Just my point of view: Another round of wedding cake decor done!

This week has reinforced my decision NOT to make wedding cakes! And it is not because the cake itself may be difficult to make, but because doing the DECOR is too incredibly tedious for my tiny brain to handle :-p. Tedious, SMALL, fiddly, fussy, etc, etc, etc. Sigh... However, I have to do this one more time - in the final 3 months of the course, and, believe it or not, I have already started searching / surfing for inspiration and ideas... otherwise when it comes down to the crunch I won't be able to do anything!

Anyway, here is what we did this week... first of all, we had to do a 3-tier cake, with each tier looking like a CUSHION! Of course, we did not actually make the cake as such... instead we were given a huge piece of styrofoam, which we first had to cut down to the specified measurements (base tier 15 inch square, middle tier 12 inch square, top tier 9 inch square). Once the pieces were ready we had to individually CARVE each piece to shape them into cushion forms... so, we started with this square of styrofoam...

And ended with this (somewhat) cushion shaped styrofoam!

From there, once all three 'cushions' were ready, we had to make sugar pastillage and cover each tier with the pastillage in our preferred colours... and this is what my team ended up with:

And just that process took almost 2 days to do!! Most of this I did as my team mate Aden was busy doing the figurines and fancy stuff that we wanted to put on the cake. Our other team mate, Aceline, was on medical leave from Monday to Wednesday, so it was mostly just Aden and myself most of the time, though when Aceline was with us she was very productive! 2 of the other 3 teams (just fyi) had 4 people each, and the 3rd team had 3 people! Luckily for Aden and me, Chef Tan helped to carve the smallest of the 3 tiers (Aden carved the middle one, and I did the big one), and Chef Azura later helped to do the decorative piping on the sides of the tiers.

While the tiers were being made ready, Aden was focusing on the 'difficult' bits and pieces that were going to go ON the cake...

1) Butterfly wings, to make butterflies (we ended up using only one in the end)

2) Flowers (made by myself and Aceline)! Small, medium, large. We used the smallest in just white, and airbrushed the medium and large flowers the lightest shade of pink. Airbrushing was done by Aceline!

3) Our caterpillar and bee 'couples', with mushroom 'highlights'

4) And here are the turtle and mice couples :-)

5) And the ladybirds!

Of course, we also need the bride and groom too... and here they are, courtesy of U-Hon (member of another team) who had made them and then made another pair he preferred, so he 'donated' this pair to us! Thanks U-Hon :-)

Once all the components were ready, we started putting it all together, and here it is:

1) The cake DONE, all components in place :-)

2) Close up of the top of the cake, with bride and groom in place, watched over by a butterfly

3) And here are the three of us with our cake - from right to left, Aceline, Aden, myself :-)

And how about the other teams? Here are the other amazing cakes produced by the 3 other teams. First the cakes, and then close ups of the toppers:

1) Cake and topper done by Nadiah, Suk Hui, Wen Li and Keng Joo:

2) Cake and topper done by U-Hon, Joanne, Angelica and Ang:

3) Cake and topper done by Cadee, Chok Tong and Sweet Ping:

Now the best part of the week was Friday! Why? Firstly because my team finished with the cake really early (like 11am on Friday)! Yippee!!! And secondly, two of my favourite students at the Academy (Xiao-Ly and Li Yin, who are the first two to graduate from the FULL 9-month course offered by the Academy) came and asked me, if I was free, to join them in their baking!! Phew, talk about an irresistable invitation :-). Of COURSE I said Yes... and here is what we made that afternoon:

1) SAUSAGE ROLLS, wrapped in milk bread, sprinkled with chilli flakes. YUM!!!