The most memorable cooking lab experience for me was when we did the cake challenge.I love baking and I always dreamed about making a full decorated cake for someone big since I was ten but I never really got that chance until grade 10 where I got to make a cake for the chef himself and that was really a big deal for me.In the cake challenge, we were each put into groups of four and were suppose to make different kinds of cakes on world food issues.When I was first introduced to the challenge I was really nervous because it was a challenge after all and I wanted to prepare the best cake possible.My group consisted of Sarah, Anna, and Jan.My Team was amazing they were the best team I could ever get and after finding out who was in my team my confidence level boosted by 99.9% because I knew how hard-working each member was individually and how helpful they were.As a team, we first started off with coming up with an idea for the challenge.We had decided on doing food waste and a cake made around our idea.
Once we had our idea we went on to the filling of our cake.We kept our filling really simple because our main focus was the fondant decorations on the outside of our cake. Our filling was a simple buttercream frosting that we had also used for other things like decorations and crumb coating.
The cake itself was a challenge on its own because we had a lot to watch out for like over mixing, measurement, size, height, undercooked or overcooked, thick or thin batter, etc. Firstly, we had started off by making the simple white cakes. I was really worried about over mixing because I had done it before in a previous lab that we did and that resulted in my cake having tunnels so I was really worried about our cake for the cake challenge.Thankfully our cake batter was made perfect thanks to my batter partner Jan.The cake itself was a challenge on its own because we had a lot to watch out for like over mixing, measurement, size, height, undercooked or overcooked, thick or thin batter, etc. Firstly, we had started off by making the simple white cakes. I was really worried about over mixing because I had done it before in a previous lab that we did and that resulted in my cake having tunnels so I was really worried about our cake for the cake challenge.Thankfully our cake batter was made perfect thanks to my batter partner Jan.Our next step was to level the height of our cake batter in each baking pan because we were making a garbage can that was two-tiered high that we would stack together to make the garbage can.One thing that we kept in mind while preparing our cakes were the sizes of each cake.I was really stressed out when we were baking our cakes because we needed it to be at a certain height and size.The next step was the actual baking and we made sure that we wore oven mitts while handling the hot trays.While baking our cakes I wasn’t the only one stressed out because my whole team was stressed because if the cakes went wrong it would have ruined our whole planning and we would have had to start again from scratch.When our cakes first came out it felt as if I was in the mannequin challenge because my whole team froze except for Anna who was taking out the cake from the oven.Our cakes were cooked perfectly but one of the tiers rose a bit higher than the other but that wasn’t a problem because we had to trim our tiers anyways to make them more stable.During this stressful time, one thing that I learned was to have patience and faith that everything will be just fine and that’s exactly what I did even though I was stressed I tried to convince my team that everything is going to workout just fine and it did. After that, it came down to the decorating part of the cake and it was the most fun thing by far in the whole challenge because we were able to go crazy with our different types of food imaginations. We started off by crumb coating each tier and then stacking it on top of each other and then taking the whole one tier and stacking it on the base cake that was supposed to be our grass.We had also inserted dowels on our tiers to make it more stable.The fondant was the funniest job to do because we really got to play with different colors and shapes. The oddest thing that we did was when we had wrapped an apple with fondant to look like a wasted apple and the funny thing was that we actually did waste that poor apple because no one ate it.Despite all the stress, our final product was truly a beautiful reflection of our hard work as a team.
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One thing that I learned during this cooking experience was that in cooking even the most imperfect thing can be perfect and that there’s never bad food it’s just one’s individual opinion on certain foods.
Taste Of Pakistan 