Das kleine Torten-Einmaleins: Festliche Torten selber dekorieren

In the organizer's words:

Baking course in German
The little cake basics: Decorating festive cakes yourself
with Nicole Michniewski

Whether weddings or birthdays, there are always occasions for a festive cake. In this course, we will learn how to make two different cake creams and what kind of decoration they are suitable for.

We will practise piping Swiss Meringue buttercream with different nozzles and create a baroque decadence.

We learn that American buttercream can also taste light with a little trick and which flowers and fruits are best suited as decoration for our fresh second creation. In this course, you can let your creativity run wild.

So that you can take your works of art home with you at the end, please bring a transport box.

Menu:

• Lemon buttermilk bases
• American buttercream modified or Swiss meringue buttercream base with bourbon vanilla
• Decoration: homemade chocolate chips, colorful pearls, roasted nuts, dried petals, fresh flowers, seasonal fruits, dried fruits

Nicole Michniewski

As in many cultures, eating together is also a celebration in Poland. Traditional production methods such as fermentation or preserving, dough dishes of all kinds and the art of conjuring up delicacies from the simplest ingredients still fascinate me to this day. Working with simple, fresh, regional and seasonal ingredients is an expression of my enduring love for the culinary heritage of my ancestors.

As the child of Polish immigrants, Nicole grew up between two cultures in a small town in western Germany in the 1980s. Close to the borders with the Netherlands and Belgium, the culinary and the cultures around her blurred together.

Inspired by her parents' traditional cuisine and her grandmother's wonderful cakes, she began baking and cooking for various events while studying art in the Netherlands. At the same time, she has been gaining experience in the catering industry for more than 20 years now, cooking in various kitchens and working in the oldest traditional bakery Matthieu Hermans in Maastricht. There she was allowed to decorate the festive cakes on Sundays and help the bakers make the cakes on her days off.

Her small catering business Mandelbaum, which was founded in 2010, is now called Smakuje. Smakuje means taste in Polish and is the first word she learned from her grandmother as a child. Even though she was still devouring chicken hearts and gizzards as a running meter back then, her cuisine today is almost exclusively vegetarian. Living in Berlin since 2012, Nicole has been supplying small cafés and hotels with her pastries for years as Smakuje Catering and has been running the successful catering company EVE together with Petra Rimkus for 4 years.