Cake Decorating Blog: February 2011

For some of you, I'm probably not going to renew anything.
Prague is fabulous!

I have no idea how, but old Prague kept it's beauty, antique flavor and essence. a real picturesque. For us (my husband and I) that was all we needed to fall in love with this glorious city.

Prague's famous gardens

Tourists taking a ride around the old city

You're probably asking, why am I talking to you about Prague?!
Well, one thing I didn't know before we visited the city, was the fact that Prague offers many sweets, decorated cookies, cakes and much more.

More of the famous gardens

Walking around the old city we "bumped" into a candy factory, specializing in creating Millefiori / Murano style candies. If you are not familiar with the concept, I'll try to explain along with the following photos.
I didn't get a chance to actually catch a photo of the candy making process, but in the photos you can see different stages of the process:

The finalized candies look like this:

So how do the make candies to look so beautiful?

stage 1
using large amounts of heated candy material in different colors, the create a cane. it doesn't necessarily look like a perfect cane, sometimes it will look more like a large flat disc, (as you can see at the bottom of the photo) but it has to be large enough, to enable the candy creators to roll it out to a very long and narrow cane.

In this box in the left you can see more examples. The yellow-white cane is the one that becomes the lemon-looking candy. The red-green one becomes a watermelon-looking candy.

To make the lemon candy, they make long triangular shapes from yellow candy material and attach 6 similar flat squares pieces of white candy material, between each pair of yellow triangular shapes and attach them together. Then, they make a very long flat white shape and coat the whole cane, excluding both ends.
All of this is done while the candy material is warm. Since the process requires heat, and I think they actually use different temperatures for different stages, it is highly recommended to have skilled professionals doing the job. Non professionals are sure to burn their hands with the hot candy... ouch!
Once the cane is ready, they let it cool down / start the process of rolling it to a narrower cane. From about 1 ft to 1 inch.

Voila-

But as I said in the begging of this post, there are many sweets in Prague, and we had a chance to see many and taste some.
One of the great sweet-stops we had was in small cafe' on our way to Prague castle. The whole way is a steep climb walking on beautiful streets with many attractions for tourist.

The cold weather and the cute fake-cloth created wedding cake at this cafe's window, got us to stop and get in for a cup of hot chocolate.

However, we didn't take into account the cakes... They looked so good and our hot chocolate with whipped cream seemed so lonely.

So each one of us chose a piece of cake. Mine was chocolate mousse with whipped cream and pistachio. And the cake was covered with green Marzipan (mmm the Czech marzipan is really good!)

My husband chose the bee sting cake that came with tons of whipped cream. It was good but not as good as mine...

The cafe' had a lot of other amazing cakes, but what really caught my attention was their piped cookies. The first ones I noticed, were the cookies in the window, the kissing couple-gingerbread piped with white royal icing. I loved them.

When we entered the cafe' we saw there were 2 carts and 2 baskets filled with gingerbread piped cookies. So beautiful!
here are a few photos, for you to feast your eyes-

Of course we got cookies for our kids. We really couldn't resist.

Just 2 stores later, after we managed to get up for all that sugar rush and warmth, back to the very cooler outdoors- we saw these:

They are so unbeliveable, apparently these cookies, are created from a very dense /thick gingerbread based dough. To create these great images and amazing detail, they use press the dough into a special mold (I think it's a wooden mold, the kind that is also used to decorate bread)-as written next to the cookies.

After buying a cookie at this shop... well we couldn't resist (ok, ok, I couldn't resist)... We kept on walking around the old city, and then we found another sweet place- a chocolatir shop, and here are some of the good looking chocolates we saw.

I really liked the flowers, they are really sweet, don't you think?

They had such a large selection, it was hard to chose, but we dragged ourselves out of the store just in time.

Prague is so beautiful and holds so many treasures, I really loved our time there and if you're looking for a romantic weekend escape in a wonderful location with lots of events, shows, and great views Prague is for you!

Just a few more photos: