March 16, 2012

Cake 101: Lesson 7: Chocolate

My apologies for the lack of post last Friday -- things got a little hectic around here and posting fell to the bottom of the to-be-done list.  On the bright side, it gave me a couple of extra days to think and I now know what the next three lessons are.

Today's lesson is chocolate. Not as in chocolate flavored, although a good chocolate cake is a divine thing, but as in the myriad of things one can do with chocolate.

Here are some of the common ways you  might use chocolate

  1. Straight -- either pieces of candy on top of a cupcake, or chocolate curls on the side of a cake (I made a cake once for my best friend that involved shaving down a 2lb block of dark chocolate with a cheese grater to get tons of little curls).
  2. Melted -- chocolate flavored almond bark, baking squares, candy melts (which may have a chocolate flavor, but aren't really chocolate), etc.  Both the cupcakes featured this week and the week before had candy melt/almond bark chocolates on them. You can buy a million different chocolate molds, and it's a quick way to add decoration. I've also used candy melts over molded rice krispy treats for things like cows, and you can paint with them to do freehand work. (See Monday's cake archive post for some examples).
  3. Modeling chocolate -- this is a sort of putty-like chocolate that you can either sculpt as is, or you can sculpt over a wire armature to make figures. I've seen it done a lot on various cake shows, and I saw some advertised for kids in Target recently. It's on my list of things to check out, but as I'm not the most proficient sculptor, I have tended to shy away from it.
So tell me -- do you use chocolate to decorate your cakes?

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