When we heard that Thao from Don’t Tell Charles was coming to London to teach her Tropical Watercolour Workshop, we were in! Yes, the class might be held in the middle of August…aka height of “wedding season” but we had to attend.
Based in Australia, Don’t Tell Charles (DTC) is known for designing avant-garde, contemporary cakes. They created the original concrete cake which is popping up all over social media at the moment. If we said that Thao’s background is landscape Architecture, you would understand!
What a fantastic day it was…living up to every expectation. One half of Bluebell Kitchen attended, along with 15 other keen bakers from every corner of the world including Nigeria, Finland and Brazil to name a few. Held at Dawn Welton Cake Studio in Bermondsey, this was very much a hands on workshop where we had a chance to recreate DTC’s signature tropical watercolour cake.
This involved everything from Thao demonstrating how to make the unique DTC (delicious) buttercream to making tropical chocolate decorations. We were given sample recipes and tips as to flavouring etc. We then got to apply this to our cakes, learned how to apply smooth buttercream and achieve the longed for razor sharp edges on a round cake.
The best section of the course…making chocolate sails. Any excuse now and we will make you a chocolate sail. Who knew they were so straight forward! Two days after the course we had an order, by coincidence for a celebration cake with chocolate sails…they are our new favourite item to create and here’s a few we have made since. We’ve even created them to display macarons on the top of a cake or perhaps as a chocolate bowl.
Photos: Bluebell Kitchen
