Crazy Month!

its been a very busy month for us, well, me mostly since CH is always busy (or seem to be). I decided to take up some short course, little did I know what I'm in for.

It all started out with this:

Few months back, I tried to bake a blackforest cake for someone's birthday, not too bad, but the process was tedious for a rookie like me. Baking the cake was easy, then it comes to icing the cake - I bought ready-made whipped cream, which was a mistake - too stiff, and I had no prior experience with cake icing. No matter how much I scrape and spread there are bumps everywhere! I gave up, decided to cover the blemishes up with something.

So this course came along, and I thought, I should take it since its a good skill to have - I do envision myself becoming a lady boss in a cafe shop. I DO have dreams you know? So without much ado I took the course up, which consists of 4 sessions, once per week, 3 hours per session.

I realized I don't have the necessary tools, and I bought these:

Every week was very hectic for me. I have to prepare a cake and ice it before the class. Then we would do our decorations on the cake. All the preparation actually took days, as I had to bake the cake, frost it, freeze it overnight, then covered with 2nd layer of frost. And I had to make the icing, and flowers too.

My pre-mixed icing for the class:

It was so tiring. Though I enjoyed every minute of the lesson, I'm really glad it's over.

I didn't think the icing was tasty (too sweet) and my decoration skills were, er, basic, so I decided to practice on my cake board instead. So every week, I baked something to the class, did nothing to it, and brought it back. Both CH and I got to savor them. Yum!

For the last lesson, I decided to make something more challenging, and tasty. So I made a yellow butter cake, with chocolate frosting from my favorite chocolate brand.

Boy it was so good! It was a 8" cake, a bit too much for us, but CH thought he should be able to finish them. Wow.








We used the leftover chocolate as a fondue for fruits and cookies. It was finished in no time!
















My not-so-perfect decoration - I'm working on it, as the teacher says, it takes lots of practice to become pro at it. I'll be working on it! Promise!

Meanwhile, the cake is calling me from the fridge. *Drooling*

Update May4: I used this recipe for the cake, and this for the cream, which I adjusted the ingredient amount as I was using 8" pan:

100g semi-sweet chocolate (I used my favourite brand Ghiradelli bar!)

1/4 Cup Chocolate powder (I used Hershey's)

1/2 Cup milk

1/3 Cup butter, cut into pieces

1 3/4 Cup powdered sugar

1tsp Vanilla essence