A Birthday Cake For Myself...

One knows that they have entered the pastry world, when they have to make their own birthday cake. Making a cake for a pastry professional takes guts. Pictured below is my belated birthday cake to myself, although I only ate one bite (therefore can I really call it my birthday cake?). My belated birthday cake was a blueberry lemon geniose with whipping cream icing.

This cake was our first attempt at filling and icing a cake, and it was cool to watch our chef instructor demo this for us, it was like watching an artist at work. I’m sure he has filled thousands of cakes. To create our cakes we sliced the genoise into three layers, which, while we were shown a good technique to use, is difficult to do consistently. I’m definitely going to have to practice. To assemble the cake we drenched the bottom layer with simple syrup and then spread whipped cream on top of the layer in a bowl shape. Inside this bowl we filled it with fresh blueberries that we covered with whip cream to make the whip cream layer level. This technique is used to ensure that the berries do not escape out of the filing, which would make it difficult to ice. We then repeated this layering, and finished with the final layer. The cake was then covered in whipped cream. Although the cake took a good picture, it is difficult to work with whipped cream without overworking it and causing it to break. As this was our first attempt at a cake, we spent a lot of time trying to perfect it, therefore we overworked the cream.

The cake still tasted delicious! How can one go wrong with whipped cream?