Gâteau Michelle

Well, I knew it would come to an end sooner or later. Summer is over and that means time for my girls to go back to school instead of spending time with me. Summer, however, went out on a good note. Our last cake took two classes to prepare and I ended up having only one of my students in class. We decided to make a basket-weave cake that included the cake and filling from scratch.

I decided to teach her how to make a lemon Chiffon cake and lemon curd filling. I was sure she could do it since she had made a chocolate Chiffon cake for the hydrangea cake previously. We started with the lemon curd because that takes the longest amount of time to make. She zested all of the lemons and squeezed them. She measured everything out correctly and cooked it to make sure it didn’t burn. Then we had to temper the eggs and I was a little nervous about how that would work out. Tempering is hard, especially the first time, and I was really hoping to not have to strain the egg pieces out. I worried for nothing! She tempered perfectly. Then she cooked it some more and it was perfect.

We decided to make the cakes round instead of ovals like in the Wilton book simply because I didn’t have any oval pans. She measured and mixed the ingredients, added lemon curd until it was lemony enough, and baked them. Again, they came out perfect! YUMMY!!!

We ended our class making the royal icing for the flowers and buttercream for the cake. She was to make the flowers on her own at home.

Next week, she came with fabulous flowers! I was soooo impressed! She finished them up before we moved on icing our cakes and they looked beautiful…well, the roses had some issues but we fixed that later. It turned out to be an icing issue and not technique.

We put the cakes together, after adding whipped cream to the lemon curd, and we had our final decorating lesson. I showed her how to do the basket weave and a rope. Then we added the flowers on top and she was done! Her cake was gorgeous. I finished my cake with roses on top and a welcome back message for the teachers (registration was the next day at school).