Baking Class- Sponge

The topic for the final class is "Sponge Cakes". We made three variations; by now we are quite efficient and the cakes were baked well ahead of time, leaving the rest of the session free to play around with decorations and embellishment. All the students took home pretty confections to amaze their families.

Kaya Pandan Cake: Simple sponge cut into two and interlayered with a very rich coconut custard. The cross section is a pretty checkerboard design which would taste good had we not forgotten the sugar.

Sweetcorn Fudge Cake is sponge sandwiched with a sweetcorn fudge and covered up with cream. We played with buttercream, a first for most of us, and tried our hand at piping and freehand decoration. Behold our clumsy attempt. Decorating was fun, but the result was not very tasty because we used icky non-dairy whipping cream which is easier for amateurs to handle.

The Black Forest Cake was the most tasty of the trio, the chocolate sponge soft and chocolatey and encasing a pleasant cherry filling. A bakery favourite in days of old, Judy demonstrated (using our cream-covered cake as 'model') how simple it is to recreate using chocolate ruffs, icing sugar, more cream and cherries.

That was the end of the basic course. Stage 2 is only held on weekdays, but Judy promised to hold a weekend course which I will sign up for when it materialises. In the meantime, we need to practise.... must not forget the sugar.

Comments

[boo_licious]

Clap! Clap! Well done! Everything looks great and Black Forest is my fav.

[umami]

Thanks boo_licious, we were quietly pleased with the results too as the cakes turned out better than the swiss rolls.

[Jasmine Tan]

I love the pandan custard cake, and I've tried to make something similar but the custard doesn't firm up enough and I'm over in the US, a lot of ingredients typically used in Malaysian recipes are kinda hard to identify....