Many different culinary skills require years of training and practice to master. Everyone has a unique style when it comes to cooking and baking. This is why the field is referred to as the culinary arts in many cases. The types of dishes that someone truly talented and skilled can create are amazing. Some people can take something simple like an apple and transform it into an unrecognizable delicacy fit for royalty. This occurs every day in professional kitchens around the world. One of the culinary art forms that is incredibly difficult to master is cake decorating.
Cake decorating requires you to use many different skills at once. You need to have the scientific and practical knowledge to be able to create a solid cake to work on. You also need the experience to know how to handle and assemble the cake once it is done. You need to be very creative in order to create designs that will impress anyone on the street. A final skill you need is speed. You must be able to work quickly and efficiently so that a single cake does not take months to complete. This is why cake decorators are so highly respected within the culinary world.
The Quenary Academy is a culinary school located in Malaysia that draws in students from all around the world. The academy has a special focus on baking. This includes cake decorating. The school has garnered a very good reputation as being one of the leading places to learn how to become a master cake decorator. There are numerous courses taught in this area at the academy every semester. The instructors are exceptionally talented and skillful. The academy released a video to the public in 2013 showcasing the skills of one of their instructors. It has managed to impress nearly everyone who watched it.
The video starts by showing a cream cake on a standard rotating cake stand. The instructor begins spinning the stand fairly quickly. You see a pastry bag come down. The base crumb coat layer of icing is applied to the cake as it spins. The instructor then uses a paddle to spread it over the entire surface in one clean movement. The instructor does some more fancy work to evenly spread out the icing while everything is spinning. This segment of the demonstration ends with the person masterfully sliding a paddle down the side of the cake to create a perfectly smooth hemisphere of icing.
The instructor speeds up the rotating cake stand and grabs a pastry bag with a much narrower tip. The person squeezes out some bright green icing. The instructor then switches and does the same with some yellow icing. The person alternates between the two as the cake spins creating alternating bands of green yellow. The next step is to use a paddle to smooth it all out. This creates what looks like a glossy shell with subtle color gradations going from green to yellow and back again.
The instructor finally stops the cake stand from rotating and grabs a flat metal tool that looks like a sharp leaf. The person uses that leaf to press into the side of the cake from the top center down to the bottom of a side. This creates what looks like a texture path from the top to bottom. The instructor repeats this around half the cake. The contrast between the white frosting inside and the colorful exterior is striking. The instructor then uses the same tool to create a pattern of diamonds on the other side by just pushing slightly into the frosting. The finished cake is a remarkable sight considering it was decorated in just around three minutes.