Spring Project Conclusion

I chose to do my project on making a mirror glaze cake! A mirror glaze is a very shiny glaze made of white chocolate, sugar and gelatin that gets poured over a frosted cake. I put a lot of time into researching how to make the glaze specifically. I found out that unless your glaze was at a perfect 95 degrees, it was not going to look right. This proved to be my biggest challenge in the whole process. The thermometer I was using was not labeled in a very organized way, which made it hard to read quickly. The glaze mixture cooled very fast but it was still a little bit too hot when I poured it over because the glaze went on too thin and some parts of the frosting were showing through. The pandemic posed a slight problem as well because if I found myself out of one small ingredient, I had to look for a different recipe. This applied mostly to the cake base itself. When making a cake from scratch there’s always a hundred different recipes out there for the type of cake you’re looking for which was very helpful.

Baking has always been one of my favorite things to do, with all the free time I have now that classes are done I would like to get back into it. My grandmother used to bake cakes professionally and they were always so beautiful. She passed a couple of weeks ago which made this cake very special to me, I wanted to make something she would be proud of. My time management for this project was sporadic. I found my recipes and did my research at the beginning of the original spring break, and I did not end up making the cake until the weekend before finals. The large gap was due mostly to adjusting to online learning and the challenges associated with the pandemic. For the capstone project, I want to make a set schedule to help me get things done with enough time to plan for something going wrong.

Through the process of this particular cake I learned a lot. There are a lot of little steps that made a difference in the overall outcome, which I think can be applied to learning lots of other things as well. For the recipe I found, a lot of the ingredients needed to be at room temperature before you combined everything together. This small detail really helps all of the ingredients incorporate better and contributes to the overall consistency, without this step you may be left with a more chunky batter. I thought that was very interesting because I had never baked anything with room temperature eggs or milk. I also mentioned before that the glaze mixture needed to be at a specific temperature before it was poured over which contributed to the over all look of the cake. I would make a mirror glaze cake again in the future. I choose blues and greens for this glaze but there are so many color combinations I can try in the future.