Tag: sugar

Gum Paste

Now that I’ve finished my formal culinary education. I tried some short courses and one of them was gum paste. Gum paste, unlike fondant icing, it will harden out completely. I learned so many different techniques on how to shape so many different things. It was really interesting but patience is needed to make these. I was asked to choose one animation character that I wanted to make and I chose Tangled (or Rapunzel). The rest of people in the class chose different animation characters but so many people wanted to make Frozen. So these are some photos of my Tangled cake.

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I finished this in 6 days with the help of my teacher, Yongki Gunawan. He is amazingly talented. He also has a lot of experiences and I couldn’t tell you how inspired I was to hear his story. Google his name and you could find him everywhere. I’ll show you some other cakes that the other students made.

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Sugar Works

First of all, sorry for not posting for about a month. I’ve been really busy, so I’m going to post my last lesson in my patisserie course today.

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It was an interesting sugar week, last week of may. This piece was made of pastillage, 100% sugar which has been coloured. Pastillage is made of powdered gelatine, water, glucose, icing sugar and corn flour. The flexibility is similar with marzipan or fondant icing, but if it’s left uncovered for too long, it’s going to become hard and keep its shape.

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The 2nd sugar product is a fruit basket. This is the most frustrating sugar work that I’ve done. I used the classic sugar recipe and casting sugar recipe. Blowing the sugar to shape it into the desired shapes might be the most difficult part but it got easier as you did it and I honestly felt like it was the easiest job to do by the end of the lesson. HOWEVER, when I did the assembling, it was easy at first but when I started to assemble all the pieces together, the side of the sugar basket started to crack and fell into big pieces. Everything went really well until the assembling part. I was really really upset, but still it was a wonderful experience.

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The 3rd product of sugar work is my first ever sugar sculpture which is the most amazing lesson ever. The sugar used for casting was isomalt. The flower and ribbon were made using the similar method – pulling. The most difficult part for me is to keep the petals of the flower thin. The sugar was so hot that it was a really painful job to work with them, but I did it anyway and finished it. Really amazing experience indeed. Thank you Chef Sebastien.

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