The Planet Cake Apprentice

Well, to be honest, this week takes the cake ( pardon the pun) as the biggest roller coaster ride I have been on in a very long time.


To begin with I was assigned 5 cakes this week, which is the biggest assignment yet and I felt well up to the challenge however, after teaching the cupcake bites class over the weekend, thus having Monday off, I felt well behind the 8 ball starting on a Tuesday. By the time I arrived on Tuesday, the rest of the team had all of their cakes ganached and were busy covering their cakes for the week.

Margie teaching Lesley and myself how to make the seals for Cupcake Bites

 

I had to get moving on my work and, come Tuesday evening, I must admit, that a bit of panic had set in. I am, by far, the slowest in the kitchen at setting up cakes ( which I suppose is to be expected due to my severe lack of experience in comparison to the rest of the team) so it literally took me an entire day to prep all of my cakes ready for covering and decorating.

To make things even tighter, Wednesday I was assigned the duty of making ganache for the following weeks orders. A whole 90 odd litres of it! All I can say is, thank goodness for my angel in disguise. My amazing work colleague and, as of this week, new room mate ( woohoo) Lesley, was there to save the day at around 60 litres of gooey chocolate goodness in and took over my ganache making post to allow me to get into the production kitchen and start covering my cakes ready for decorating.

On to decorating it was. The first order for the week was one of our gorgeous online christening cakes and, just to add a little more pressure, I was told that the original collection time for the cake had been moved forward to a morning collection on Thursday rather than an afternoon one!

With the first cake done and assessed by Paris as a “couture cake that I should be very happy with” it was on to the next with a sense of pride and elation.

The iconic Tiffany box was next on the list but things didn’t go so well with this one. Whilst on her rounds Paris questioned where the template for the logo that I had painted on the box had come from. It was incorrect and needed to be fixed. I felt so crushed! I have a tendency to be quite hard on myself and want everything to be perfect so, when this happened I felt as though I had let Paris, Planet cake and myself down.

The criticism put me into a tail spin and I felt so scattered. All of my organisation and scheduling went out the window and, before long, I felt myself falling way behind with my deadlines.

Emma came to my rescue and assisted me with finishing off the other 2 cakes that were to be completed by the days end. I felt so deflated and annoyed with myself for letting something like constructive criticism throw me off so badly. Certainly a lesson learned!

The week wasn’t all negative though. I managed to set up and cover my first cylinder cake with great success and I was the very proud winner of the in house design competition for the fortnight. Those factors, along with the fact that Paris praised my cake as couture and has entrusted me to my first wedding cake next week reinforces that I must be on the right track.

Quite honestly, I was so happy to walk away from work on Friday night and leave the rollercoaster week behind me but it has only stoked the fire in my decorators belly to kick some major cake butt next week!