OUR STORY
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I am sharing my baking journey mainly to encourage those who are starting their own journey.
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I have always loved baking and cooking. I call it playing with food. My motto is: “It does not matter what you have also long as you make a meal out of it”.
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About four years ago, Nov 2013, when my son was about to turn one, I decided I want to bake a Xmas birthday cake for him. At that point I did not even know what marzipan or fondant was. All I did was to ask my colleague, what do we call that “white hard thing you find in wedding cakes”. She told me there is marzipan and fondant and she also told me what the difference between the two was.
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Then I tried Google and YouTube on how to make fondant and marzipan…. Dololoooo or too difficult to follow. I then settled for ready-made. I bought my first marzipan at Pick n Pay and my first fondant at Woolworths. At this point, I did not even know anything about baking supply stores.
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This was my 1st fondant cake.
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At this point I didn’t even know that a cake needs to be crumb-coated before putting on a fondant. Luckily this was a fruitcake so you only need jam.
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I guess my relationship with food is very personal. After this, I had so much confidence in baking cakes. I didn’t even know it takes passion, love, skill, experience, technique and artistic abilities.
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After the first cake mentioned in part 1…..gosh I grew wings of confidence. I felt like I can execute any cake I wish to. At this point Googling or even watching YouTube , to learn and get ideas for cakes that did not even exist in my world. It was all in my fantasy world.
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I made my first fondant cake on the 26 December 2013, and now 4 months later, it was my pastor’s 50th birthday. The ladies at church were planning a celebration for him. Guess what, I didn’t miss an opportunity, I volunteered to bake the cake. I did not even know that a stacked cake can easily fall until I watched “Our Perfect Wedding” some years later. That’s how much confidence I had when working with food.
This time I expanded my interest and passion in this adventure. I guess the sky was the limit. I went straight to 3-tiered cakes. See picture attached.
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By then, I still didn’t know that a cake needs to be crumb-coated before putting on a fondant. I bought marzipan at Pick n Pay and fondant at Woolworths as they were the only supermarkets I knew that sells this. The fondant was not enough to cover the 3-tier cake, therefore, the third tier was covered by marzipan only.
Everyone at church gave me positive feedback. No one pointed out anything that needs to be improved. Only recently in 2018, when my skill level has risen, they are only coming out and sharing their honest feedback, lol. “you still remember that cake. “…. And we laugh about it. I guess they wanted to push me to do my best… for that I will be forever grateful.
Fast forward to 2015, A colleague of mine, shared with me that she attended a cupcake decorating class. I loved what she showed me. Then, it started to bother me that I cannot do it. From this I gained two things: 1- that cupcakes can be decorated, I think I called them muffins. 2 – that there are classes you can attend to learn.
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With these two lessons, I gained from Anke, I went straight to Google and started to google for cake classes around my area. I got one just few Kilometers away from me. At R1 550 I enrolled for 1 week, 1 hour classes, June 2015.
See picture attached. Now I started to see the light
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After completing this class, I now knew about pipping, nozzles, crumb-coating, supporting sticks (dowels) before stacking the cake. You should have seen my excitement and confidence. I came back and didn’t even waste time to start baking for family and friends at a small fee, free or at a loss or cost of the cake. They kept coming back and this gave me a lot of confidence to continue. They never complained. I think the taste of the cakes sorted them out … don’t get this wrong, I always knew how to bake tasty cakes, I just did not know how to decorate them.