The highs -
My ever favourite scones, in every imaginable flavour (candied lemon and poppyseed, lemon and currant, almond and apricot, cranberry and white chocolate.....)
The crowd pleaser - carrot cake with cream cheese icing
The American staple - lemon pound cake
And cake decorating 101 - we had so much fun as Frank instructed us in daily piping practice.....I'll tell you upfront that the photos below are his demonstrations. It may be some weeks before mine make it onto the blog!
See here Frank's immaculately decorated chocolate hazelnut dacquoise with praline buttercream (yumbo by the way - inside and out)
And here his lemon raspberry sponge
And finally his celebration cake demo - "just copy that" he instructed us. Sure Frank. In about a million years!
Alas, sugar highs turned into sugar lows though when we turned to high ratio cakes, made with partially and fully hydrogenated shortening (a heart killer).
For those not in the know, shortening is big business in America with about six times the annual consumption of butter. Shortening was conceived about 100 years ago as a cheap alternative to butter. It is solid at room temperature, requires no refrigeration and lasts for ever. As an example, we kept a tub of it below our table for piping practice all week in very warm temperatures and it looked no different on Friday to Monday. It is so greasy that we had to jettison our piping bags each day as there was no hope of washing the shortening off. Can you imagine the stuff in your system?!
While shortening is less common in Australian home baking than in the US, it is still widely used in Australian commercial bakeries, particularly supermarket cakes. So just a wee reminder to always check the ingredient label, or just fork out for the better stuff made with real butter!
For those worried about why SFBI included these shortening cakes in the course, I should add that they were demonstrated for "completeness" given their prevalence in US baking. These "fake cakes" (pictured below) as I like to think of them were all binned after decorating practice instead of being sent to the food charities with the rest of our surplus.
High ratio fake cakes - when a happy birthday is not so happy after all.....
