The Culinary Tales Week 23: Fun with Fondant
There was so much more to baking that there wasn’t enough time to cover every topic. That is why there’s a whole separate patisserie program. The twelve weeks of baking education we were getting was meant to give us a solid base, to be useful in all parts of the kitchen.
There was no time to learn sugar artistry; instead we got to watch a video featuring Ewald Notter, world-renowned pastry artist who is banned from competition because he is *that* good. (Once, during an international compeition, he turned in three entries and swept the medals; gold, silver and bronze all went to him.) Now, he runs a pastry school in Florida and goes on teaching tours. I was dying to attend one of his classes. Not because I like sugar artistry but the man is dreamy. Except he sounds a bit like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Eh, no one´s perfect.
We did get to work with fondant, though. First up were petit fours, which is big with grandmothers and the afternoon-tea crowd. Petit fours are tiny bite-sized cakes, and the ones we made were two layers of sponge cake in between which we filled with raspberry or apricot jam. The top had a thin layer of marzipan (a sweetened almond paste) and then the whole thing was coated with poured fondant.
Truthfully, I find fondant gross – it´s overly sweet and leaves a gross sticky feeling in your mouth (hey now, keep that dirty joke to yourself.)
To make fondant coating (we could use the word “couverture” here since anything French sounds fancier), we mixed hot water with the fondant until reaching the proper consistency: when it was liquid enough to be pourable. We had to use gloves to knead, massage and mix because the glob got painfully sticky.
The other use for fondant is for cake decoration, and this was probably the best fun I had in baking. Our big assignment was to create a theme celebration cake. In previous years, the class was required to make wedding cakes, but now, we can do anything we want. I chose to do a wedding cake anyway, because how many chances would I get to do a wedding cake?
I designed an all-white, three-tiered wedding cake, with a braided twine for borders and “ribbons” draped around it. It was topped with a great big bow. And it was all made with fondant.
Fondant is basically edible play-doh. Then you mold and roll it like you did when you were a kid playing with clay, except without the soiled pants and snotty, runny noses.
To work with fondant is to first roll it out until it´s about an eighth of an inch thick before wrapping the cake with it. After that, you go to town. Artistically speaking.
I chose to keep it simple because (a) that´s my style, and (b) knowing my limits with time and artistry, I wanted a design that could realistically finish. We only had two days to get this done and I was no Ace of Cakes.
Many classmates came up with some fantastic designs, my favorite of which was Sweet Momma who, surprise!, wowed us with a Ratatouille-themed cake.
Even Annoying Girl surprised us with a whimsical take on Finding Nemo, my second-favorite cake.
There was impressive artistry in that lab and I almost wished that I went with the whimsical instead of the basic. My cake was plain, classy you could say, though unimaginative in retrospect. But it got me thinking that wedding cake-making was something that I was open to doing professionally.
There’s certainly profit in it. One of my favorite parts of “Father of the Bride” was the cake-shock scene hilariously played out by Steve Martin and Martin Short.
“A cake, Franck, is made with flour and water. My first car didn´t cost that much.”
“(Snickers) Welcome to the 90s, Mr. Bawnks.”
I can’t believe that was more than 20 years ago. Thousand-dollar cakes was eye-opening back then. No one bats an eye nowadays. It is an unnerving sign of the times that people are willing to pay big bucks for something made up of flour and water, especially if it’s on trend. I’ve paid a lot of money for baked goods that look like a million dollars but taste like shit. Yet that doesn’t seem to bother a lot of folks. Then again, style has been winning over substance for years. Maybe that´s why I´m still single.
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