Well, this is pretty unusual for a guy, but yes, just as the title suggests, I did attend a baking course. My mum and her friends were supposed to attend this 3 and a half hour baking course. However, one of my mum's friends couldn't make it. So, my mum's friends suggested to my mum to call me to join since my mum had told them about my cooking exploits at home last year.
As expected, I was the only guy there out of the 8 people who attended the workshop. It was a little awkward at first but then I told myself that I wasn't going to let these other people ruin my new experience. I knew that such opportunities were a rarity and it was up to me whether to make use of it or not.
The first thing that we were taught to do was tiramisu cake. By the way, the pastry chef who was teaching us is a Japanese. Her name is Tomoko. Well, since she's Japanese, she taught us how to make the original tiramisu cake, just the plain one, like how it was supposed to be.
We had to cut the sponge cake into 4 layers. The last layer is supposed to be discarded. We were given the 1cm bar to use as a base to cut the cake. Then, we had to wrap the three layers in a clean wrap and put it aside.
Next up was to make the mousse, or the cream layer to put in between the layers of cake. We had to mix some fresh cream, gelatin, mascarpone and Italian meringue. The Italian meringue was made for us but Tomoko later showed us how to prepare it.
One of the good things that I learned from the workshop was how to whisk and how much to do it. If whisked too much, she said the flour would become to thick and the cake will be to dry. So, just adequate amount of mixing would do. And so mix mix mix.
After that was done, we put the cream into a special kind of plastic bag with a cone at the end of it. Then, it was time to put the pieces into place. First, we had to wet the bottom layer of cake with coffee syrup (which was prepared for us). Then, squeeze the cream from the plastic bag onto that layer of cake. And then do the same thing for the other 2 layers. Once we were done with that, we had to put the cake in the fridge.
Next up was making the Gateau Chocolat Framboise (or raspberry chocolate cake). Well, it isn't really a cake because no flour is used. It's more like frozen chocolate, but worthy of a cake's stature.
We were first introduced to the types of chocolate that we could get from ingredient shops. For baking that day, we were going to use Belgian chocolate. This cake was also quite easy to do because it was basically just chocolate.
It's basically just melting chocolate with unsalted butter, and then heating eggs and granulated sugar in a separate bowl and then combining them and then adding cocoa powder. The tedious part is mixing. To make it thick and dense, we have to mix the batter about 100 times.
She taught us a technique of mixing the batter called the "cut and fold". She said she would walk around to see if we were doing it right. She basically corrected everyone except me. It's because when she came to my table, she said "That's really good, fine". My proudest moment of the day, yeah!
The last thing that we were taught to do was the basic sponge cake that we used to make the tiramisu cake earlier. We were making this for the participants of the next class. After we put the sponge cakes in the oven, we took out the tiramisu cake from the fridge and sieved some cocoa powder on it. At the end, we got to take back our tiramisu and chocolate cakes.
In my point of view, the workshop was really worth it. Tomoko was a really nice person and she was always positive and had the positive aura around her. She was also quite well versed in baking and knew reasons to why some things can be done and why some can't. And the best part, I learned some really good tips on baking which should be helpful to me in the future!
