Baking Class at Gulacakery, Kota Kemuning Shah Alam

Baking is my passion. I had my fair share of successes and failures but the latter never deterred me from trying new recipe I scoured on the internet. I tried almost everything that was in, like red velvet, rainbow cake, Japanese cotton cake and many more. The last straw was when I tried baking Pandan Gula Melaka and the frosting was a total disaster that I stepped back, shying away from the oven for quite some time. 

Meanwhile, I followed quite a few bakers and bakery on instagram, drooling at their bakes. One of them is Gula Cakery, and I had been following them since I frequented their outlet in IOI City Mall, Gula Petite. They had the yummiest Pandan Gula Melaka I have ever tasted. 

And as fate would have it, around October last year, Gula Cakery's post on Instagram caught my eyes. The post was on a baking class. To be exact, a voucher for a group baking class.

After much deliberation I bought the voucher for 2 recipe baking class. I didn’t manage to attend any of their pre-arranged classes due to my schedule, which is a shame. So I reached out to the owner, Arieni and a sweet person she is, she tried to arrange one that works for me! I am super thankful to her, especially she was already in her 3rd trimester and due to give birth in few weeks!

So on 18th Mac, the class commenced. I was so excited beyond words. This is my first baking class ever and also marks my first encounter with a Kitchen Aid Artisan stand mixer. I am actually a Kenwood kind of person before but I totally changed my mind after seeing this beast perform.

Immediately thrown into my bucket list

We were divided into 3 groups, 4 persons each. Everyone had varying experience with baking so I thought our group is nicely balanced. We were given 3 recipes, Pandan Gula Melaka (PGM) with Swiss Buttercream, Chocolate Pavlova and Double Chocolate Chip Cookies.

Gula Cakery Baking Class on 1st Floor
We started with PGM and the first lesson I carved into my head was always cream your butter and sugar right! It was supposed to be beaten until white, so that the cake would be lighter in texture. We were also told not too simply reduce the sugar in cake recipes because it can result in drier, crumbly and dense cake. The batter cannot be over mixed too, since doing so will deflate the cake.

While the pandan cake is cooking in the oven, we move on to the second recipe, chocolate pavlova. I tried baking regular pavlova once but I think I did something wrong somewhere since my pavlova's surface came out sticky and collapsed once out of the oven.

This is how the finished meringue should look. Glossy, smooth and most importantly, stiff peak!
Pandan cake out, pavlova in. Swiss meringue buttercream next. I don’t want to remember how disastrous the one I made was before but learning the exact technique made me realise that there were things that need to be learnt from the expert to get it right. And of course, a good stand mixer will definitely help too!

Like pavlova, the heated sugar-white egg mixture need to be whipped to stiff peak before adding the softened butter. The batter will curdle a bit after butter addition but my teacher said curdling is good because it means I am doing the right thing!

 I didn’t take many photos while frosting our PGM (too busy frosting guys!) but here is what we did for the finishing touches. Sprinkle some Hawaiian coconut on top and drizzle with gula melaka. 

Frosting the PGM
Finished cake. Notice my super bright expression, haha
We whipped some whipping cream for pavlova topping, mixed ingredients together for the double chocolate cookies and had lovely olio aglio for lunch, not noticing that 3 hours has passed in a breeze.

Assembling the pavlova
Bakes of the day!
It's been a while since I had a me time like this and I am so thankful to hubs and my mom who looked after the kids when I was away. I look forward for more baking classes in the future but it is time to try these recipes at home and see if I replicate it unsupervised.

Till then.

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