The writing on the wall

You might call this one of my life goals - that of being able to write on pastries presentably enough for said pastry to make it to the display case. So. For the last three days of my practicum I asked to be assigned to the chef in charge of decorating the Golden Fan's cakes, and I told him that if he could teach me only one thing, it would have to be this. I spent one whole day trying to write - it's all in the piping cone and the flick of the wrist, he told me - and here are some of the still-awful results, although the sous chef of the hotel came by and said one of them, the "Happy Birthday" in the foreground next to "Happy Anniversary", looked decent enough. Well, the Great Wall wasn't built in one day, was it?

Getting it right the second time

I love making these meringue cups (would they still be called vacherons?) because making them involves pulling out all of the piping skills I can muster from my flour-dusted self. This was my second time to make them and they're a vast improvement over the first batch I did, which had lots of hollow spaces in the sides. The pastry cooks start turning out quantities of them when a glut of unused egg whites accumulates, and the Golden Fan uses the meringue cups as the base for the fruit tarts it serves in its buffet resto.

Cutesy cutesy coo!

Aren't these strawberry cupcakes the cutest? They're for a children's party. I was asked to decorate all of them with a dusting of Bianca powder (essentially a fancy form of confectioner's sugar with an additive that prevents it from absorbing moisture), piped whipped cream (it was like dancing: 1, 2, 3, step!), a fresh strawberry quarter and a triangle of colored white chocolate.