Finals

Well, it is finally here, the last week of school. Good news was that I didn't have any written final tests!!! YES! Bad news was that I had a large sugar showpiece to do, a torte that I made up, and a short story to write for finals. It wasn't bad, once I got the showpiece done. It was so nerve racking doing that piece, but I got it done. Here are a couple of pictures of my final sugar showpiece. I took pictures from every angle I could. The small piece in the background with the purple flowers was a classmate's. I couldn't get any good pictures of my piece without having hers in it.



It is a "Four Seasons Tree". The red things on the top are blown sugar apples (that was the smallest I could get them). The green are the leaves, the pink are blossoms, the yellowish stuff in the back represents fall, and if you look close and hard you can see the ice cycles for winter.
He said it was a nice tree, but I don't think I am going to get a good grade on it. You should have seen some of the other pieces. My piece was the tallest, approx 2 feet, and the widest, but my "execution" of the project was what apparently knocked my grade down.

The torte turned out nice. Here is a picture. It is the same torte I made for Thanksgiving, if you remember.

I added the chocolate band around the sides, which was probably one of the toughest things I have ever done, although I would rather do chocolate bands than sugar showpieces. Anyway, I had to temper both kinds of chocolate at the same time and keep them tempered all on the day that it was -8 degrees the night before. The marble slabs we use for tempered chocolate literally froze the chocolate as soon as we poured it on the slab. The point of this story is that the dark chocolate didn't scrape all the way off because it had set too much so you can see it in this picture. He tasted it today and at that point he had said that it was the best torte in the class. Granted he hadn't tasted them all, but he didn't have anything bad to say about the taste of the torte. I got a really good grade on it, which sort of makes up for the bad grade on my showpiece.