Pasta and Cake January 23, 2011

I managed to do 2 new things this week—make my own pasta and decorate a cake with fondant!

Making pasta is actually easy but managing the roll out process is something that comes with practice. I used the proportion as described in Michael Ruhlmann’s book Ratio of 2 eggs to 1 cup of Italian ’00′ flour. The dough started off quite sticky so I added a bit more flour to make it easier to work with. It’s amazing how the dough develops into this silky mass!

I shaped it into a ball, wrapped it in cling film and put it in the fridge for it to rest for 30 minutes.

I packed away my bag of flour thinking I won’t be needing it but I was wrong! I initially had a hard time handling the pasta sheets because they were sticking so I looked really funny trying to stretch my other arm to grab the bag of flour to dust the work area I ended up redoing that batch! After that I struggled with the length of the pasta sheets–I should have processed then in smaller batches so I can handle a thinner sheet because the pasta came out a little too thick for my taste.

Other that those bits with technique, it wasn’t bad for a first attempt. I’ll make sure to do better the next time around.

Since rolling out the pasta took longer than I expected, my simmering pasta sauce sauce developed a nice depth of flavor to it. It’s my current favorite pasta sauce made with Chevups sausage .

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Cake decorating is a different story. Putting an extra effort in decorating really shows in the result–it requires patience and creativity. Last Friday, 7 of us assembled over at Cathy’s place to decorate eight 4.5 inch cakes for a birthday party for the 8 January celebrants. Before we can start work fondant decorating, we had to level the cakes and frost it with ganache. Some of the fondant had been pre-mixed with color the week before so we only had to focus on reworking the fondant and making new colors.

We rolled the fondant out on mats dusted with icing sugar and corn flour using rolling pins (it was interesting how we were all comparing our tools!) and when thin enough, we laid them on the cake or cut designs out. I found this process daunting as the fondant can crack if not handled properly, and can stick to the mat is not dusted enough. After the  cake is covered (we covered each cake with skin tone fondant to match a celebrant’s skin tone), the fun begins. We worked on hair styles, accent pieces, distinguishing features…the finished products were very cute!

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