Plans After Scones

Photo Credits: Life in a Peanut Shell

Since we have recently discovered that passion projects will be coming to a close by the end of the third quarter/beginning of fourth quarter, we needed to come up with another plan. It is unfortunate that we have only been able to hand out desserts to the class once, but hopefully, if all goes well, we will be able to give out two more sugary creations for our peers and teacher to enjoy. As you all may know, the first dessert that we will be handing out is Irish blueberry scones, in recognition to St. Patrick's Day on March 17. We mutually agreed to make a dessert that was red in color afterwards, as March is Red Cross Month. We have not officially chosen what we would like to attempt to bake, but as this second creation will be our last dessert, we will most likely aim towards making a cake. At the beginning of the project, I was mainly interested in following recipes and making desserts because I thought that by at the end of year, I would be a professional baker who was capable of making extravagant, luxurious, jaw-dropping cakes. I got this visualization from watching the reality TV show Cake Boss and witnessing the Youtuber Yolanda from How to Cake It make incredibly realistic cakes.

Photo Credits: How to Cake It

Photo Credits: Cake Boss

With this in mind, we will make a large, two or three tiered cake, cover it in fondant, make decorations using the fondant, pipe frosting using the techniques we have learned previously, and much more. The two of us originally thought that we had no other option but to make the cake red velvet-flavored, but we then realized that there were endless possibilities and we are not limited to just one flavor. This is because we can dye the cake batter using red food coloring. Some ideas include: nutella-filled (hazelnut) ultimate vanilla cake, Snickers cake using a peanut butter base filled with caramel, chopped peanuts, and a ring of chocolate buttercream (beware of peanut allergies), vanilla cake with fresh strawberries, strawberry cake filled with sweet whipped cream, key lime cake with lemon buttercream, white chocolate cake with strawberries, lemon flavored with vanilla frosting, etc. We cannot use a base that is too dark in color, such as chocolate, because the dark color would mask the food coloring. For the decor, I would like to try some new techniques, such as lining edible pearls around the base, creating a buttercream/frosting color gradient, and much more. Since we have not yet decided on the flavors of the cakes, we are not certain of which ingredients we will need to purchase.