True Story

First and Last Three-Tiered Cake I’ll Never Make Again

A nice accomplishment at the time, but not to be repeated!

I wished to be a professional baker since childhood, so when the opportunity arose, I jumped at the chance and created an amazing showpiece of a cake for my final exam — only to realize it was more difficult than I could have imagined.

Back to work

After I retired and bought a new place to live, my taxes doubled, something I hadn’t anticipated. It was time to go back to work. Having been retired for over 15 years and with technology changing so rapidly, I knew the only way I could code again was to go back to college first.

I enrolled in our community college, which ultimately led me in a new direction.

After taking a few computer courses, I realized I wasn’t doing as well with it this time around. The programming logic was the same, but the code used to produce a result had changed drastically.

New direction

The degree also consisted of a basic web design course, which I liked so much that I thought it might be the area to go into, but a second semester was not offered at my college.

That was disappointing and led me to read through another college’s offered courses, hoping to find the next level of web design.

Instead, I stumbled upon culinary courses. I wasn’t aware any of the colleges offered those types of classes, so I quickly changed my major and went for the culinary degree instead.

Baking classes held my interest

As much as I learned interesting ways to prepare food, this story is about my baking classes because that’s where my interests lie.

The baking textbook alone was over 1,000 pages, and it broke baking down into more than just cake or cookie mixes. There are reasons why ingredients work well together — baking is like chemistry — there’s a formula that works and one that does not.

During this course, we were shown how to make pastries, icings, ways to keep baked goods soft and fresh, and ways to keep pie bottoms from becoming soggy — so much stuff I wish I had learned earlier in life.

Final exams

What my story is leading up to are the final exams. For the written courses, we took tests while being monitored by a proctor to receive our certifications, and there were plenty of those, from food safety to cost accounting!

For our baking final, we were asked to bake a three-tiered cake and told we could stack the layers any way we wished.

During the semester, the instructor taught us to either use thick straws or dowels to stack the layers directly on top of each other or use plastic pillars and plates so the cake would end up being around 3 feet tall.

I don’t do anything the simple way. I never take the path of least resistance, although there are times when I should, and this may have been one of them.

I chose the tall version with pillars between the layers — not an easy feat — and the only one to go this route.

After our elaborate three-tiered cakes were decorated, we were asked to drive them around the parking lot in our cars to ensure they would stand up to delivery.

After we made it back safely, we had to re-assemble and place our cakes on tables to display for the rest of the school.

My super-high chocolate cake

I made my cake layers chocolate with coffee for a deeper flavor. I used French buttercream on the outside, chocolate mousse between the layers, and toasted slivered almonds along the bottom of each layer for decoration.

It was a sight to behold, but would I ever make a cake like this again? Heck, No! I’ve since sold the dowels and plates, so I would never be tempted to try again.

Our cakes were then rated by the other students and visitors for appearance and taste, and mine placed second, beaten only by the girl who made a lovely cake decorated with pink rosettes. Her design was simple, flawless, and elegant.

Luckily, I took a picture of mine, which appears at the top of this story.

As you can see, it started slipping halfway through the day, with both myself and my instructor giving it a little nudge here and there to keep it up.

My advice: don’t try this at home, folks, unless you’re planning to be a professional baker — it is harder than it looks!

I did eventually end up working in a gluten-free bakery that did not make high cakes after a 130-hour internship and a stint at a hotel, but that’s another story.

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