June 2013-Week 2

ORGANIZATION SKILLS

This week, I started my personal project on cake decorating. I’m sure I spent my time wisely this week as I began to investigate step by step day by day. Overall, this week was a good start of my personal project.

COMMUNICATION WITH SUPERVISOR

This week, I had my first meeting with my supervisor with two other students as well. We discussed briefly about the personal project, went through the criteria in detail, and used the PP guidebook to know what needs to be done to achieve a high grade. Overall, it was a very beneficial and effective first meeting as now I have a better understanding of what is expected in the given time to finish the personal project.

INFORMATION

This week, I chose my personal project topic and AOI: cake decorating and human ingenuity. So, I looked through cake decorating websites available in the net. I opened three sites that seemed to be appealing and interesting to me: cakejournal.com, cakeoricandothat.blogspot.com, and jessicakes.blogspot.com. As I looked through the content, jessicakes.blogspot.com turned out to be the best website I can use as a source in relation to my topic. I then looked through the many sections of the blog and saw how Jessica Harris, the blog owner, bakes and decorates her simple, clean, yet beautiful cakes. I opened her most recent update and realized that she had tutorial videos on Craftsy.com. Knowing that I needed to learn and apply the techniques and skills she had later on in the create stage, I purchased her videos and learned so much from them. On lesson 1-2, she demonstrated how she is able to produce clean and simple edges on her cakes by crumb-coating (adding a thin layer of buttercream before frosting the whole cake), using buttercream on wax paper, using the cardboard as a guide, and flipping the cake in the end to achieve the clean look. To be able to achieve that clean look on a cake has always been a challenge for me. It was either the buttercream was not smooth and messy, or crumbs on the cake were scattered and seen around the light colored buttercream. She required that crumb coating is a very important step in icing cakes. Her technique really helped the idea of icing a cake and I look forward to apply her technique soon. Then, on lesson 3, she explained the medium marshmallow fondant and modeling chocolate in cake decorating. She showed a recipe of both in her videos (2:1 ratio of marshmallow and powdered sugar to make marshmallow fondant, candy melts and corn syrup for modeling chocolate) and demonstrated the purpose of the mediums. Marshmallow fondant is not just very easy to work with, but it is simple to make and not sticky. Modeling chocolate is a very easy form of chocolate to use as decoration as it cuts beautifully, works well with templates, and holds its shape very well. I felt like she is very passionate in what she’s doing and I would want to know more about her. I then emailed her, asking her whether if it is possible for me to interview her via email.