Ankita Jain attends a workshop to scent out new trends and tricks
Imagine being able to eat a princess castle and sinking your teeth into its turrets and roofs, the pink and lemon eaves melting in your mouth. And feeling royally pampered as the icing, chocolate and nuts whip up a yumminess with each bite. Cakes and breads of all sizes seem to jump right out of the fantasies of chefs at Pragati Maidan’s culinary art show.
Once run-of-the-mill cream cakes decorated with a couple of butter cream roses and a leaf or two were every bride’s cup of tea. Now it’s all about customised designs to suit the personality of those they are made for. These fancy cakes are all works of edible art, each one as much a treat for the eyes as they are for the taste buds. Perhaps in these health-conscious times, you need a little more of visual conviction before plunging the fork in. These cakes come in multiple tiers, flavours, layers and colours and are embellished with sugar blooms, ornate lace, ruffles and frills, shimmer, pearls, buntings and what not.
“As far as wedding cakes go, cascading flowers have been a regular feature but statement flowers are all the rage at the moment. lace appliqué work is still being explored by cake artistes around the world and the masterpieces they’re creating are definitely mind blowing,”says Chef Willment leong.
While a white wedding cake, embellished with pastel decorations, is always in good taste, cake designs generally tend to follow some theme or the other. That brings us to flowers. Blooms of many varieties and shapes are used as a decorative element on wedding cakes; roses, especially. Carnations, peonies, orchids, daffodils, frangipani and the like come a close second. Crafting the flowers, we learn, is the hardest and most-time consuming part of making a cake. “Each petal has to be made individually and dried a week before. The flowers are stored upside down to preserve their shape,” says chef Ramesh Tanwar. He has used a variety of sculpting tools for the same. He adds, “Cakes are relatively easy to bake, while flowers are the most exacting for they involve precise shading as the colour deepens towards the centre.”
Moving ahead, we notice a team of chefs working in a live kitchen, mixing ingredients for dough, weighing them out into exact loaves and moulding them into shape. Another group slices sheets of dough into quick 100-gm triangles, whisks them into little crab-like curves and further moulds them into guitar alike shapes. The chef then sends them to proof into ovens. As they rise into crisp croissants, the quiches are lined and filed and soon, they go in too. Meanwhile, the breads get their signature cuts — a sharp slice through the country loaves, four lines through the baguettes and rings on the beer breads. Into the oven they go too, and rise.