Day 5 and it was all about Royal Icing.
I don’t work that much with royal icing as I think that cakes with buttercream and sugarpaste coverings are more common these days. Also lettering on cakes tend to be with the use of cutters, moulds or even fabulous tools like Clickstix.
I only really use royal icing to pipe round the edge of cakes, to give a shell border and that is about it... I used to make royal icing using egg whites, but ever since setting up Cake Masters, I was aware of various regulations regarding uncooked egg in food items. Instead of using egg whites to make royal icing I would use meri-white meringue powder. I learnt in class today that Wilton Colour Flow (or albumen) is much better to use to get a stronger royal icing which you can make amazing structures with. I found that with my royal icing made with meri-white, my structures would quite annoyingly break and were quite brittle.
Tony, our tutor showed us how to mix up royal icing using Wilton colour flow, icing sugar and water as well as showing us how to make our own piping bags from parchment paper- I am officially an extraordinaire in this department as I made about 20 cones today!
After filling our piping bags we started with straight lines and attempts at writing.
We then used the wilton nozzles 44 and 43 to create these gorgeous scrolls. Today’s class took me back in the day when my royal icing birthday cake would have a very fancy royal iced, hand piped border- I today was creating these sorts of designs myself and thoroughly enjoyed myself.
The next part of the lesson was to cover a board and have a go at piping an “S” and “C” scroll and a border, it was all a bit wobbly!
Next we moved onto something more challenging- a royal icing collar! Have you seen these before? Very old school- but amazing engineering!
We started by piping very thin lines and then dots on those lines- after carefully doing this on top of acetate on a template, we moved to flooding.
I was quite nervous about this part, and thought that I might over flood my collar. I was very careful and managed to fill it all in perfectly.
I will take a picture of the collar, and will let you know if I can get it off in one piece once dry- I am very used to my pieces breaking, so have my fingers crossed that it all goes well tomorrow.
Just as a note, although I don’t think I will be using much of what I learnt today on actual cakes that I make, I thoroughly enjoyed myself, as most of today was very new to me J
Look forward to seeing how my collar is doing when I get in tomorrow morning- yes there is a Saturday class -no rest for the wicked!
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