Posts Tagged ‘discovery travel and living’
The Premiere of Cake Boss, Discovery Travel and Living
Take one bag of flour, one bag of sugar, lots of shouting and you have the recipe for a great reality series about, well… baking..
Feedmelah.com was recently invited to a media preview of Discovery Travel and Living’s newest reality show, Cake Boss! All about award winning pastry chef, Buddy Valastro and his trials and tribulations with his loving, dedicated and loud family business.
Buddy has created some of the most mouth watering and elaborate cakes, including Britney Spears’ circus-themed 27th birthday cake amongst others.
We were screened part of the first episode, where you see the back of the bakery in full gear, with over 300 cakes to bake in a single week, a monster wedding cake for Brides Magazine and thousands of pastries.
What would a reality show be without some drama? Well Cake Boss has more than enough of that, with the bakery running out of sugar within the first 10 minutes of the episode… drama ensues!
Our task that evening was to experience what it’s like to decorate a cake and how difficult it actually is in real life.
We were guided patiently through every step by Chef Lu, a seasoned pastry chef at The Cooking House in Sri Hartamas.
We were expected to recreate one of the designs that Chef Lu had earlier prepared and displayed proudly at the front of the class.
Looks too good to eat doesn’t it?
With our base of flour, fondant, butter, icing sugar and various other ingredients, we had to make the different components of the flower pot you see above, including the pot, the petals and the leaves.
No simple task if you aren’t prepared to be delicate.
Step 1 was to create the ‘pot’ by using a ready made cup cake and wrapping it with a brown coloured pastry. Some work was required to get the dough into the right consistency for wrapping the cupcakes with as the dough was ready made and a little dry in the air conditioned room.
After some effort, I managed to get it into a somewhat ‘pot’ like shape and we were told to use some paper to wrap it and hold it into shape.
The next few steps were the hardest, where we were required to make the leaves and individually create each and every petal and form it into a blossoming flower or rose.
With stubby fingers working against me, I struggled to form any type of flower (hence no pictures of this step – fingers covered in too much flour and dough).
But with some time, patience and lots of moulding and fixing, I managed to churn out the beauty of a ‘rose’ you see on the left.
OK, so a rose doesn’t really look like that and my leaves are too big, but not bad for a first try right?
CAKE BOSS premieres on Discovery Travel & Living ASTRO Channel 707 every Wednesday at 1900 hrs (7:00 pm Malaysia Time), starting March 3. Encores Wednesdays at 0500 hrs (5:00 am) and 1300 hrs (1:00 pm), Thursdays at 0100 hrs (1:00 am) and Sundays at 0400 hrs (4:00 am), 1200 hrs (12:00 pm) and 1800hrs (6:00 pm).
