Icing on the cake
Hayley McLarin ends her series of cooking classes with a session of cake decorating
Some early adopters will queue to have the latest iPhone. Others have to be on every concert pre-sales list. On this particular Saturday, a group of eager early birds were desperately waiting on the next cake class list.
Emma Hogg runs Strawberry Sky Cakes, boutique cake classes, and has gathered a loyal following.
I felt like a participant in The Great Kiwi Bake Off as I drove through rural countryside to get to her Pukekohe home.
A chirpy woman wearing a spotty apron, Emma offered me tea in a Wedgewood cup and saucer. It was all terribly, and wonderfully, English.
With her husband Jason, Emma moved here from England in 2010 and named her cake business after a strawberry farm in the heart of Kent.
What would normally be a garage has been transformed into an intimate classroom. Lining the walls are exquisite cakes: a three-tiered wedding cake with nearly nude icing (that’s when they have barely a covering), a novelty Christmas cake with Santa languishing in bubble bath, and another decorated to look like a pohutukawa in full bloom.
Thankfully those are the prototypes for other classes and we were not attempting anything like this. Our group of six women were there to learn piping skills.
Admittedly this isn’t a true cooking class, but creating food is art, in all its forms — and what better way to finish this series than with something sweet?
Seated around a purpose-built work station were Emma’s regulars — mums and grandmothers who have made their family’s birthday cakes for years and are forever being asked to create celebration cakes for colleagues and friends. These were the hardcore regulars who eagerly anticipated new classes being scheduled. They have attended countless times and will attend countless more.
Then there are two newbies — a newlywed who fell in love with Strawberry Sky when Emma made the cake for her wedding, and me.
It started like an art class at school. We each had a board, and all the tools we would need to create words, flowers, hearts and beads — all with royal icing, a soft, fluffy icing using meringue powder. We were trying our hand on iced boards rather than risk destroying a perfectly good cake.
First up, a rose and leaves that needed to be etched on a clear sheet before using a scalpel to cut out the stencil. It involved blood, sweat and almost literally tears of frustration for me. The work was delicate. I am anything but.
I felt I was constantly behind everyone else, which tested my patience and made me lose my cool. I rushed my stencil etching, missing half the elements. Then when it came time to cut it out I held the scalpel too low and too hard. The blade cut into my finger.
I have done eight classes and this was the first time I’d needed a catering-blue plaster.
It was only once we iced the flowers on to the board that I could see all the smaller details I had failed to etch and stencil out. The result reminded me of trying to decipher a child’s piece of art. You could hardly call my flower a rose. It looked more like a preschooler’s mosaic.
Next we tried — and others mastered — a peony, piping on a pattern we traced on to the board. I used to be good at colouring-in as a child, so what happened? Can I put my poor skills down to being left-handed? I suspect not, but what should have been a robust flower ended up a weak and wispy outline.
Determined to not get the participation award, I was quick to finish and then looked at my neighbour’s art. Her flower was not only perfectly shaped, she had carefully brushed the icing to resemble the ridges in petals, the vibrant fuchsia colour popping off the board.
A lunch break saw us all sharing food tips, the local ladies talking about the upcoming rural rendition of Ladies Night, which cafes in Pukekohe have upped their game, the best place for cheap fuel and where they go for all their cake supplies.
The second half of our day was spent trying to pipe consistently sized beads, writing letters and adding gold embellishment, how to add lemon juice (or vodka) to icing to wet the mix but have it set quickly and how to repair icing bleeds among other errors.
Emma was delightful, chatty and generous with knowledge gained while making thousands of cakes, including works of art for Trelise Cooper and the King of Tonga. Cake decorating takes patience and Emma gave all her pupils time and encouragement, and said she enjoyed watching others feel a sense of achievement in her classroom.
Like an intense exam, my time was up long before I had completed my work. And I was feeling pretty good about it until I compared it with that of the others in the group. It was then I could see why they keep coming back. You want to learn more skills and improve your cake art. And what a wonderful way to switch off and destress — I was so consumed by what I was doing, I thought about nothing else. There was one other upside — testing on a board meant I was not tempted to eat too much cake.
A cooking class? An art class? It’s all semantics. It was a first-class first class.