poem written on it.

 

 

 

Kara Buntin owns A Cake To Remember LLC, custom wedding cakes in Richmond VA